The Elements We Live By: How Iron Helps Us Breathe, Potassium Lets Us See, and Other Surprising Superpowers of the Periodic Table

The periodic table as you’ve never seen it before—starring the elements that power our bodies and our way of life

Some elements get all the attention: glittering gold, radioactive uranium—materials we call “precious” because they are so rare. But what could be more precious than the building blocks of life—from the oxygen in our air to the carbon in all living things?

In The Elements We Live By, physicist and award-winning author Anja Røyne reminds us that we’d be lost without the quiet heroe...