My favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut. His writing simply connects with me - might be his Hoosier background, his secular humanism, or the simplicity of his ideas on the shapes of stories. I've read all of Vonnegut's novels and many of his short stories.
In his novel Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut presents a fictional idea of ice-nine, a super-stable form of solid H2O that is able to 'infect' any sample of water with which it comes into contact. The ice-nine is so stable that it has a melting temperature of 45.8 C leading to all of the liquid water in the fictional world solidifying - which leads eventually to the end of civilization as we know it.
Ice-nine is fictional, but the two forms of ritonavir discussed in this video aren't fictional at all. Ritonavir was an incredibly important drug for HIV patients, and the useful crystalline structure of ritonavir was spontaneously replaced with a less useful polymorph and nearly destroying the drug's total production.
Along the way, the video looks at tin pest and tempered chocolate, other examples of polymorphism.
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