Endless Curiosity about science, math and universe

In short: From 1929 to 1948, 7UP contained lithium citrate — the same lithium doctors still prescribe for bipolar disorder. It was not a secret ingredient: the ads said "Lithiated" in large letters and sold the soda on exactly that promise. Nineteen years of medicated soda ended only after a different lithium product started killing people. A soda launched two weeks before the Crash Charles Leiper Grigg launched his lemon-lime soda in St. Louis in October 1929 — about two weeks before the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. A nation sinking into low spirits was the market, and the advertising leaned into it: a drink to lift your mood. The ingredient behind that promise, featured front and center, was lithium citrate — lithium combined with citric acid, which pharmacists of the day used to calm the nerves. As for the number seven, it remains a mystery: seven ingredients, seven-ounce bottles, or lithium's atomic mass of about seven — none confirmed, beca...

In short: The name is the lab notebook. WD-40 stands for "Water Displacement, 40th formula" — the first 39 tries failed. And the spray carries a genuine authorship dispute: the company's official story credits its president, chemist Norman Larsen, but in 2014 a San Diego historian argued the actual developer was a different man with an almost identical name — Iver Norman "Norm" Lawson. A rust problem on a missile On September 23, 1953, a tiny San Diego company called the Rocket Chemical Company opened with just three employees — founders Norman B. Larsen, Gordon Dawson, and John B. Gregory. Its laboratory made rust-preventing solvents and degreasers for the aerospace industry, and the pressing job was a coating that would displace water from the skin of the Atlas missile so the metal would not rust. Water displacement sounds simple. The notebooks say it took forty attempts. Thirty-nine failures with a number on them Most products hide their failures. This o...

In short: The 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — for plastics that conduct electricity — began in a Tokyo laboratory in 1967, with an experiment that looked like a failure. The researcher who ran that first experiment was Hyung Chick Pyun, a visiting scientist from Korea. His name did not appear among the authors of the first paper; it remained only in the acknowledgments. This article follows the record honestly, without accusing anyone of stealing credit. Why was polyacetylene a wall? Plastic built the modern world because it is light and slow to decay — and because of one absolute rule: it does not conduct electricity. That is precisely why electric wires are wrapped in it. Polyacetylene, a plastic made of acetylene molecules linked into long chains, looked different on paper: its alternating single and double bonds seemed to hold a path for electrons. But whenever anyone made it, all they got was a black powder — impossible to shape, impossible to measure. To be useful, it had to ...