In case you are wondering who Tom Lehrer is, he is this guy:

A radiation accident transforms two youngsters into superheros, and simultaneously creates an evil villain for them to fight. The graphic novel covers that story and is indurated with frequent cleverly placed molecule size chemistry lessons.

Teachers need to know that this book complies with Next Gen science standards and is very classroom friendly. Indeed, author Preece is a chemistry and physical science teacher (and a trained chemist).

It is a great read, an engaging story, and the lessons are informative and easy on the eyes. I recommend it for the youth in your life who is into science. Teachers should have a look at it!

This is a fun graphic novel mystery book by C.A. Preece and Josh Reynolds. Two cousins experience an incident that would make a physicist cry, but that works in a chemistry book because they now have the ability to observe and change matter. So this is a superhero book, designed to teach chemistry. The story is great, the science is great, and the pedagogy is well suited for kids and adults that like graphic novels.

Preece is the chem teacher (high school) and Reynolds is the artist.

This is written for grades 7 through 10 (ages 8-12) but some younger kids will do fine with it.

This book is pretty new, but I think it is available.

Here are some books that are currently available cheap on Kindle, for anywhere from free to two bucks, that are either science or otherwise, I suspect, of interest to readers of this blog:

Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World

In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, an d 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself

Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World

Adams: An American Dynasty

(I know, the pineapple is depicted, not the banana. Just go see the site you’ll understand.)

Click on the image to visit the site.

Related:

• The book Wonderful Life with the Elements
• Tiny Periodic Table of the Tiny Elements
• Look Around You: Water

Every now and then you come across a book that takes the Periodic Table and transforms it into a learning experience about chemistry and stuff that can be really interesting. Wonderful Life with the Elements: The Periodic Table Personified is the latest effort I’m aware of to do that. This smallish, square book (read: Stocking Stuffer for your nerdy spouse or child) by Japanese artist Bunpei Yorifuji seems to follow a recent trend in books to be very quirky, perhaps to compete with on-line methods of accessing information. One method of getting chemistry across to people is to redo the iconography or the spatial metaphors of the Periodic Table. In this case, the elements are depicted as drawings of people who have various characteristics. You can look at a drawing and using what you know (using rather complex keys) infer stuff about the elements from the individual’s body, face, and clothing. A person standing there in their underwear may indicate an element useful in human nutrition. A person who appears to be dressed up in a robot suit is a human-made element, one that generally does not exist in nature, and so on.

Hair or hat styles relate to elemental families, and faces vary on the bases of the element’s subatomic characteristics. The elements are standing on things that suggest stuff about their uses. So, for instance, you might have this:

Gold has a big long beard indicating that it was discovered in ancient times. The figure representing gold and gold itself are a bit hefty of mass. Gold sports the hair style of a transition metal, and appears to be wearing Carharts, suggesting a multiplicity of purposes. There is quite a bit more information than this in this one figure.

The book comes with a nifty, full size fold out periodic table that I’m tempted to razor out and hang on my wall.