Love chemistry

The plaque is actually a 'Chemical Landmark' [1] from the Royal Society of Chemistry. This, together with the tempting purple, red, white, black and blue plastic balls that represent the atoms of the double helix (nobody has stolen any of them yet, surprisingly), serves to remind us that beneath its glorious complexity, life is really chemistry.Chemistry is chemistry, too, of course, and the department devoted to that particular subject has also had its foyer refreshed. Here there is a grand and stylish periodic table [2] on the wall, each element given its own perspex box, with most elements occupied by actual samples. Some scarce and highly radioactive elements are absent, and monochrome photographs of the great scientists after whom they are named peer out through the perspex as proxies. The hairy Dmitri Mendeleev himself, who is credited with the discovery of the periodic table, is among them, at element 101. If you stand back from the display, a few elements are particularly striking: the brilliant yellow powder of sulphur, the shining copper spheres, the vial of sticky brown bromine, the shimmering gold foil, the mercury, and the noble gases represented by discharge tubes formed into their chemical symbols, glowing eerily in sequence. But the general impression is of a lot of very similar looking, dull, silvery-grey metals with obscure names.Similar they may look, but they all have different histories and characteristics. The story of how human curiosity and ingenuity has allowed us to understand the properties of the elements and exploit them in countless different applications is a rich and extraordinary one, and the best narrator I know is John Emsley, in his wonderful book Nature's Building Blocks [3]. The text is both encyclopaedic and engaging, listing the role of each element in biology and medicine, nutrition, war, the economy and the environment, as well as its chemical properties. Each also has an 'element of surprise' section: a quirky piece of info