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From laughing gas and whipped cream to compressed air and bicycles, Mark Miodownik’s new book It’s a Gas lives up to its title by revealing just how much science is woven into the everyday
By Tom Tierney
Compressed air now keeps beer fresh by allowing bottle tops to be pushed on firmly
Shutterstock/Parilov
It’s a Gas
Mark Miodownik (Viking (UK, out now); Mariner (US, 17 September))
WHEN Humphry Davy first gave nitrous oxide to people with tuberculosis in the late 1790s, hoping it might provide a cure, he couldn’t have known that he was also playing a small but important part in culinary history. Yet the links between the two are made clear in Mark Miodownik’s new book on gases, appropriately called It’s a Gas.
While it quickly became apparent to Davy that nitrous oxide had…
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