The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

The full title of this book is The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements. Whew! I think about half of those words could be edited out.

I'm not going to lie to you, a good bit of this book is above my intellectual pay grade. The different shapes of electron shells and shearing off particles...ummm, OK, my eyes are glazing over. But those bits aren't that common. There were a few times I had to re-read a passage to see if I could actually understand it, and found that no, I in fact didn't, nor couldn't. Most of the book though is really engaging and written in a pretty layman style. You do not need to be a chemist to read and understand 90% of this book. And that extra 10% is not where the jokes are (disclaimer: there aren't any real jokes...I think).

Here are some fascinating facts I learned from this book:

1. Antimony (Sb atomic number 51) was once used as a laxative. "Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn't dissolve in the intestine, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them." Page 22 (italics mine because, gross.)
2. The longest word in an English-language document was published in a chemical resource book in 1964. It is the protein that is considered the first virus, which was discovered in 1892, called the tobacco mosaic virus. I'm not going to print it here because it's 1185 letters long. It looks like someone was trying to hit a letter limit in an essay, or like someone sprinkled catnip on the keyboard and Mittens went nuts. Page 32-33
3. Jupiter is possibly an elemental freak show. I've heard that people theorize that it could rain diamonds there, but some scientists believe it could have liquid diamonds and metallic hydrogen. Mercury (the planet, not the element) has cube-shaped iron snowflakes. That's just fucking cool! Page 70 & 71
4. You know how history books talk about the mustard gas used in World War I? It was made from bromine originally before they switched to chlorine. According to the book, "Chlorine turns victims' skin yellow, green, and black, and glasses over their eyes with cataracts. They actually die of drowning, from the fluid buildup in their lungs." Yeah. The stuff in your pool. Don't recall reading that in my history text. Page 86
5. Lots of military-thriller type TV shows and movies have a villain threatening to launch a dirty bomb. But what exactly does a dirty bomb do? A cobalt-60 dirty bomb "kill(s) with gamma radiation (which) in addition to burning people frightfully, ... dig(s) down into bone marrow and scramble(s) the chromosomes in white blood cells." So The Hulk would actually have leukemia. Cobalt dirty bombs also can't be waited out because "it would take a whole human lifetime for the land to recover." Page 112-114
6. All radioactive elements decay (I do remember they have a half-life from chemistry. Or maybe I remember it because of the video game?). Bismuth's half-life is so long it will be the final element to go extinct. Page 159
7.  One of the things I can barely grasp is that molecules can be either right handed or left handed. I can't explain this so you'll have to read the book so you can understand it. But whether a particular molecule is right or left handed gives it different properties. "The zesty odor of lemons and oranges derives from the same basic molecules, one right-handed and one left-handed." And this handedness is absolutely crucial; the reason why thalidomide was such a horrible drug is "because the scientists couldn't separate the curative form of the active ingredient from the wrong-handed form." Page 182
8. "Polonium has been linked to lung cancer from cigarettes, since tobacco plants absorb polonium excessively well and concentrate it in their leaves. Once incinerated and inhaled, the smoke ravishes lung tissues with radioactivity." Forget nicotine, every puff you take irradiates your body with the same element that killed Alexander Litvinenko. If you don't know who that is or can't remember, look it up. That is what you are doing to yourself. I know it's hard, but the best things in life usually aren't easy. And you are the best thing in someone's life. Page 208 
9. Lithium has been given as a mood stabilizer in the US since 1967. It "reset(s) the body's circadian rhythm, which runs on DNA inside special neurons in the brain. Special proteins attach to people's DNA each morning and degrade and fall of after a set time. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over (and they) fall off only after darkness falls, making the brain stop producing stimulants. In people with bipolar disorder, the protein doesn't fall off the neuron, so the brain keeps making stimulants until the surges deplete the brain, causing the person to crash." Much has been said about mental disorders. More should be done to understand them. This explanation made this disorder a bit more understandable to me. I've quoted sporadically and summarized some. The whole section was very enlightening. Pages 251 through 254. 

And that's just a sample. There were other things that I really found interesting but wanted to keep the list fairly short, otherwise why would you want to read the books. I have a bad enough reputation for spoiling movies, I don't want to get started spoiling non-fiction books.