Chemicals often have a negative Image among the general public. But there is no material world or indeed human beings without chemicals. The material world is operated by chemicals. The title ‘Chemicals for Life and Living’ implies that the material world is staged and played by chemicals. The book consists of five parts and an appendix. Part 1 – Essentials for life; Part 2 – Enhancing health; Part 3 – For the fun of life; Part 4 – Chemistry of the universe and earth, and Part 5 - Some negative effects of chemicals. The appendix gives a brief summary of what chemistry is all about, including a short chapter of chemical principles. No quantitative calculations are included in this book so that it is appealing for everyone – not just chemists.

Chemicals often have a negative Image among the general public. But there is no material world or indeed human beings without chemicals. The material world is operated by chemicals. The title ‘Chemicals for Life and Living’ implies that the material world is staged and played by chemicals. The book consists of five parts and an appendix. Part 1 – Essentials for life; Part 2 – Enhancing health; Part 3 – For the fun of life; Part 4 – Chemistry of the universe and earth, and Part 5 - Some negative effects of chemicals. The appendix gives a brief summary of what chemistry is all about, including a short chapter of chemical principles. No quantitative calculations are included in this book so that it is appealing for everyone – not just chemists.

In this book, the authors describe the long journey from formless inanimate matter to man, explaining the nature and the logic of the physical-chemical processes involved. It stresses the limitations of reductionism analyses of these processes as complexity increases and novel properties emerge. And, in particular, the authors develop the idea that it was chemical change of the environment that allowed evolution of life to occur and that this evolution required successive addition of new message systems and information codes connected, compatible, and cooperative with previous extant systems. In doing so, the authors analyze the relationship between chemical element content and speciation both in inanimate and living systems in terms of fundamental units and variables or composite (derived) units and variables. Through such analysis, the authors conclude that chemical speciation is very much a matter of chemical cooperation (order versus disorder) while biological speciation requires cooperative flow of chemicals and energy (organization versus disorder). They argue that chance mutations of DNA are far too simple to provide a basis for evolution and biological diversity, though it is a representation of such diversity. It is the survival strength of systems of molecular machinery which separate and generate living species. In the final chapter, they analyze the effect of man's activities on the present global and local ecosystems and speculate on the possible nature of the emergent properties to be expected from an ever-increasing complexity of information based modern societies.

Emphasises on contemporary applications and an intuitive problem-solving approach that helps students discover the exciting potential of chemical science. This book incorporates fresh applications from the three major areas of modern research: materials, environmental chemistry, and biological science.

Pross examines these issues from a chemical perspective, providing a new understanding of how the sciences of chemistry and biology relate to one another.

The acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams tackles "big questions like the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness ... in an entertaining and easily digestible way” (Wall Street Journal) with a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between. Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called “the poet laureate of science writers,” explores these questions and more—from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.