Word: nitrogen
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...about sodium azide is that it usually saves lives. That's because, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sodium azide is best known for its role in air bags. When a car crashes, an electric charge causes the sodium azide to explode and, in turn, release nitrogen to inflate...
...Many would-be bombmakers have suffered severe burns while trying to mix the explosive in makeshift laboratories. For terrorist groups, however, the risks of TATP are outweighed by the advantages. The white, sugarlike powder is lightweight and nearly odorless (the better to evade bomb-sniffing dogs) and contains no nitrogen (foiling scanners that detect nitrogenous bombs). Its basic ingredients - acetone, hydrogen peroxide and acid - are readily available in beauty supplies and home-improvement products. Al-Qaeda operatives have been using the stuff for years...
...Borlaug--who died Sept. 12 at the age of 95--joined the Rockefeller Foundation's effort to conquer hunger in Mexico. At the time, agricultural researchers were enhancing crop yields by bombing plants with nitrogen fertilizer. But they eventually discovered that the process made seed heads grow so big they would collapse in the field. Nature seemed to have hit a wall...
...human population has exploded over the past few thousand years, the delicate ecological balance that kept the Long Summer going has become threatened. The rise of industrialized agriculture has thrown off Earth's natural nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, leading to pollution on land and water, while our fossil-fuel addiction has moved billions of tons of carbon from the land into the atmosphere, heating the climate ever more. (See the top 10 green ideas...
...three of the nine cases Rockstrom has pointed out, however - climate change, the nitrogen cycle and species loss - we've already passed his threshold limits. In the case of global warming, we haven't yet felt the full effects, Rockstrom says, because carbon acts gradually on the climate - but once warming starts, it may prove hard to stop unless we reduce emissions sharply. Ditto for the nitrogen cycle, where industrialized agriculture already has humanity pouring more chemicals into the land and oceans than the planet can process, and for wildlife loss, where we risk biological collapse. "We can say with...