Tracing uranium’s past, and how it intersects with our understanding of other radioactive elements, this book aims to disentangle our attitudes and to unpick the atomic mindset. Chain Reactions looks at the fascinating, often-forgotten, stories that can be found throughout the history of the element. Ranging from glassworks to penny stocks; medicines to weapons; something […]
Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium by Lucy Jane Santos
Chain Reactions looks at the fascinating, often-forgotten, stories that can be found throughout the history of the element. Ranging from glassworks to penny stocks, medicines to weapons, and something to be feared to a powerful source of energy, this global history not only explores the development of our scientific understanding of uranium, but also shines […]
Looking for radioactivity in Las Vegas
Lucy Jane Santos, the author of Chain Reactions, is prepared to go anywhere to look for the history of radioactivity. Even Las Vegas. Fortunately, she found that the sinful city still radiates with its atomic heritage, which hasn’t decayed yet. Over the last — almost — decade of tracing the history of radioactive elements – […]
How to radium party
Lucy Jane Santos, the cultural historian, explains how to hold a radium party like the ones that lit up New York a century ago. At the beginning of July 2020 I held a radium party for friends and family to celebrate the launch of Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium. We had specially-created (slightly) glowing […]
Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium by Lucy Jane Santos
Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the 19th century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal. Half Lives tells the fascinating, curious, sometimes macabre story of the element through its ascendance as a desirable item – a present for a queen, a prize in […]