BACKGROUND The noble gas helium induces cardiac preconditioning. Whether activation of mitochondrial K(+) channels is involved in helium preconditioning (He-PC) is unknown. The authors investigated whether He-PC (1) is mediated by activation of Ca(2+) -sensitive potassium channels, (2) results in mitochondrial uncoupling, and (3) is age dependent. METHODS Anesthetized Wistar rats were randoml...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Inhalation of low-density helium/oxygen mixtures has been used both to lower the airway resistance and work of breathing of patients with obstructive lung disease and to transport pharmaceutical aerosols to obstructed lung regions. However, recent clinical investigations have highlighted the potential for entrainment of room air to dilute helium/oxygen mixtures delivere...

Helium has been classified as a kind of inert gas that is not effortless to spark chemical reactions with other substances in the past decades. Nevertheless, the cognition of scientists has gradually changed accompanied with a variety of studies revealing the potential molecular mechanism underlying organ-protection induced by helium. Especially, as a non-anesthetic gas which is deficient of re...

Recently, there has been considerable interest in investigating quantum entanglement in two-electron systems, such as two-electron model atoms and quantum dots. In this work, the quantum entanglement of the helium atom and helium-like ions are explored using the two-electron wave functions constructed by the B-spline basis. As a measure of the spatial entanglement, the linear entropy of the red...

By focusing a high-intensity acoustic wave in liquid helium, we have observed the nucleation of solid helium inside the wave above a certain threshold in amplitude. The nucleation is a stochastic phenomenon. Its probability increases continuously from 0 to 1 in a narrow pressure interval around P(m) + 4.7 bars ( P(m) = 25.3 bars is the melting pressure where liquid and solid helium are in equil...

Electrons on helium substrates form a model Coulomb system in which the transition from classical electron liquid to Wigner crystal is readily observed. However, attempts to increase the electron density in order to observe the ‘quantum melting’ of the system to a Fermi degenerate gas are hindered by an instability of the helium surface. Here we describe experimental efforts to reach the degene...

The deep interiors of Jupiter and Saturn consist of fluid, metallic hydrogen. In Jupiter the metallic hydrogen is uniformly mixed with helium. In Saturn, the incomplete solubility of helium may cause unmixing and energy release. In the interiors of Uranus and Neptune the fluid mixture (of hydrogen, helium, water, methane and ammonia) is metallic or ionic. The terrestral planetary cores are pred...

Warm Neptuneand sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets in orbits smaller than Mercury’s are thought to have experienced extensive atmospheric evolution. Here we propose that a potential outcome of this atmospheric evolution is the formation of helium-dominated atmospheres. The hydrodynamic escape rates of Neptuneand subNeptune-sized exoplanets are comparable to the diffusion-limited escape rate of hydrog...

We present a semianalytical free-energy model aimed at characterizing the thermodynamic properties of dense fluid helium, from the low-density atomic phase to the high-density fully ionized regime. The model is based on a free-energy minimization method and includes various different contributions representative of the correlations between atomic and ionic species and electrons. This model allo...