How to be a chemical tourist

Ytterby is tiny. It’s basically a bus stop, a few houses, and a set of steps up to a rocky ravine. White Sands Missile Range, deep in the big empty heart of New Mexico, is even more Spartan. There, the only residents are ants obsessed with radioactive material and military personnel testing the latest toys in the US arsenal.

But both sites still graced my scientific bucket list. Ytterby has proven to be the richest source for the discovery of natural elements on the planet, with four named directly after the sleepy cabins on the edge of the Stockholm archipelago. And White Sands – open only twice a year to the public and set in a desert with the welcoming epithet of ‘the Journey of the Dead Man’ – rewards anyone willing to make the nine-hour drive from Phoenix with a black obelisk to mark the spot Gadget, the first nuclear bomb, went off. Atomic selfies are cool.