Modern life relies heavily on oil. We use it to power our vehicles, and use the gas that collects above it to heat our homes. We make plastics from it. Yet the first oil well was drilled in only 1859. Before that, people collected oil at ‘seeps’ where it appears above ground — and they…
Category: chemistry
Where the streets were paved with gold
You might have heard of people in the past moving to places (usually London) where the streets were said to be ‘paved with gold’. It meant that anyone could be rich there. Gold would not make good actual paving. But there was once somewhere the streets really were — accidentally — paved with gold. It…
Eighty percent of the nitrogen in you came from a chemical factory
Have you ever wondered how the world could suddenly support so many people? In 1900 there were 1.6 billion people and now there are 7 billion. How can we make enough food for them? The answer is a ground-breaking chemical process called the Haber process. It doesn’t sound that interesting – it takes nitrogen from…
Sellotape, pencils and a Nobel prize
You might think you need lots of clever kit and a large research team to win a Nobel prize these days. But Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov did it with just pencil lead and some sellotape. Well, nearly. They won the Nobel Prize for Physics, 2010, for playing with their sticky tape dispenser and producing…
The shipwrecked rhino 