Is chemistry better than its reputation? When it comes to dealing with humankind's big challenges, chemistry is the key discipline. Award-winning chemist Nuno Maulide and physicist Tanja Traxler embark on a captivating journey into the fascinating world of syntheses, bonds and reactions. Entertaining and vivid, the authors describe how chemistry influences our everyday life. They discuss chemical approaches to solving global problems such as climate change, food security for Earth's growing population and waste production. For what is chemistry, after all? It is the science of ourselves, nature and the entire universe.

For Albert Einstein she was “our Madame Curie”, for the Nazis an unwanted Jew and for the tabloid press “the mother of the atom bomb”. Only the second woman to receive a doctorate in physics, Lise Meitner graduated from the University of Vienna in 1906 and established herself in the male dominated science community. In 1938 she fled from the National Socialists and settled in Sweden, where she achieved her big breakthrough together with Otto Frisch: the discovery of the principle of nuclear fission. But the Nobel Prize she deserved eluded her. She spent the final years of her life in Cambridge. The authors paint a portrait of Meitner’s life against the backdrop of the rapid progress of nuclear physics and the great catastrophes of the 20th century, and provide new insights in the world of this unique scientist.