More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 10 - August 26, 2018
calcium carbonate, which is the main constituent of limestone, a rock formed from the compressed layers of living organisms over millions of years and then fused together by the heat and pressure of the movement of the Earth’s crust. You also need some rock containing silicate—silicate being a compound containing silicon and oxygen, and constituting roughly 90 percent of the Earth’s crust—for
At these temperatures, rock starts to fall apart and re-form to create a family of compounds called calcium silicates.
To make concrete, aluminum- and iron-rich rocks are the magic ingredients, but only in the correct proportions. Once it has all cooled down, the result is a powder the gray-white color of the moon. If you put your hands through it you find that it has the silky texture of ash—there is something atavistic about it—but your hands soon feel dried out as if under a subtle type of attack. This is a very special material with a very dull name: cement.
Self-healing concrete has these bacteria embedded inside it along with a form of starch, which acts as food for the bacteria.
Cocoa butter is one of the finest fats in the vegetable kingdom, slugging it out with dairy butter and olive oil for pole position.
obsessively every afternoon and every night. Whether this is down to the brainwashing I received watching Flake adverts, or a psychophysical
the shorter wavelengths of light are more likely to be scattered than the longer ones, which means that blues get bounced around the sky more than reds and yellows. So instead of seeing a white sky when we look up, we
see a blue one.
The plastics that followed celluloid, such as Bakelite, nylon, vinyl, and silicone, built
on its creative power and have also had an important impact on our cultural psyche. Bakelite became a moldable replacement for wood
spawned a new family of fabrics, such as Lycra and PVC, as well as a group of materials called elastomers, without which all our clothes would be baggy and our pants would fall down. Vinyl changed music,
natron, which is a naturally occurring form of sodium carbonate. With it, the Romans were able to make transparent glass at a much lower temperature than would be needed to melt pure quartz.
The Chinese were experts in paper, wood, ceramic, and metals, but they pretty much ignored glass.
On Earth, ninety-four different types of atoms naturally exist, but eight of these elements make up 98.8 percent of the mass of the Earth: iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, and aluminum. The rest are technically trace elements, including carbon.
