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Asked by god 69 to Alex, Ali, Kerry, Philip, Theo on 13 Nov 2014.
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Kerry O'Shea answered on 13 Nov 2014:
Nitrogen is the most common element on Earth (7th most common in the universe) and it’s the 4th most common element in our bodies after oxygen, carbon and hydrogen.
Liquid nitrogen however is pretty harmful and can cause suffocation as it evaporates the oxygen content in the air, so you should never have a container of liquid nitrogen in a confined space, such as a lift, because there’s a good chance you’ll suffocate!
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Philip Ratcliffe answered on 13 Nov 2014:
We don’t need to make as roughly 4/5 of the atmosphere is nitrogen (the oyter 1/5 is oxygen and then there’s alittle bit of CO2 and some trace gases). So really what we do to get pure nitrogen is to separate it from the oxygen – this is a rather complex process. One way is to use the fact that N2 and O2 liquify at different temperatures, so by cooling air you can separate then fairly easily. However, this is not what is used commercially these days.
Basically it doesn’t do anything to our bodies as it doesn’t interact much with anything – it’s almost what we call inert.
You may have heard though that it’s responsible for the “bends” in deep-sea divers. That is when they go very deep it can dissolve in their blood and if they come up too quickly then it comes out of solution and forms bubbles in the veins and arteries, which can be very painful and even cause death. For this reason divers who go down very deep often use a misxture of oxygen and helium – helium can’t dissolve in the blood because it’s absolutely inert.
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