29 January 2013
Nature Geoscience favourite
How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world -
Jan Willem Erisman, Mark A. Sutton, James Galloway, Zbigniew Klimont & Wilfried Winiwarter
doi:10.1038/ngeo325
On 13 October 1908, Fritz Haber filed his patent on the "synthesis of ammonia from its elements" for which he was later awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A hundred years on we live in a world transformed by and highly dependent upon Haber-Bosch nitrogen.
This article has been highlighted as one of the editors' ten favourite papers in the web focus celebrating the fifth anniversary of Nature Geoscience (http://www.nature.com/ngeo/focus/5th-anniversary/index.html).
The paper will be freely accessible to registered users until the end of January 2013.