The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is a great book with lots of interesting stories about the elements such as:
- Superfluid helium that defies gravity
- Antimony pentafluoride - an acid with a pH of -31 (100,000 billion billion billion times stronger than HCl)
- The cobalt-60 dirty bomb that thankfully hasn't ever been built (as far as we know)
- How Linus Pauling figured out how chemistry works. Really.
- Cadmium-tainted rice in Japan
- Prontosil - the antibiotic that predates penicillin
- Acute beryllium disease
- How cigarettes can also kill you with radioactive polonium
- Why the Washington Monument is topped with a pyramid of aluminum
- Why lithium works as an antidepressant
- How Wilhelm Rontgen went out of his way to prove to himself that he really didn't discover x-rays. Even though he did.
- Ice X
- How drinking beer lead to the development of the modern particle collider
- "Tools of Ridiculous Precision
And much more! Read it! You can go here to preview most of the first chapter for free (click on the book cover)!
