Oxygen Cycle Quotes

The only oxygen to be found was the pale band of skin on Adam's wrist where his watch had been and the glimpse of the sky between classes.

Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star,” she says softly. “Every atom in your body. The metal in your chair, the oxygen in your lungs, the carbon in your bones. All those atoms were forged in a cosmic furnace over a million kilometers wide, billions of light-years from here. The confluence of events that led to this moment is so remote as to be almost impossible.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. Her touch is awkward, as if she doesn’t quite know how to do it. But she squeezes gently. “Our very existence is a miracle.

The school day was a pillow over his head. He would suffocate before the final bell. The only oxygen to be found was the pale band of skin on Adam’s wrist where his watch had been and the glimpse of the sky between classes.

Life and water are inseparable. Three quarters of the earth's surface is covered by water, just as three quarters of your body is made up of water. Even in the driest desert where rain may come just once every few years, the cycles of life are based on waiting for the arrival of water. Our bodies are not so patient. Every cell in your body needs water to survive, and that means that drinking plenty of clean, fresh water can make you stronger healthier and smarter. Water carries oxygen and fuel to your cells, lubricates your joints, regulates your body temperature, and plays a key roll in just about every function of your body. My number one roadie, POODIE, says, "You can't make a turd without grease.

The only oxygen to be found was the pale band of skin on Adam’s wrist where his watch had been and the glimpse of the sky between classes. Four

Over the years, I've moved through alternating cycles of personal neglect and nourishment. Sometimes it's just easier to give in and allow my life to become utterly consumed by the menial and trivial than to justify or assert my individual needs. Then, disgusted with my malaise, I rise up, spurred to action by a resurgence of energy, determined to find new ways of incorporating creative expression into my life without upsetting the domestic applecart. Like a salmon's impulse to swim upstream, the urge to improve my mind and keep my brain stimulated with fresh experiences and challenges seems innate, almost primal. Struggling for my inner life, I know I must keep oxygen flowing through my intellectual gills or I will die. Pushing against stagnation and opposing currents, I swim for mental survival, obsessed with reaching some instinctual goal and preserving my sanity.

Gideon was quickly checking through her muscular structure and then weaving very gently into the complexities of her reproductive system. Suddenly Legna cried out again, her hands hitting his chest and grabbing fistfuls of his shirt, her entire body trembling from head to toe. This time Gideon gave the reaction his full attention. He looked into her wide eyes, the pupils dilating as he watched. Her mouth formed a soft, silent circle of surprise. “What are you doing?” she asked, her breath falling short and quick. “Nothing,” he insisted, his expression reflecting his baffled thoughts. “Merely continuing the exam. What are you feeling?” Legna couldn’t put the sensation into words. Her entire body felt as if it were pooling liquid fire, like magma dripping through her, centering under the hand he had just splayed over her lower belly. So, being the empath she was, she described it in the only way she could with any efficiency and effectiveness. She sent the sensations to him, deeply, firmly, without preparation or permission, exactly the way she had received them. In an instant, Gideon went from being in control of a neutral examination to an internal thermonuclear flashpoint of arousal that literally took his breath away. His hand flexed on her belly, crushing the silk of her dress within his fist. “Legna!” he cried hoarsely. “What are you doing?” She didn’t even seem aware of him, her eyes sliding closed and her head falling back as she tried to gulp in oxygen. His eyes slid down over her and he saw the flush and rigidity of erogenous heat building with incredible speed beneath her skin. And as it built in her, it built in him. She had created a loop between them, a locked cycle that started nowhere, ended nowhere. All it did was spill through and through them. “Stop,” he commanded, his voice rough and desperate as he tried to clear his mind and control the impulses surging through him. “Legna, stop this!” Legna dropped her head forward, her eyes flicking open and upward until she was gazing at him from under her lashes with the volatile, predatory gaze of a cat. A cat in heat.

Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, absorb infrared energy and help warm the planet. So they're absolutely crucial. The problem is that their concentration in the atmosphere needs to be regulated as the sun slowly brightens. Otherwise, the Earth would not be able to stabilize its surface temperature, which would be disastrous. Plate tectonics cycles fragments of the Earth's crust -- including limestone, which is made up of calcium, carbon dioxide, and oxygen atoms -- down into the mantle. There, the planet's internal heat releases the carbon dioxide, which is then continually vented to the atmosphere through volcanoes. It's quite an elaborate process, but the end result is a kind of thermostat that keeps the greenhouse gases in balance and our surface temperature under control. --Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D. (astronomer & physicist)

One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that ours is just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call “a false vacuum” or “a scalar field” or “vacuum energy”—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can’t understand to one we almost can. “These are very

