The heart-shaped boxes are empty. The milk chocolate hearts have been divested of their red foil wraps. Valentine’s week has come and gone.
Chemistry
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Carbon is no Joe Schmoe
Each year around Christmas time, Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, chooses the most important science story of the previous 12 months.
35 xenon atoms arranged by microscope • Image courtesy IBM
Looking at the small print
We don’t know who first imagined that the world was made of atoms.
Early photograph of Paris by Louis Daguerre (1838)
Optics, chemistry — and images
One day in Paris, in 1827, a certain Madame Daguerre approached the famous chemist Jean Dumas. Her husband was obsessed, she said, with an apparently foolish idea. He believed he could make permanent pictures on metal plates by means of light focused by a lens. Was his dream within the bounds of science, she asked, or was he completely mad?
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Cinderellas of science
There is more at stake in the cold fusion story than the discovery of a cheap, safe source of unlimited energy. There is also a chance for chemists to have their day in the sun at the physicists’ expense.
Period table of elements, Houston Museum • Photo by Shadow Byrd (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Nature’s music
Somewhere on the wall of every high school or college chemistry laboratory hangs a periodic table of the elements. Every student of chemistry has an image of the table graven on his brain.
Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory
The deadly blessing
The aftermath of the tragedy continues to unfold. It is a haunting, terrifying story, touched with dreamlike beauty, ending in suffering and death — a moral fable for our times.
4-(p-Hydroxyphenyl)-2-butanone, the smell of raspberries
Ah, molecules
Someone asked me the other day why I never write about chemistry in this column. I’ll tell you why. Chemistry is boring.
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Curious stuff, this water and ice
It has been a fine winter for skating. Cold, snowless days have given us lots of smooth black ice. I have spent many pleasant hours skating the ponds near my home in Easton.