Carol Potenza

Boron = boring? That’s kinda-sorta why this atomic element didn’t get attention earlier in the Periodic Table of Death and Mystery series. Boron literally never came up in organic or biochemistry. It’s considered nonessential for human life (1) based on the biochemist’s periodic table, and it’s not even in my generic once-a-day vitamin and they include selenium(6). That doesn’t mean boron (B) isn’t important in human history, past, present, and future. It is. Boron was originally found as evaporates, including in the complex salt, sodium borate (Na2H20B4O17) (3), better known as borax. As early as 300 A.D., the Chinese employed …

“Evolutionary mismatch” is a concept developed in the field of evolutionary psychology. The concept postulates that human brains are wired for conditions that no longer exist. That “we have stone-age brains in modern environments,” and our primitive brains still drive our behaviors (1, 2). But what does it mean to have a “Stone Age” brain? You’ve probably heard the term Stone Age before, especially if you ever watched the Flintstones (3). It’s a dated term that applies to a period ~2.5 million to 5000 years ago, when humans made and used stone tools. It’s also when our brain size, structure, …

We use idioms in language all the time. “Don’t cut corners is a good rule of thumb.” “You missed the boat on that one and it’s the last straw.” “She’s normally fit as a fiddle, but under the weather today” (1). Idioms are expressions that have a completely different meaning than the literal words because how weird would it be for it to be “raining cats and dogs”? But most idioms used today have historical origins (2). If you “make the grade”, it means you’ve succeeded. But originally it had to do with whether a train locomotive could pull its …

Is this title deliberately provocative? Maybe. After all, sex sells, hubba-hubba. But we’ll get to that later, after you get a little more information about the periodic table element Neon and meander through its brightly colored world, er, Universe. But before we do that, let’s first explore the Periodic Law because it had a direct effect on the discovery of Neon. The Periodic Law was proposed independently in 1869 by a Russian Scientist, Dmitri Mendeleev, and a German Scientist, Lothar Meyer (1). Sixty-three of the 118 atomic elements (5) had been discovered but there was confusion about how to categorize them: atomic number or chemical properties. Mendeleev and …

A friend of mine writes time-travel books, so let’s use Mr. Peabody’s (1) Wayback Machine (which, shockingly, doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page) to jump back to 1669 and an Alchemist named— No. Wait. We first need to go back even farther to Medieval Arabic and European physicians and the fascinating subject of uroscopy—the divination of disease by the inspection of urine (2). This quote is from the twelfth century manuscript found in Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages:  “While you look at the urine for a long time you pay attention to its colour, substance and quantity and to its contents from …