The road system in Zambia is extremely simple. There are only a few major roads, and Lusaka on the road map is defined simply as a crossroads from which spring the 'Great North Road', the 'Great East Road', the 'Kafue Road' heading southerly, and the 'Mumbwa Road' heading West. I've followed the Great North Road almost as far as it reaches, straight up into the Northern Province, and turned off to the NorthWest reaching the town of Kasama. From here the road deteriorates markedly and is badly potholed. The last 250 km takes one to a T-junction. 5 km to the right is the town of Mbala. 25 km to the left however is my destination. Following this, the road drops quite swiftly through a thousand metres as you drop into the Rift Valley. Surrounded by the heights of the Zambian plateau is Lake Tanganyika. My road lies parallel to the valley and the lake and meets the shores at a small dusty down called Mpulungu, generally pronounced 'poolungoo', and we're 1140 km North of Lusaka at Zambia's only port.

I'm delighted to announce that WebElements has collaborated with Theodore Gray to produce a new glossy laminated periodic table poster showing his fantastic photographs of the elements. The style of the poster is such that it pairs nicely with our existing periodic table poster. You can order it now from our online shop

Thomas Kuhn conceived over a half century ago that science should be distinguished into revolutionary periods separated by normal science. Normal science fills in the details while the rare revolutions replace one theoretical framework with a better paradigm. As a science develops, broad revolutions are followed by revolutions which make less sweeping changes. Our knowledge of elements and periodic charts seems to be in a period of normal science. And if revolutions occur in that part of chemistry, they are likely to be rather narrow in scope.

But a revolution may be about to change the way we learn chemistry. Major revolutions in education have been widely separated in time. Much from the Lyceum of Aristotle remains in today's schools. But the Internet has introduced a new medium much as Johannes Gutenberg advanced the printed medium in the 15th Century. The textbook and printed documents had a dramatic change on education and the way knowledge and understanding was transmitted from one generation to the next. Most of the pieces for another revolution are in place. Google has provided a ...

Polonium has no biological role and any sample used to kill the former KGB spy must have come from either a research laboratory or nuclear facility. It is found in uranium ores but at miniscule levels 0.00000001%. So small that the Curie's were awarded the Nobel prize for their superhuman effort to extract it. Could a terrorist smuggle Polonium into this country or is there a human leak at a UK Defence Establishment? Gramme quantities of polonium-210 are synthesized from bismuth in nuclear reactors. Carrying quantities of polonium is difficult because of the high temperature from radioactive decay [500oC] and the emission of deadly alpha particles. These radioactive particles are most dangerous when ingested. They pick up electrons from cells in the body and escape as helium gas. Polonium-210 has a relatively short half life [138 days] so the 'evidence' diminishes constantly with time. Also Polonium is fairly volatile and will evaporate if not kept in a sealed container. Polonium is one of the deadliest known substances and is believed to be a trillion more times toxic than HCN weight for weight.

I'm slowly expanding some of the functionality on the WebElements periodic table site and we now have the bare bones of a news and forums site here (the current URL will switch to the main WebElements site in a
while). This part of the site will also house chemistry information pages in a "book " format (this will also be open to contributors in a while) and some other features.

The system I am using does allow individual users to post their own blogs and it seems to me that some of you have something to say. Chemists don't seem to be natural bloggers, however, this is an offer for some of you chemists out there to have your own blog on one of the highest profile chemistry sites around.

Good to see that the complete works of Charles Darwin, one of the greatest scientists, are being published online by Cambridge University. Darwin Online features many newly transcribed or never-before-published manuscripts and is worth anyone's time to browse around for a while. The great English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) revolutionized our understanding of life on earth.

This demonstrates JSpecView loading via bbcode using jspecview tags

File pclanilIR.jdx width 600 height 400

This is achieved by writing:

[jspecview=600,400]pclanilIR.jdx[/jspecview]

The =600,400 bit gives the desired spectrum size while the file name to de displayed is included between the tags. The file is uploaded by authors who are assigned rights to upload attachments.

The motivation for this came from CHMEMCONF Spring 2006 following initial results with Jmol, and in particular Robert Lancashire's paper. With Roberts's help, what I've done here is made a small extension to the software I'm using here (Drupal so that spectra in JCAMP-DX formatted can be embedded simply with a bbcode type string.

Can't see anything above? Please consult http://jspecview.sourceforge.net/ for help. In particular, JSpecView should run on any system that supports Java 1.5 at least. Previous versions of Java are not supported.

I'll issue a note with more details on how to do this after further work.

I'm managing to make some progress on this area of the site, but a little more rushed than I would have preferred owing to what amounted to a denial of service attack from Russia and the failure of the previous forum software to cope. Several years ago I used content management software to combine news/forums/wikis and so on but the software was too early and clunky. After that I moved to smaller packages, one for news, one for forums, and so on. That worked but it was all rather fragmented. Open source content management systems have evolved and here we see the first steps to recombine the news, forums and so on pack into a single entity using a single system. I have a different system that I am still pondering for the future but I think this one is OK for now. So, what we now have is:

• News: (starting with the material from the previous news site. I need to recruit a few novice reporters for this so volunteers are invited to get in contact. We can pay a little for articles, but not top rate;
• Forums: starting with the posts from the previous forums site. All members from the previous forums site who made any posts still have accounts but all these members need to reset their password (this is a security measure, sorry for inconvenience);

This site now has the ability to display molecules interactively via the Jmol Java applet. This should mean that some stories or articles may come to mean a little more. As an example:

File H3N-BF3.mol/nexus/

The motivation for this came from CHMEMCONF Spring 2006 and in particular Bob Hanson's paper. With Bob's encouragment, what I've done here is made a small extension to the software I'm using here (Drupal so that molecules can be embedded simply with a bbcode type string, in this case:

[jmol=300]H3N-BF3.mol[/jmol]

I'll issue a note with more details on how to do this after further work.

Can't see anything above? Please consult http://jmol.sourceforge.net/ for help. In particular, Jmol should run on any system that supports Java 1.4. Previous versions of Java are not supported.

OK - the start of a new WebElements area that will bring together, eventually, the news site, the books site, and the forums site. It will also act as a location for chemistry content related to WebElements. The sort of thing I mean here is, for instance, sections on the chemistry of the various groups or periods in the periodic table, articles on periodicity, expanded disucssion of the chemistry of specific elements, and so on. All that will take years to add of course, for now, just testing the software.