For the article of the week this week, we discuss how and why the world's population has exploded in the last 100 years. In the year 1800, there was 1.6 billion people on Earth and just 200 years later there's 7.6 billion people on Earth. 

The main contributor to this is how easily humans have access to nitrogen now. Nitrogen is the great limiting factor on growth of all plant life on Earth, and humans have hijacked the nitrogen cycle via the Haber-Bosch process. This allows humans to "fix" nitrogen from the air. Before this, we had to rely on nitrogen fixing bacteria and legumes like soy to fix nitrogen in the air and place it in the soil in its usable form.

Now that humans have the capacity to make all the nitrogen we need, we can make more food and that allowed our population to explode. It is estimated that two thirds of annual global food production uses nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch process and that this supports nearly half the world's population.

To learn more about the Haber-Bosch process and how that caused our population to explode, listen to this week's podcast.

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