There is a question about corrosion that people rarely ask and that turns out to be the whole subject.
The question is not why metals corrode. Almost all of them…
There is a difference between two ways of putting a mark on a surface, and almost everything about the history of writing materials follows from it.
The first is to…
There is a useful exercise in considering how recently an ordinary thing became ordinary, and fire on demand is the most striking example available.
Fire itself is extremely old. Reliable…
The useful way to think about any bond is as a chain with three links - surface, adhesive, surface - and a chain fails at whichever link is weakest. Here…
Almost everything strange about smell follows from two facts: it is chemistry rather than physics, and it takes an unusually direct route into the brain. Here are twelve consequences.
1.…
Soap is one of the oldest manufactured substances and one of the most consequential, and almost nobody can explain what it does.
The common assumption is that soap is a…