NAUTILUS EDUCATION
Nitrogen: Your natural curls
The next time you brush your hair, think of the nitrog- enous waste that helped create it. All of your proteins, including hair keratin, contain formerly airborne nitrogen atoms. But the nitrogen in air is biologically inert. For nitrogen to become a component of your hair, it has to be converted into a more accessible form. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria is one way that can happen. They live among the roots of beans, peas, and other legumes, consuming atmospheric nitrogen and releas- ing it as ammonia, a kind of microbial manure that fertilizes soil in which plants grow. When you eat a plant, you consume formerly atmospheric nitrogen.
BETA PRODUCT
Every flash of lightning and every automotive spark plug emits a puff of nitrogen oxide, which can dissolve into raindrops and fall to earth as a form of fertilizer, again finding its way into food webs through plants. But most of the nitrogen in modern foods comes from urea and ammonium nitrate fertilizers artificially fixed by industrial processes. In ages past, the nitrogen in human hair came mainly from bacterial waste and lightning. But today, unless you eat a strictly organ- ic diet, you run your hairbrush through nitrogenous frameworks that are mostly of human origin.
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