When I was searching out colourful chemistry stories for my book Cracking the Elements, I kept running into something a bit weird. In standard accounts of the development of the periodic table, there were almost ridiculous numbers of people called William and Henry. I didn’t discount any of these fine men. I ended up including…
Category: BOOKS
Ten years of articles for Engineering & Technology magazine under veteran features editor Vitali Vitaliev.
Until July 2020, Vitali Vitaliev was Features Editor at Engineering and Technology Magazine, a role he held for nearly 14 years. I knew his name from reading his work regularly in The Guardian, but it was through my friend and colleague Dea Birkett that I met him and began writing periodically for the magazine. I…
Cold war, hot science: investigating the discovery of super-heavy elements, and visiting Russia, for the Royal Society’s essay collection on scientific collaborations
In September 2017 I responded to a call for proposals sent out by Jon Turney, a science writer I knew by glowing reputation if not in person. He was commissioning a book of essays exploring scientific collaborations for the Royal Society, and I thought maybe I had a candidate. While working on my book Cracking the…