This year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science looked at, among other things, the history of alchemy, deep carbon, the health of lonely people, tracking individuals in swarms and stuttering. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis offers a radical new way to treat infectious diseases as the effectiveness of our current antibiotics wanes. A romp into theories of the cradle of life: Chemists, geologists, biologists, planetary scientists and physicists gathered recently to ponder where and what Eden might have been. The unsung hero of science: The International Year of Chemistry throws the spotlight on to a science that has utterly transformed our lives. One shocked chemist: Molecular surprises are sometimes right in front of us, if only we’d do the math. A review of Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams (and more). The evolution of the periodic system: From its origins some 200 years ago, the periodic table has become a vital tool for modern chemists. Tear down your wall-charts and burn your chemistry textbooks: The scientist's holy bible is getting a historic revamp as ten elements on the periodic table are about to be altered. What would happen if every element on the periodic table came into contact simultaneously? Blogging the periodic table elements: Sam Kean on wild, weird, wonderful stories about the elements that make up our universe. No one knows exactly why the international prototype of the kilogram, as pampered a hunk of platinum and iridium as ever existed, appears to weigh less than it did when it was manufactured in the late 19th century.
