Word: nitrogenated
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...called the dead zone. Agricultural fertilizer byproducts like nitrogen are running off farms and into the Mississippi River, which then spills out into the Gulf of Mexico. Those chemicals help feed crops on land, but as they build up in the still, warm waters of the Gulf, they in turn feed excess growth of algae. When algae dies and decomposes, the process sucks much of the oxygen out of the water. A sea without oxygen is little different from the surface of the moon - nothing can live there. Fish and other sea life flee, or suffocate. That's the Gulf...
...could be much worse. That's one of the implications of a new study published Wednesday in Nature that tracks the ability of streams and rivers to absorb nitrogen runoff before it pollutes the seas. A team of 31 scientists led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee studied 72 streams in eight regions across the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and found that only about a quarter of the nitrogen that spills into rivers makes it to open water, with most of the rest managed by bacteria that live in the waterways. In a process called denitrification, the microbes...
That line of defense, however, is weakening. Mulholland and his collaborators found that the filtering ability of streams couldn't keep pace with the flow of nitrogen pollution. So, as runoff from fertilizer increased, the natural denitrification system slowed, and more nitrogen survived untouched to the open ocean - worsening the dead zones. That's cause for concern as American farmers plant increasing amounts of corn, a crop that requires heavy fertilizer, to meet the growing global demand for grain and to supply America's corn-hungry ethanol makers. According to a separate study published by University of British Columbia...
Mulholland backs that conclusion. Our inland waterways can barely handle the nitrogen fertilizer we're already using in order to grow record yields of corn and other crops. Truly ramping up biofuel production - unless it can be done in a way that uses much less fertilizer, perhaps with experimental techniques that harness plant waste matter instead of food crops - might overwhelm that system. "We have to be very careful about biofuels in terms of what kind of crops we grow and where we grow them," says Mulholland. "The great expansion of corn could be a real problem." It would...
...what of the half a million leftover embryos, which now nestle in nitrogen? "What you do with the frozen embryos you don't use is your decision and yours alone," says the American Fertility Association. But it is not so simple. Are they people--or property? Stored embryos have been treated as part of an estate and the center of custody fights, like the Porsche or the puppy. Conservatives promote adoption as an answer, but some patients don't want their genetic offspring being raised by other people. Should they be required to keep them frozen indefinitely? Should governments...