A bizarre experiment started 30 years ago in the Arizona desert: Eight men and women moved into a hermetically sealed glass building to build a mini-earth. About a dangerous experiment that went wrong.
from
Christoph von Eichhorn
On a January day in 1993, eight emaciated figures danced in a huge glass house in the Arizona desert. They ran in circles, laughed like crazy and felt like newborns. The reason was called oxygen. In the last few months, the oxygen content of their air had dropped from 21 to 14.5 percent, which corresponds roughly to the conditions on the summit of a 5000 meter high mountain. Those who endure this have to struggle with slowed reactions and confused thoughts or startle from sleep because the body thinks it is suffocating. Now the redemption: tank trucks pumped pure oxygen into their sealed-off residential complex. One participant described the sudden increase to 26 percent as the “most astonishing physiological experience of my life”.