In 1969, NASA scientist James Lovelock noticed something unusual happening in the earth’s atmosphere: inexplicably, its balance of oxygen and other gases was regulating itself like a thermostat. But what was doing the regulating? He looked at other planetary processes—including the stable concentration of ocean salinity and the cycling of nutrients—and came to a startling conclusion: the earth is alive. He proposed that the earth is a superorganism—one giant living system that includes not just animals and plants but rocks, gases, and soil—acting together as if the planet was a single living being. Its bodily systems, such as the water cycle and nitrogen cycle, are balanced to maintain life on earth. The throb of the tides was the systole and diastole of the earth, and water coursed like blood through its veins. We proud humans may simply be microbes on the surface of a superbeing whose entirety we cannot fully comprehend. Like the bacteria in our body, is it possible that we, too, are part of a larger living earth, a speck on the eyeball of the universe? Tree roots break the sidewalk. Dandelions spring through the cracks. Insects grow resistant to pesticides

Only a few components of our atmosphere are greenhouse gases, which absorb infrared photons. The three most important are (in order) water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. Nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, which make up approximately 99.9% of the dry atmosphere, are not greenhouse gases. • The carbon cycle describes how carbon cycles through its primary reservoirs: the atmosphere (containing 100 GtC), land biosphere (2,000 GtC), ocean (1,000 GtC in

Cash is the oxygen that fuels growth. And the cash conversion cycle (CCC) is a key performance indicator (KPI) that measures how long it takes for a dollar spent on anything (rent, utilities, marketing, payroll, etc.) to make its way through your business and back into your pocket. In

So training smart, training effectively, involves cycling through the three zones in any given week or training block: 75 percent easy running, 5 to 10 percent running at target race paces, and 15 to 20 percent fast running or hill training in the third zone to spike the heart and breathing rates. In my 5-days-a-week running schedule, that cycle looks like this: On Monday, I cross-train. Tuesday, I do an easy run in zone one, then speed up to a target race pace for a mile or two of zone-two work. On Wednesday, it’s an easy zone-one run. Thursday is an intense third-zone workout with hills, speed intervals, or a combination of the two. Friday is a recovery day to give my body time to adapt. On Saturday, I do a relaxed run with perhaps another mile or two of zone-two race pace or zone-three speed. Sunday is a long, slow run. That constant cycling through the three zones—a hard day followed by an easy or rest day—gradually improves my performance in each zone and my overall fitness. But today is not about training. It’s about cranking up that treadmill yet again, pushing me to run ever faster in the third zone, so Vescovi can measure my max HR and my max VO2, the greatest amount of oxygen my heart and lungs can pump to muscles working at their peak. When I pass into this third zone, Vescovi and his team start cheering: “Great job!” “Awesome!” “Nice work.” They sound impressed. And when I am in the moment of running rather than watching myself later on film, I really think I am impressing them, that I am lighting up the computer screen with numbers they have rarely seen from a middle-aged marathoner, maybe even from an Olympian in her prime. It’s not impossible: A test of male endurance athletes in Sweden, all over the age of 80 and having 50 years of consistent training for cross-country skiing, found they had relative max VO2 values (“relative” because the person’s weight was included in the calculation) comparable to those of men half their age and 80 percent higher than their sedentary cohorts. And I am going for a high max VO2. I am hauling in air. I am running well over what should be my max HR of 170 (according to that oft-used mathematical formula, 220 − age) and way over the 162 calculated using the Gulati formula, which is considered to be more accurate for women (0.88 × age, the result of which is then subtracted from 206). Those mathematical formulas simply can’t account for individual variables and fitness levels. A more accurate way to measure max HR, other than the test I’m in the middle of, is to strap on a heart rate monitor and run four laps at a 400-meter track, starting out at a moderate pace and running faster on each lap, then running the last one full out. That should spike your heart into its maximum range. My high max HR is not surprising, since endurance runners usually develop both a higher maximum rate at peak effort and a lower rate at rest than unconditioned people. What is surprising is that as the treadmill

A Lady wrote on a Forum "after my body gets old or not and collapses my thoughts which r electrical impulses will cease my body blood etc will melt back into the soil....my last breath which sustains life will go back into the atmosphere so we will be around until our galaxy implodes..." I concur. Who says we die...? I found the epiphany a long time ago that nature is our supreme being and we are going to be here Forever. You die and the grass feeds off your flesh, the cow eats the grass, your children eat the cow and then your children dies and the cycle goes on again. Just as how the carbon dioxide you breathe out is what plants take in and we survive on the oxygen they give out. We are not separate and distinct from nature. We are one. God is a metaphor for the Universe. We are the universe and the universe is in us. It is evident in how the dead meat of an animal or the offspring of a plant gives us life in the form of food then we die and our body deteriorates to fertilize the soil so the plants can survive. The universe is everything. The air that we inhale, the various plants that cures ailments and alleviates various symptoms of diseases. It Should not be cryptic or alien to us to understand how a plant cell completely independent of us can affect our health in such a positive way. That is because the universe is in every one of us.

