ScienceAugust 26, 2026

denitrogenation

dee-NY-truh-juh-NAY-shun

Definition

The process of removing dissolved nitrogen gas from the body's tissues.

Etymology

Derived from the prefix 'de-' (meaning removal) and 'nitrogen' (a chemical element), plus the suffix '-ation' used to form nouns denoting a process. It emerged in technical medical and scientific contexts to describe the extraction of nitrogen from a medium.

In the news

An expert uses this term to define the physiological goal of the prebreathe protocol, which prevents decompression sickness before astronauts undergo depressurization for a spacewalk.

Before every spacewalk, astronauts spend hours breathing pure oxygen inside their own bodies for one specific reason — to stop their blood from doing to them exactly what nearly happened to test subjects inside vacuum chambers on Earth

Read the full article ↗

Space Daily

Related words

Learn words like this every day

Meet new words every morning.

Newspoken pulls carefully chosen words from the day’s news — with clear definitions, context, and light review that makes them stick. Get it on your phone.