This site uses technical, analytics and third-party cookies.
By continuing to browse, you accept the use of cookies.

Preferences cookies

“The travelling Genius”, Matteo Duca – Bread, trenches and smog: the nitrogen cycle in the Anthropocene

The series of encounters entitled “The travelling Genius : Italians Art, humanities, science … in the world”, is a space for discussion and cultural dialogue that the Italian Cultural Institute has developed especially for young Italians in world. Italians who, beyond any orientation, are the bearers of knowledge accumulated in Italy and diffuse the following, even without their knowledge, a provision or a vocation of ancient origin: the generous exchange of culture, comforted by a keen sense of human comprehension.

September 11, 2017, 6pm Free Admission
Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Montreal
1200 Av. du Dr Penfield
Conference in Italian

Like air, the impact of human activity on the nitrogen cycle is ubiquitous though invisible, also exerting a profound effect on our health. Largely ignored by the mainstream media (focussed on carbon dioxide), the imbalances in the nitrogen cycles are considered by many scientists as a more worrying threat to ecosystems and human health. The implementation of a chemical industrial process to produce artificial fertilisers on a large scale marked a watershed at the beginning of the 20th century: however, this veritable revolution, which allowed a dramatic rise in crop yields, is now turning into a bane, contributing to the disruption of the equilibrium of the nitrogen biogeochemical cycle. In this lecture, we shall look at this issue from a historical perspective, travelling from Peru’s guano deposits to the trenches, the explosives and the poisonous gases of WWI. Finally, we will fast-forward to today’s megalopolises choking on air pollution, and we will learn which chemical reactions give rise to the imbalances in the nitrogen cycle. Finally, we will discover the results of scientific research aimed at developing countermeasures to decrease our “ecological footprint”.

Matteo Duca is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Varennes. His passion for science beyond the laboratory motivates him to collaborate with the centre of science communication Cœur des Sciences (UQAM) on the organisation of outreach activities. In 2012, he obtained his PhD cum laude at Leiden University (the Netherlands), with a research project on electrochemistry and catalysis. This research field studies the chemical reactions that require electricity to occur, and those that, instead, produce it. The separation of water into oxygen and hydrogen, i.e. water electrolysis, is an example of the former, while among the latter we can cite batteries. The Italian scientist Alessandro Volta, regarded as one of the “founding fathers” of electrochemistry, perfectly embodies both aspects of this discipline, as he was among the first to observe that water electrolysis could be driven by a battery (the so-called voltaic pile).

Reservation no longer available