Word: nitrogenating
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...simulate these peculiar conditions, California scientists use a peculiar apparatus: a "molecular beam" developed by Physicist Franklin C. Hurlbut. First, all possible air is pumped from the stainless steel tube (which takes a week of pumping). At one end of the tube is a small "source chamber" containing nitrogen gas. When this is heated by a furnace, the nitrogen molecules pick up kinetic energy and zigzag through the chamber at great speed. Those that happen to be shooting in the right direction pass through a hole one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter that leads to the evacuated tube...
...nitrogen molecules enter the tube as a "beam" that can be deflected and controlled almost like a beam of light. The hotter the source chamber, the faster the molecules move. When the temperature in the source chamber is 1,000° C., the molecules in the beam speed at 1,800 m.p.h. Models of aerodynamic surfaces placed in this beam behave just as if they were moving at 1,800 m.p.h. through the ping-pong-ball atmosphere on the frontier of space...
Blodgett's vegetables grow in narrow, shallow concrete beds which look like giant window boxes and are filled with gravel; three times a day, they are fed with water containing the necessary nutrients (nitrogen, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium). The water, drained back by gravity into an underground reservoir, is used over & over again. There are two farms, one at Chofu, 14 miles from Tokyo, the other near Kyoto. The larger installation at Chofu has 50 acres of hydroponic plots in the open and five acres under a million-dollar greenhouse, has its own ice plant and railroad siding...
...scientists have learned to deprive them of even these few tender hours. In Britain's Journal of Experimental Biology, C. R. Ribbands of the Bee Research Department, Rothamsted Experimental Station, tells how he and colleagues anesthetized worker bees by putting them in jars of carbon dioxide or nitrogen. The bees soon recovered, but with changed personalities. Young workers that had been tending the baby bees forsook their charges and started gathering nectar, to be stored up in the combs and made into honey.* Older workers, that had been gathering both nectar and pollen (for baby bees), usually gathered nothing...
...Composition of ordinary air by volume: 78.03% nitrogen, 20.98% oxygen, .94% argon, .03% carbon dioxide, .02% other gases...