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World Service,12 Mar 2015,23 mins

Nitrogen

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Nitrogen is the bringer of life and death to mankind on a massive scale, but it may also threaten us with a potential environmental disaster as frightening as climate change. Justin Rowlatt gets the chemical lowdown - replete with the inevitable bangs - from professor Andrea Sella of University College London. He travels to home of the Haber-Bosch process - which first cracked open nitrogen's explosive potential a century ago - at BASF's gigantic chemical works in Ludwigshafen. We send our Washington DC correspondent Rajini Vadyanathan to a sewage works, while Justin heads for the John Innes Centre to meet Giles Oldroyd - a genetics researcher hoping to break man's nasty nitrogen addiction.

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