More bad news for aerobic activity: Whether it’s running, cycling, or a step class, the main reason it gets easier the more you do it, is not because of improved cardiovascular conditioning, but because of improved economy of motion. For the most part, it doesn’t get easier because of muscular endurance, but because your body is becoming more efficient at that particular movement. You require less strength and oxygen than you did before, because your body’s nervous system is adapting. Wasted movements are eliminated, necessary movements are refined, and muscles that don’t need to be tensed are relaxed and eventually atrophied. This is why marathon runners will huff and puff if they cycle for the first time in years.

Thus it was that the Rule of the Prime Catalyst came into being. Conflict among carbon-oxygen cycle units brings forth consistent emanations of Loosh.”40 Life requires death, and the cycle continues

The Human Heart CONSIDER, FOR example, the human heart and its accompanying circulatory system. The human heart is vastly superior to any human artifact. Every second it undergoes a cycle of contraction and expansion, and beats continually and faithfully for the duration of a human lifetime. It starts beating in the womb and in eighty years will beat about two billion times. The cardiac muscle itself consists of an interconnected syncytium of billions of muscle cells specially adapted to resist fatigue and contract autonomously without external activation or control. Within the cardiac muscle cells there are trillions of tightly packed molecular arrays of contractile filaments whose regular rhythmic lengthening and shortening generate the cardiac cycle. At rest each of us needs about a fourth a liter of oxygen per minute to satisfy our energy needs.30 This involves the movement every minute of one hundred trillion oxygen molecules across every square millimeter of the alveolar surface of the lungs. And with every contraction the heart pumps one hundred billion red blood cells through hundreds of kilometers of tiny capillaries.31 Coursing through the capillaries in the lungs, each of these tiny nano-machines carries one billion molecules of oxygen (O2) from the lungs to the tissues, each loosely bound to an iron atom in the hemoglobin. By the heart’s unceasing activity it ensures a bountiful supply of oxygen to provide us with the vital energy of life. The red cells themselves, no less than the heart, are also miracles of bioengineering. During its 120-day lifetime in the circulatory system, each red cell makes hundreds of thousands of circuits, covering hundreds of miles. It is only because the red cell membranes are uniquely soft and strong—one hundred times softer than a latex membrane of comparable thickness but stronger than steel32—that they can withstand these repeated deformations as they squeeze though the smallest capillaries, which in many cases have a diameter of five microns, almost half the diameter of the average red blood cell.

He peered through the microscope until the blood cells materialized, red and blue and shades in between, different shapes and sizes… In all these years, it never failed to amaze him, this magnificent dappled sea of bone marrow, ever regenerating and replenishing itself in an ongoing cycle that made life possible – red cells that carried oxygen, white cells that fought off infection, and platelets that made the blood clot.

By 1942 the Cornell physicist had established himself as a theoretician of the first rank. His most outstanding contribution, for which he would receive the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics, was to elucidate the production of energy in stars, identifying a cycle of thermonuclear reactions involving hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen that is catalyzed by carbon and culminates in the creation of helium.

The news business also plays a role in this new political climate and desperately needs to reassess how it operates. One benefit of the Trump era is that he exposed how incompatible the twentieth-century model of journalism is in the digital age. As president, he thrived on opposition, and the mainstream press consistently played into his hands, feverishly chasing every lie and half-truth he uttered or tweeted. In a real sense, Trump hacked the press by exploiting journalistic conventions and offering continual pseudo-events designed to hijack news cycles and dominate coverage. The communications scholar Whitney Phillips calls this the “oxygen of amplification.”13

The fact that changed my life was that somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere comes from the sea. I had always thought that the forests and the trees and plants around us were responsible for the air we breathe, but they are only a bit player in the oxygen cycle upon which life on this planet depends.

Here’s the information: To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method, start by finding a quiet place and lying flat on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax the shoulders, chest, and legs. Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and let it back out just as quickly. Keep breathing this way for 30 cycles. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. Each breath should look like a wave, with the inhale inflating the stomach, then the chest. You should exhale all the air out in the same order. At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the natural conclusion, leaving about a quarter of the air left in the lungs, then hold that breath for as long as possible. Once you’ve reached your breathhold limit, take one huge inhale and hold it another 15 seconds. Very gently, move that fresh breath of air around the chest and to the shoulders, then exhale and start the heavy breathing again. Repeat the whole pattern three or four rounds and add in some cold exposure (cold shower, ice bath, naked snow angels) a few times a week. This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold and then hot again—is the key to Tummo’s magic. It forces the body into high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. Tissues become oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken.

