African American Women Chemists and African American Women Chemists in the Modern Era
by Jeannette E. Brown
Chemist Jeannette E. Brown has written two collections of biographies of African American women chemists. The first collection includes the stories of African American women chemists from the early days of the scientific field until the 1960s, while the second collection begins in the 1960s and carries forward to today.
Caveman Chemistry: 28 Projects, from the Creation of Fire to the Production of Plastics
by Kevin Dunn
Half a million years ago our ancestors learned to make fire from scratch. They crafted intricate tools from stone and brewed mind-altering elixirs from honey. Caveman Chemistry is an experiential exploration of chemical technology from the campfires of the stone age to the plastic soft-drink bottle. An experiential exploration? Not only will you learn about these technologies, you will learn to recreate them. Instructions are given for making bronze from metal ores; glass from sand, ashes, and limestone; paper from grass or straw; soap from fat; alcohol from honey; photographs from egg whites; chlorine from salt water and celluloid from cotton. Your guides on this journey are the four alchemical elements; Fire, Earth, Air and Water.
A Civil Action
by Jonathan Harr
This book tells the story about water contamination in the town of Woburn, Massachusetts, and the legal fight to get big companies to pay. It is a compelling book that will make you think differently about our legal system and the meaning of the phrase “truth in justice.”
The Disappearing Spoon, and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
by Sam Kean
Kean reviews all of the elements of the periodic table. There’s a story associated with each one. He talks a lot about what makes things elements, what distinguishes one element from another, and why those differences are important, elucidating how big a difference a proton can make in a single atom’s chemistry. This book is much more than the table of contents reveals! If you like chemistry, try it. You’ll like it! There’s a focus on radioactive elements. Learn something new!
Napoleon’s Buttons: How Seventeen Molecules Changed History
by Jay Burreson and Penny Le Couteur
Though many factors have been proposed to explain the failure of Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign, it has also been linked to something as small as a button — a tin button, the kind that fastened everything from the greatcoats of Napoleon's officers to the trousers of his foot soldiers. When temperatures drop below 56°F, tin crumbles into powder. Were the soldiers of the Grande Armée fatally weakened by cold because the buttons of their uniforms fell apart? How different our world might be if tin did not disintegrate at low temperatures and the French had continued their eastward expansion! This fascinating book tells the stories of seventeen molecules that, like the tin of those buttons, influenced the course of history. These molecules provided the impetus for early exploration and made possible the ensuing voyages of discovery. They resulted in grand feats of engineering and spurred advances in medicine; they lie behind changes in gender roles, in law, and in the environment; and have determined what we today eat, drink, and wear. Showing how a change as small as the position of an atom can lead to enormous differences in the properties of a substance, the authors reveal the astonishing chemical connections among seemingly unrelated events. Napoleon's Buttons offers a novel way to understand how our contemporary world works and how our civilization has been shaped over time.
The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi
In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi—scientist, poet, writer—makes chemistry a metaphor for his life. But it becomes more than that. Chemistry shapes his life, defines his life. In Auschwitz, it even saves his life. It becomes his living. In the end, chemistry becomes everything: life itself. Each title of the very different 21 tales in the book is the name of an element at that story’s core, sustaining the architecture of a book that delivers a sharp sense of the compulsion, ambiguities and delights of science. Levi’s narrative invokes the rise of fascism, the folly of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich, the fall of Prague, General Francisco Franco’s conquest of Spanish Republican forces in Barcelona, the sustained bleakness of all-out war in the 1940s, the nightmare of the concentration camps and the cruel post-war struggles to survive and rebuild.
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
by Kate Moore
The incredible true story of the women heroes who were exposed to radium in factories across the U.S. in the early twentieth century, and their brave and groundbreaking battle to strengthen workers' rights, even as the fatal poison claimed their own lives.
The Curies' newly discovered element of radium made gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty and a wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shone bright in the dark years of the First World War. Meanwhile, hundreds of young women toiled amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covered their bodies from head to toe; they lit up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were the luckiest alive — until they began to fall mysteriously ill. But the factories that once offered golden opportunities ignored all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women's cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium took hold, the brave shining girls found themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America's early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights that would echo for centuries to come. Their courage and tenacity led to life-changing regulations, research into nuclear bombing, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Clarice Phelps, "How I Claimed a Seat at the Periodic Table"
A Civil Action
Science, truth in the legal system, environmental justice. Reveals the story behind water contamination in the town of Woburn, Massachusetts and the legal fight to get big companies to pay. It is a compelling movie that will make you think differently about our legal system and the meaning of the phrase “truth in justice”
Dark Waters
A tenacious attorney uncovers a dark secret that connects a growing number of unexplained deaths to one of the world's largest corporations (Dupont). While trying to expose the truth, he soon finds himself risking his future, his family and his own life. Source: wikipedia.com
The Moth: This episode features a story by Roald Hoffman, 1981 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, about his boyhood in occupied Poland and his subsequent move to the United States.
STEMulating Conversations: When Clarice (Claire) Phelps received her undergraduate degree in chemistry, she had no idea that it would lead to her being the first African American woman to be on a team that discovered a new element on the periodic table. She is currently a researcher and program manager in the the Nuclear Materials Processing Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Source: Stitcher.com