Quotes About Nitrogen

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine. In

I've been experimenting more and more with LN2, liquid nitrogen. I've used it in battle on 'Iron Chef America,' but have also made some great ice creams at home for my family. Since it freezes basically on contact, you can have ice cream ready in mere minutes.

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore—and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.

For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond about 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fish or to decide to try to have a smoke break. It

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore—and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you

When you take a breath, the nitrogen in the air goes into your lungs and straight back out again, like an absentminded shopper who has wandered into the wrong store.

Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Why don't all gases act this way? Because molecules with two copies of the same atom—for example, nitrogen or oxygen molecules—let radiation pass straight through them. Only molecules made up of different atoms, the way carbon dioxide and methane are, have the right structure to absorb radiation and start heating up.

By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt... After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved.

Under natural conditions, the soil does not lose its fixed nitrogen.

The usual way of growing cotton is highly petrochemical-intensive, requiring 110 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. Some of the fertilizer is broken down by soil bacteria into nitrate, a toxic and highly soluble chemical that can leach into groundwater or get washed into lakes, creating oxygenless dead zones.

Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people's worth of food from the same land.

I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.

nitrogen is the most common growth-limiting factor for all plant species, and yet evolution furnished only a small number of them with the means to alleviate this constraint.

As might be expected with modern media reporting, every news report of some notable research advance has been commonly seen as moving us "closer" to the holy grail of nitrogen fixation in cereals—but "closer" remains elusive. "Substantial progress" reported in one year has no consequences five years later.

By 1970 the global applications of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers were more than eight times the 1950 level. By the century's end they had risen above 80 million tons a year, and recently they have been close to 120 million tons of nitrogen a year.

Their benefits are indisputable: I have calculated that no less than 40 percent of the global population receive their dietary protein (directly from crops and indirectly from animal foodstuffs) from harvests that got nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; in China, the share is about 50 percent.

During the second decade of the twenty-first century, worldwide applications of nitrogenous fertilizers averaged about 110 million tons a year, and losing half this mass is releasing more than 50 million tons of the element (in reactive compounds, mostly as nitrates and ammonia) into the environment.

I've been experimenting more and more with LN2, liquid nitrogen. I've used it in battle on 'Iron Chef America ' but have also made some great ice creams at home for my family. Since it freezes basically on contact, you can have ice cream ready in mere minutes.

Agricultural husbandry essentially maintains the balance of bound nitrogen.

The Earth's breathable atmosphere is typically comprised of 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, a little less than 1 percent argon, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide, neon, helium, methane, krypton, and hydrogen

half of its carbon 14 content decays into nitrogen 14 every 5,700 years, until

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

The more the relationships of the nitrogen-rich substances to the cell nucleus were recognized, the more the question of the arrangement of the nitrogen and carbon atoms in the molecule came to stand out.