Here’s the information: To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method, start by finding a quiet place and lying flat on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax the shoulders, chest, and legs. Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and let it back out just as quickly. Keep breathing this way for 30 cycles. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. Each breath should look like a wave, with the inhale inflating the stomach, then the chest. You should exhale all the air out in the same order. At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the natural conclusion, leaving about a quarter of the air left in the lungs, then hold that breath for as long as possible. Once you’ve reached your breathhold limit, take one huge inhale and hold it another 15 seconds. Very gently, move that fresh breath of air around the chest and to the shoulders, then exhale and start the heavy breathing again. Repeat the whole pattern three or four rounds and add in some cold exposure (cold shower, ice bath, naked snow angels) a few times a week. This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold and then hot again—is the key to Tummo’s magic. It forces the body into high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. Tissues become oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken. •

In Brazil, the rainforests of the Amazon are being destroyed at an alarming rate by bulldozing and burning. There are many excellent reasons to prevent this continuing – loss of habitat for organisms, production of carbon dioxide from burning trees, destruction of the culture of native Indian tribes, and so on. What is not a good reason, though, is the phrase that is almost inevitably trotted out, to the effect that the rainforests are the ‘lungs of the planet’. The image here is that the ‘civilized’ regions – that is, the industrialized ones – are net producers of carbon dioxide. The pristine rainforest, in contrast, produces a gentle but enormous oxygen breeze, while absorbing the excess carbon dioxide produced by all those nasty people with cars. It must do, surely? A forest is full of plants, and plants produce oxygen. No, they don’t. The net oxygen production of a rainforest is, on average, zero. Trees produce carbon dioxide at night, when they are not photosynthesizing. They lock up oxygen and carbon into sugars, yes – but when they die, they rot, and release carbon dioxide. Forests can indirectly remove carbon dioxide by removing carbon and locking it up as coal or peat, and by releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Ironically, that’s where a lot of the human production of carbon dioxide comes from – we dig it up and burn it again, using up the same amount of oxygen. If the theory that oil is the remains of plants from the carboniferous period is true, then our cars are burning up carbon that was once laid down by plants. Even if an alternative theory, growing in popularity, is true, and oil was produced by bacteria, then the problem remains the same. Either way, if you burn a rainforest you add a one-off surplus of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but you do not also reduce the Earth’s capacity to generate new oxygen. If you want to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide permanently, and not just cut short-term emissions, the best bet is to build up a big library at home, locking carbon into paper, or put plenty of asphalt on roads. These don’t sound like ‘green’ activities, but they are. You can cycle on the roads if it makes you feel better.

I realize that we’re already going harder than I’d imagined. The next three days may be uncomfortable, but as I think back on the depths of my depression, I’m certain that they won’t hurt – at least not like that. This sort of pain – the burn of oxygen-starved legs and the searing of lungs – feels like nothing less than the warm embrace of an old friend.

Like most stars, the really massive ones begin by burning hydrogen and creating helium. Stars are powered by nuclear energy—not fission, but fusion: four hydrogen nuclei (protons) are fused together into a helium nucleus at extremely high temperatures, and this produces heat. When these stars run out of hydrogen, their cores shrink (because of the gravitational pull), which raises the temperature high enough that they can start fusing helium to carbon. For stars with masses more than about ten times the mass of the Sun, after carbon burning they go through oxygen burning, neon burning, silicon burning, and ultimately form an iron core. After each burning cycle the core shrinks, its temperature increases, and the next cycle starts. Each cycle produces less energy than the previous cycle and each cycle is shorter than the previous one. As an example (depending on the exact mass of the star), the hydrogen-burning cycle may last 10 million years at a temperature of about 35 million kelvin, but the last cycle, the silicon cycle, may only last a few days at a temperature of about 3 billion kelvin! During each cycle the stars burn most of the products of the previous cycle. Talk about recycling! The end of the line comes when silicon fusion produces iron, which has the most stable nucleus of all the elements in the periodic table. Fusion of iron to still heavier nuclei doesn’t produce energy; it requires energy, so the energy-producing furnace stops there. The iron core quickly grows as the star produces more and more iron. When this iron core reaches a mass of about 1.4 solar masses, it has reached a magic limit of sorts, known as the Chandrasekhar limit (named after the great Chandra himself). At this point the pressure in the core can no longer hold out against the powerful pressure due to gravity, and the core collapses onto itself, causing an outward supernova explosion.

