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by
Thomas Hager
hobnobbed
“the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to which wheaten bread is not the staff of life.”
As a species we long ago passed the natural ability of the planet to support us with food. Even using the best organic farming practices available, even cutting back our diets to minimal, vegetarian levels, only about four billion of us could live on what the earth and traditional farming supply.
The goal of alchemy was to distill the pure soul of nature from the rough, chaotic stuff of the earth, to find the spirit hidden in matter. God was in everything, even the rocks, and alchemists believed their work was a way to understand the workings of the divine.
Their goal was to approach pure perfection on earth, to create in their primitive laboratories a divine substance capable of curing ills, conferring long life, and transforming base elements into gold. In the West they called this the Philosopher’s Stone.
Saltpeter was a significant factor in favor of the British takeover of India.
It was the deadliest incident in world labor history. The Iquique Massacre, as it became known, broke the back of organized labor in the nitrate fields.
N2 is held together with a triple bond, the strongest chemical bond in nature. Breaking it and freeing the individual N atoms requires enormous amounts of energy, heat on the order of 1,000°C, intense enough to to melt copper. The only thing in nature hot enough to break apart N2 is a bolt of lightning.
pogroms
Dreyfus affair
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry.
He never found a better catalyst than his iron-aluminum-calcium mix.
gases cool as they expand.
Bosch’s metals experts began looking for ways to improve it, to create a more hydrogen-resistant carbon steel, flavoring it with other elements, adding dashes of molybdenum, tungsten, chromium, anything that might offer an improvement.
He needed his private time if he was to function publicly at Farben.
He needed order and serenity to offset the stress of crises and decision making.
He needed time to play with his collections to ve...
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apostasy.”
The Haber memorial was not a revolutionary event. It was only a gesture. But it was the only time after Hitler’s accession to power that German scientists and their representatives would gather publicly in defiance of Nazi displeasure. The German Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda made sure that no newspaper reports of the event were published.
The Hitler regime was making it clear that private interests mattered less than the public good,
inauspicious.
Instead of a great leap forward, Mao had triggered China’s great famine, the worst mass starvation in recorded history.
A more personal way of gauging the impact of Haber-Bosch is to look at your own body. About half the nitrogen in you came out of a Haber-Bosch factory. Don’t worry: Nitrogen is nitrogen, the atoms in Haber-Bosch ammonia are precisely the same as the atoms in the best natural manure, and they all come, one way or another, from the air you breathe—but half the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.
It does not all come from farmers; there is manure runoff from ranches (the manure rich in nitrogen from animals grown on feed made by crops fed with Haber-Bosch fertilizer) and municipal wastewater with its load of excess lawn fertilizers and home sewage.
Less attention has been paid to the issue of airborne fertilizer altering the amount of fixed nitrogen available to every ecosystem on the globe, from tundra to jungle, forest to prairie, ocean to desert.
