Near Twins and Black Sheep: The Genealogy of ELements

     One element, carbon, is a part of proteins. "The longest word to appear in an English-language document whose purpose was not to set the record for the longest word ever" does, in fact, describe a protein that is considered the first virus ever detected - the tobacco mosaic virus. Carbon is the backbone of amino acids which come together to form proteins. The longest word i mentioned earlier contains the names of 159amino acids, and each one appears in the order they appear in the protein, so scientists can reconstruct it by just using the name alone. Each amino acid contains oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and a branch that can be 20 different molecules. Oxygen has six extra electrons, so it only needs two to fill its outer shell. Carbon, however, needs four electrons so it is very flexible with bonds. Since silicon is right below carbon on the periodic table, they share a lot of properties. Silicon, or 'silico', is at the core of the longest nontechnical word in in the Oxford English Dictionary (45 letters long). A compound it can form with oxygen, silicon dioxide, is fatal and is believed to have killed many dinosaurs when an asteroid or comet collided with the earth so long ago. It is also believed that silicon could be the base of life on other planets, just as carbon is on Earth. Some creatures like sea urchins have silicon n their spines, and some believe silicon could form brains as complex as a carbon-based one. However, there are issues of getting silicon dioxide into and out of the organisms (like how carbon dioxide is circulated through our bodies and produced in cellular respiration.) And since it is a solid, that creates so many more problems when circulating nutrients and minerals comes into play. Also, silicon wouldn't be able to form rings of sugars to store energy and it can't form double bonds. In the end, life forms made of silica wouldn't be able to grow, react, reproduce, and attack - everything needed for life.
     Underneath silicon, we find germanium- a "sorry, no-luck element," the black sheep of the column. It has been used to build "the world's first solid-state amplifier in December 1947 by Bardeen and Brattain, called the transistor." The only problem with germanium is that it produces unwanted heat, so scientists mainly tried to make silicon work. When an engineer from Texas demonstrated a silicon transistor, things changed and the germanium idea was dumped.
    Eventually, Bardeen left the field, and Jack Kilby soon arrived. He started working at Texas Instruments when all other employees had vacation. Alone, he decided to pursue a new idea called an integrated circuit, where all the transistors, resistors, and capacitors are carved from one block of semiconductor, made of germanium. This also led to the invention of the computer chip. Sadly, he did not get cred for his work until 2000, but that's more than what some scientists of the day got.

     I hope this isn't too long, and you get to read it. It is a long post, and things jump around a lot, but this book covers a lot of things about each element, and it is all equally interesting.