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Wars are often fought over resources, but as far as we know only one war has ever been fought over fertilizer.
Meet J. J. Thomson, who disproved Einstein’s dictum that the man “who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.”
Discover alchemy, the secret science!
When Communist East Germany built a wall across Berlin, it created two different cities, two different countries, and for scientists two different careers.
As Coca-Cola’s popularity spread in the United States in the 1920s, rabbis around the country asked, is Coke kosher?
A display of rare books exploring the golden age of alchemy and alchemy as the root of modern chemistry.
The chemistry of the universe may help explain the presence of life on Earth.
Reatha Clark King wanted to be a research chemist, so she made the journey from the segregated South to Illinois. At the University of Chicago her dreams came true.
Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661) is an acknowledged landmark of science. But the book’s reputation is based less on what it is than on what it is perceived to be.
On May 1, 1915, Clara Immerwahr Haber sat down at her desk to write farewell letters to friends and family.
Neither medicine nor food, the vitamin pill was born in the early 20th century and came of age during World War II. Now, vitamins are here to stay—and so is the controversy that swirls around them.
A mother’s dogged search for the cause of her babies’ mental decline led to the discovery of a new disease.
Chemist Frank Field turned a hand-me-down mass spectrometer into pioneering career.
Robert Boyle is best known in chemistry classrooms for Boyle’s law, but the law was never stated outright in Boyle’s work.
Even toward the end of his life, Isaac Newton still had questions about chemistry.
In the 1950s comic books took Mexico’s youth by storm. But alongside familiar superhuman avengers were other kinds of heroes: real-life chemists.
Rare earth metals are the vitamins of modern technology. How did this group of chemically dull elements become so important and so troublesome?
By 1790 chemistry was the up-and-coming science. The products of chemistry—industrially useful salts, acids, and alkalis—would soon be measured not by the ounce (or the gram) but by the ton.
Before becoming a synonym for cinema, celluloid was used imitate expensive materials like ivory, tortoiseshell, and linen.
Faced with a sudden shortage of rubber, the wartime United States turned to an unlikely place: a Japanese American internment camp in California.
The feud between William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy over the newly discovered element thallium rested on the very definition of discovery.
How did a seemingly benign chemical and a near-miraculous public-health initiative spark decades and decades debate?
During the 1860s and 1870s, was a booming New York City’s stench choking the health from its citizens? Chemist Charles Frederick Chandler aimed to find out.
A 1904 caricature from Vanity Fair is a striking example of the role images played in creating the Marie Curie myth.
When the EPA needed a way to identify and measure pollutants, Robert Finnigan, an ex–Cold War engineer, offered his computerized mass spectrometer for the job.
A 19th-century chemist was the first to raise the alarm about adulterated food.
Two years after getting his PhD, future Nobel Prize winner Marshall Nirenberg set out to probe the genetic code despite having no experience in the fields at the forefront of this work.
Thin became “in” during the 1920s, and the calorie became a vital tool in the battle to lose weight. Yet before becoming a fashion necessity, the calorie had a decidedly less glamorous role.
In the 19th century, chemical oblivion replaced liquor, opiates, and bleeding as the numbing agent of choice for surgeons.
Susan Solomon led expeditions in Antarctica and proposed the now-accepted theory about the role of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in creating the ozone hole.