Nitrogen

NITROGEN: MY FAVORITE ELEMENT

                            This is my drawing of Nitrogen!

 

BACKGROUND

Nitrogen was discovered by a Scottish physician named Daniel Rutherford in 1772.

Daniel Rutherford called it Noxious Air. He performed a simple experiment with an empty bottle that he turned upside down in a pan of water, so that the air was trapped. A burning candle was placed inside the bottle with the trapped air, causing the water to rise a bit. The part of the air that seemed to “disappear” when the candle was burned was oxygen gas, and the part of the air that did not disappear was the nitrogen.

Rutherford found that the new gas was different from carbon dioxide and that it didn’t support life.  In 1790 the chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal suggested the Latin term “nitrogenium” from the Greek nitron. In the 19th century, nitrogen was assigned the N letter.

WHERE NITROGEN IS FOUND

Nitrogen gas makes up 78.1% of the Earth’s air. The atmosphere of Mars, by comparison, is only 2.6% nitrogen. Nitrogen gas can be obtained by liquefaction and fractional distillation. Nitrogen is found in all living systems as part of the makeup of biological compounds.  

PROPERTIES OF NITROGEN

Here is a table to quickly see all of the important properties of Nitrogen:

Property	Properties of Nitrogen
Atomic Mass	14.007 amu
Atomic Number	7
Boiling Point	-195.8 C
Melting Point	-210 C
Atomic Symbol	N
State at Room Temperature	Gas
Acid or Base Reactivity	None
Density	1035 kgm^-3
Color	Colorless

A RESUME FOR THE FABULOUS NITROGEN:
Nitrogen is everywhere! We see it in our atmosphere and in living things. We use it to preserve historical documents so that they don't get ruined over time. It is also used in fertilizer to help crops grow. In addition, Nitrogen is used in storage to keep packaged or bulk foods fresh. It can also be used in hospitals to store blood until needed for operation. Doctors can use it to remove tatoos, warts, birthmarks, and skin cancers as well. Nitrogen is found in lightbulbs, and the importance of this can be seen in the following, very cool video!

Nitrogen can also be used in making ice cream!!! The following video shows how this is done:

In San Francisco, there is an ice cream shop called Smitten Ice Cream, where they do exactly this! These are some pictures of them making individual ice cream scoops for people.

                                             


They have these ice cream machines on the counter for you to watch!
                             

This is the liquid nitrogen being used to freeze the ice cream!

WHAT IF THERE WAS NO NITROGEN?!
Barely anything, if anything, would exist!

WHY I PICKED THIS TOPIC:
I picked this topic because a lot of people don't know about nitrogen, but it's my favorite element. It is used in a lot of things, that people never think. Only some of these are in my blog, but there are a lot more uses for nitrogen!