Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth are filled with ghosts (and witches); Moaning Myrtle haunts the toilets at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts; and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol boasts not…
The road to the laboratory is paved with fizz, slime, messy purple stuff, bad smells, and goo. “Do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent…
“The periodic table,” begins Theodore Gray’s wonderful book The Elements, “is the universal catalog of everything you can drop on your foot.” It’s also been…
Cephalopods, real and imaginary, pop up in an array of literature, from Game of Thrones to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (in which a giant…