All history articles
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OpinionLetters: December 2021
Readers discuss the environment and greener fuels, and speculate on chemistry’s role in the first world war
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ResearchMarie Antoinette’s secret messages to Swedish count revealed by chemical analysis
Spectroscopy deciphers censored passages in 200-year-old letters between last French queen and the man rumoured to be her lover
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NewsExplainer: The science of alkyl nitrites aka poppers
From their origins as 19th century angina treatment to becoming an important part of gay subculture, these recreational drugs exist in a legal limbo
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PodcastDeep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures by Adam Zmith – Book club
A history of a drug – and the queer community
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ReviewThe Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science
An extremely well-researched monograph containing stories that bear an eerie resemblance to today’s politicised clinical trials
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ReviewUncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
20 years after it was first published, Oliver Sacks’ memoir remains a popular chemistry classic – and for good reason
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ReviewHalf Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium
The story of a radioactive element from its rise to a cure-all ingredient to the downfall of an entire industry
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ReviewDeath By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts
A book for anyone with an interest in science, death, Elizabethan literature and British history – or all of the above
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ReviewFilm: Radioactive
Based on a graphic novel, this film is both a profile of Marie Curie and a celebration of her discovery, the phenomenon of radioactivity
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ResearchBiomolecular analysis unpicks human story of Himalayan skeleton lake
Archaeological deposits subject to ancient DNA analysis, stable isotope dietary reconstruction, radiocarbon dating and osteological analysis
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OpinionThe silent rise of the robots
Mechanical helpers have been creeping into our labs for decades