Mark Miodownik

A world-leading materials scientist presents an engrossing collection of stories that explain the science and history of materials, from the plastic in our appliances to the elastic in our underpants, revealing the miracles of engineering that seep into our everyday lives. 25,000 first printing.

Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

Stuff Matters

Alawander Bouston 

This is essentially why gold is still valuable in the twenty-first century. If gathered together, all the gold ever mined would fit inside a large town house.

Igor

the advantage of the codex, with its individual pages, is that many scribes could work on the same book at the same time, and after the invention of the printing press many copies of the same book could be created at the same time. As biology had already discovered, the speedy copying of information is the most effective way of preserving it.

Libraries are now actively researching the chemistry of book smell to see if they can use it to help them monitor and preserve large collections of books. Although it is a smell of decay, to many it is nevertheless perceived to be a pleasant one.

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