The 2007 Ig Nobel Chemistry prize winner was Mayu Yamamoto (International Medical Centre of Japan) for developing a way to extract vanillin (vanilla fragrance and flavour) from cow dung. The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced 5th October 2007 and prizes prizes awarded at Harvard in America. To celebrate, a local ice cream bar put on a tasting session of a new flavour, Yum-A-Moto Vanilla Twist, concocted in honour of the 2007 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Mayu Yamamoto. The mind boggles.

This stamp commemorates the death of Mendeleev (February 1907), one of the lead figures responsible for the periodic table. Absolutely excellent choice of colours if I might say so! The stamp was sent to me by Prof Gabriel Pinto (Departamento de Ingeniería Química Industrial, ETSI Industriales, UPM, Madrid, Spain) and I quote from his web page:

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.

The 2006 Ig Noble prize for chemistry has been announced and was awarded to Spanish researchers Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon (University of Valencia), and Carmen Rosselló (University of Illes Balears), for their outstanding research: "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature." published in the Journal of Food Science, 1999, 66, 1038-41.

The Ig Noble prizes are administered by the publishers of the Annals of Improbable Research magazine. It's not always clear to me that the Chemistry Ig Noble prizes seem more related to other areas, and some non-chemistry prizes look as though the work was chemical, but never mind. For the record, here are a few of the more recent awards.

The positions of the elements La, Ac, Lu, and Lr in the WebElements periodic table is justified in the article by William B. Jensen, J. Chem. Ed., 1982, 59, 634.

Elements 117, and 118 are not known at the time of writing, but are shown "greyed-out" in the tables at their expected positions for information.

It's great to see a new book about the periodic table and this one is written by Eric Scerri, a world authority on the periodic table!

Dr. Eric Scerri is a leading philosopher of science specializing in the history and philosophy of the periodic table. He is also the founder and editor in chief of the international journal Foundations of Chemistry and is a full-time lecturer at UCLA where he regularly teaches classes of 350 chemistry students as well as classes in history and philosophy of science. You can buy this book from our WebElements Amazon Store or our WebElements Amazon UK Store.

The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance

The periodic table is one of the most potent icons in science. It lies at the core of chemistry and embodies the most fundamental principles of the field. The one definitive text on the development of the periodic table by van Spronsen (1969), has been out of print for a considerable time. The present book provides a successor to van Spronsen, but goes further in giving an evaluation of the extent to which modern physics has, or has not, explained the periodic system. The book is written in a lively style to appeal to experts and interested lay-persons alike.

The Periodic Table begins with an overview of the importance of the periodic table and of the elements and it examines the manner in which the term 'element' has been interpreted by chemists and philosophers. The book then turns to a systematic account of the early developments that led to the classification of the elements including the work of Lavoisier, Boyle and Dalton and Cannizzaro. The precursors to the periodic system, like Döbereiner and Gmelin, are discussed. In
chapter 3 the discovery of the periodic system by six independent scientists is examined in detail.

Two chapters are devoted to the discoveries of Mendeleev, the leading discoverer, including his predictions of new elements and his accommodation of already existing elements. Chapters 6 and 7 consider the impact of physics including the discoveries of radioactivity and isotopy and successive theories of the electron including Bohr's quantum theoretical approach. Chapter 8 discusses the response to the new physical theories by chemists such as Lewis and Bury who were able to draw on detailed chemical knowledge to correct some of the early electronic configurations published by Bohr and others.

Chapter 9 provides a critical analysis of the extent to which modern quantum mechanics is, or is not, able to explain the periodic system from first principles. Finally, chapter 10 considers the way that the elements evolved following the Big Bang and in the interior of stars. The book closes with an examination of further chemical aspects including lesser known trends within the periodic system such as the knight's move relationship and secondary periodicity, as well at attempts to explain such trends.

The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time until 2007.

The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday's groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking.

The Society's online collection, which until now only extended back to 1997, contains every paper published in the Royal Society journals from the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions in 1665, to the most recent addition, Interface.

You can register for free. So now, for a time at least, you can read free of charge some extraordinary historical documents. Here are a few examples:

• On the Constitution of the Atmosphere by John Dalton
• On the Action of Radium Emanations on Diamond by William Crookes

The Mendeleev Periodic Table

This table shows the form of Mendeleev's Periodic Table of the chemical elements as published in 1872. The heading "Reihen" means "Row" and the heading "Gruppe" means "Group". The symbols R²O and RH⁴, etc., are written in the style of the time which uses superscripts to denote the number of atoms in molecules rather than the current style which uses subscripts. The gaps marked with hyphens ("-") represent chemical elements deduced by Mendeleev as existing but unknown in 1872. He was able to predict with considerable success the properties of some of the missing chemical elements such as germanium.

This is the start of the WebElements periodic table documentation

There are countless sites carrying different chemical structures displayable in glorious and rotating 3D and a lot of extra information can be held within a virtual molecule allowing clickable atoms and bonds to spawn spectra and other wonders. But, the kind of molecular models kits that fascinated me as a students chemist still have a valuable place in chemical education and research, argues science writer David Bradley It is no coincidence that even Nobel chemists go "back to basics" to help they and their students get a real feel for chemistry.