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Review : Top twenty

13 July 1996

The world has evolved to run on just 20 elements, or so it seems.
In Natural
Selection of the Chemical Elements (Oxford, £75, ISBN 0 19
855843 0), R.
J. P. Williams and J. J. R. Frausto da Silva explain how humans have
impinged on
this natural selection by adding the rest of the periodic table to their
chemical repertoire and making ample use of “unnatural” elements, in industry
and elsewhere. Ultimately our world will evolve to compensate—and we may
not be around by then to react.

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