Additional information
by Ainissa Ramirez (Author)
In the bestselling tradition of Stuff Matters and The Disappearing Spoon a clever and engaging look at materials, the innovations they made possible, and how these technologies changed us. Finalist for the 41st Los Angeles Times Book Award in Science and Technology and selected as one of the Best Summer Science Books Of 2020 by Science Friday.
In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions--clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips--and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. She describes, among other things, how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway's writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid's cameras to create passbooks to track Black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies.Author Biography
Ainissa Ramirez, Ph.D., is the author of the award-winning title The Alchemy of Us (The MIT Press). A graduate of Brown University, she earned her doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford. Dr. Ramirez began her career as a scientist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey and was later an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Yale. Yet, Ainissa Ramirez is best known as a masterful science communicator who is dedicated to making science engaging to a broad audience. Her book was an L.A. Times Book Prize finalist and it won the Connecticut Book Award as well as the AAAS/Subaru Book Prize. Ramirez has written for Forbes, Time, The Atlantic, and Scientific American and has explained science headlines on CBS, CNN, NPR, ESPN, and PBS. Additionally, she speaks widely on the topics of science and technology and gave a TED talk on the importance of a science education. Currently, she is writing a series of science books for young readers (Candlewick/MIT Press).
