Ranked #87 in Materials Science
From plastics to smart materials to never-before-seen composites, scientists have transformed the raw materials of the wilderness into the stuff of the modern world. Now, award-winning journalist Ivan Amato explores this fascinating science.Prehistory was stuck in the Stone Age partly because it lacked the scientific know-how to smelt iron from rocky ores. The Industrial Revolution owed its birth to the geniuses who figured out how to make large amounts of steel. Postwar America can thank or hang in effigy John Wesley Hyatt, who gave us plastics. And twenty-first-century America may well... more