What is blood? How can we account for its enormous range of meanings and its extraordinary symbolic power? In Blood Work Janet Carsten traces the multiple meanings of blood as it moves from donors to labs, hospitals, and patients in Penang, Malaysia. She tells the stories of blood donors, their varied motivations, and the paperwork, payment, and other bureaucratic processes involved in blood donation, tracking the interpersonal relations between lab staff and revealing how their work with blood reflects the social, cultural, and political dynamics of modern Malaysia. Carsten follows hospital workers into factories and community halls on blood drives and brings readers into the operating theater as a machine circulates a bypass patient's blood. Throughout, she foregrounds blood's symbolic power, uncovering the processes that make the hospital, the blood bank, the lab, and science itself work. In this way, blood becomes a privileged lens for understanding the entanglements of modern life.

Imagine visiting a top-secret government lab, one that was a key site for the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear fusion technology in the twentieth century. Well, even in today's world of color-coded security levels, the doors of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California are open to you. And it's just one of the many surprising stops along the way in Duane S. Nickell's captivating new edition of the Scientific Traveler series, Guidebook for the Scientific Traveler: Visiting Physics and Chemistry Sites across America.

Are you in the mood for a trip to the Titan Missile Museum in Tucson? Want to spend some time at the Fermi National Accelerator Center near Chicago? Perhaps quench your thirst for knowledge and discovery at the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in St. Louis, where brewers are chemists at heart? Set your own pace. As an active participant or living room traveler, you'll be mesmerized as Nickell leads you on a tour of physics and chemistry sites.

Written in an easy-to-read and accessible style, this comprehensive guide is a practical and fun way to promote scientific literacy. You'll meet some of the world's great physicists, engineers, and chemists as you turn pages filled with more than fifty photographs. Organized into chapters on individuals, places, and sites--from universities of science to national laboratories, particle accelerators to energy labs and beyond--Nickell illuminates the history of each topic and paints a panorama of stunning achievements in physics and chemistry.

Whether you're traveling in California or Maine, or taking to the road in Texas or Illinois, Nickell helps complete your trip with a state-by-state list of monumental sites and resources. From the east coast to the west, north by northwest, or south in search of the Florida Solar Power Energy Center, you'll enjoy all your scientific travels with Visiting Physics and Chemistry Sites across America.