And the reason for this, it turned out, after two or three years' work, was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide, because nitric oxide is a gas, and it's released and in a few seconds it's away, but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide nitrate, NO3 nitrite, NO2 nitrosothiols.

And they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter, nitric oxide.

What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels, so it lowers your blood pressure.

And I started doing research, and we found, very excitingly, that the skin produces nitric oxide.

It seemed we couldn't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans.

But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide.

We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death, and how cells survive, and their resistance to other things.

We put on creams that blocked the enzyme that made it, we injected things. We couldn't turn off the nitric oxide.

We think that the skin well, we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms.

We suspect a lot of these come from diet, green leafy vegetables, beetroot, lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin.

When we put people under a lamp for the equivalent of about 30 minutes of sunshine in summer in Edinburgh, what we produced was, we produced a rise in circulating nitric oxide.

So what you can do is you can multiply those data by the NO that's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation.

The drug, BiDil, is designed to treat or prevent congestive heart failure by raising low or depleted levels of nitric oxide in the blood. It was originally designed for a wide population base, and race was irrelevant.

e Each of the devices contained about 100 kilograms of conventional explosives surrounding several layers of chemicals, including potassium cyanide, sodium cyanide, hydrogen peroxide, potassium ferricyanide, nitric acid, mixed acids, as well as various insecticides and pesticides.

Now, if you're on the equator here that's these two lines here, the red line and the purple line the amount of nitric oxide that's released is the area under the curve, it's the area in this space here.

So we thought we'd just kind of model Different amounts of UV hit different parts of the Earth at different times of year, so you can actually work out those stores of nitric oxide the nitrates, nitrites, nitrosothiols in the skin cleave to release NO.

On the other hand, emissions of carbon dioxide can be reduced simply by using biofuels, made from plants whose carbon dioxide price was paid via uptake of the very same gas from the atmosphere during their growth. Reductions of other greenhouse gases, such as nitric oxide, are attainable through clever combustor design.

Moreover, energy use has grown 16 fold during the twentieth century, causing 160 million tons of atmospheric sulfur dioxide emissions per year more than twice the total of natural emissions. Likewise, more nitrogen fertilizer is applied in agriculture than is fixed naturally in all terrestrial ecosystems, and nitric oxide production from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass also surpasses natural emissions.

Given that these mischievous forms of hemoglobin are difficult to study in living systems, researchers have largely ignored them. Instead, they have focused on strategies for preventing the kidneys from filtering the infused hemoglobin the hemoglobin from leaking through the blood vessel walls and synthetic hemoglobin from destroying nitric oxide (a gas produced in blood vessels that helps them to dilate and increase blood flow).

Our bodies get Vitamin D from the sun, but as dermatologist Richard Weller suggests, sunlight may confer another surprising benefit too. New research by his team shows that nitric oxide, a chemical transmitter stored in huge reserves in the skin, can be released by UV light, to great benefit for blood pressure and the cardiovascular system. What does it mean? Well, it might begin to explain why Scots get sick more than Australians ...