The problem is not that women don’t try. On the contrary, we’re trying all the time, to do and be all the things everyone demands from us. And we will try anything—any green smoothie, any deep-breathing exercise, any coloring book or bath bomb, any retreat or vacation we can shoehorn into our schedules—to be what our work and our family and our world demand. We try to put on our own oxygen mask before assisting others. And then along comes another struggling kid or terrible boss or difficult semester.

hyperventilation reduces the concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood. This leads to a narrowing of blood vessels and reduced delivery of oxygen to the brain. An oxygen-deprived brain is more excitable and agitated, and as it floods with self-generated thoughts, anxiety kicks in. One contributes to the other, creating a vicious and self-perpetuating cycle.

We might be excused our ignorance in this case, because ocean-atmosphere systems are, after all, almost inconceivably complex. Less easy to excuse is our astounding lack of knowledge of much more visible features of our planet’s natural resources and ecology—features that have a direct impact on our well-being. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the state of the planet’s soils. While we have good information for some areas, like the Great Plains of the United States, soil data are sketchy for vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where billions of people depend directly on agriculture for survival. So we can’t accurately judge how badly we’ve degraded these soils through overuse and poor husbandry, though we do have patchy evidence that the damage is severe and getting worse in many places.18 Similarly, despite extensive satellite photography, our estimates of the rate and extent of tropical deforestation are rudimentary. We know even less about the natural ecology and species diversity inside these forests, where biologists presume most animal and plant species live. As a result, credible figures on the number of Earth’s species range from 5 to 30 million.19 And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds.

This is the famous cycle of life. Carbon dioxide breathed out by animals is absorbed by plants, which make food and oxygen and so on. The cycle needs a constant supply of Gibbs free energy to turn. And crucially, at each step of the cycle, a small amount of free energy is lost as heat. This means at each step the entropy of the universe goes up.

Let’s begin at the beginning—what is oxygen and why do you need it? The oxygen in the air you breathe is part of the Krebs cycle, which is a biochemical process that produces ATP, the building block of energy for your body. Your body gets the oxygen it needs out of your lungs. When you drown, your lungs are filled with water, and this oxygen transfer can’t occur. No ATP equals death. (Randomly, because if you’re reading this far, we’re all nerds—the reason cyanide kills you is it blocks another function in the Krebs cycle, which also = no ATP = death.)

Death may be due to a wide variety of diseases and disorders, but in every case the underlying physiological cause is a breakdown in the body's oxygen cycle.

What is it really that makes Earth Earth? The surface, where we live, exists at the interface between two giant heat engines: below us the churning mantle, above us the restless, windy troposphere. All rocky worlds large enough to hold an atmosphere will have some combination of these, and the dynamic possibilities of each realm have been substantially illuminated by the variations we’ve found on other worlds. We live on the convoluted, shifting shoreline between cycles of earth and sky that are incessantly driven by the Sun above and the heat below. So much about our world can be understood as the interplay between these inner and outer cycles. Life thrives at the boundary, enabled and sustained by the great cyclic flows of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorous. Still, something else is going on here.

There is more heat stored in the first 10 feet of the ocean than in the entire atmosphere. It drives the hydrologic cycle, harbours 80% of all living organisms, absorbs 30% of the carbon dioxide we produce, generates over 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and accounts for over 95% of the habitable space on the planet.

They drive planetary cycles of carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus, by converting these elements into compounds that can be used by animals and plants and then returning them to the world by decomposing organic bodies. They were the first organisms to make their own food, by harnessing the sun’s energy in a process called photosynthesis. They released oxygen as a waste product, pumping out so much of the gas that they permanently changed the atmosphere of our planet. It is thanks to them that we live in an oxygenated world. Even now, the photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans produce the oxygen in half the breaths you take, and they lock away an equal amount of carbon dioxide.

Within the past couple of years I’ve switched from water to beet juice for prerace hydration. I know it sounds weird, but it has a benefit that is lacking in any other hydration choice and I encourage all runners to try it. Beet juice is rich in dietary nitrates, which are precursors for nitric oxide, a chemical that the body uses to cause blood vessels to dilate. Consuming beet juice before exercise increases vasodilatation and blood flow and reduces the oxygen cost of exercise. These effects translate directly into better race performance, even in highly trained endurance athletes. A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Exeter found that consuming half a liter of beet juice 2.5 hours before cycling time trials of 4 km and 16.1 km improved performance by 2.8 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, in club-level cyclists.