Periodic Tabloid

History museums are beginning to experiment with smells in exhibitions, but they must tread carefully not to simply incorporate smells without thinking about context.

Holding up in the heat? Across the country, people are praising their air conditioning units. But decades ago these appliances came with dangerous and environmentally-devastating risks.

Last month, students from a science journalism class at the University of Pennsylvania visited CHF to review our museum. It was their final assignment and an informal contest of sorts: CHF staff chose their favorite review for publication on Periodic Tabloid. The winning piece, Ben Guarino’s “Not to Be Tabled,” appears after the jump.

Each month CHF staff members get together to discuss a chemistry-related title. But you don't have to be in the building to join in. August's pick after the jump.

Chemists’ notebooks are the movie stars of CHF’s archival collections. Not only do they open up a window into the thought processes of their owners, but they are frequently embellished with sketches of those thoughts.

Ben Franklin knew what he was talking about when he advised, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Though Franklin was generalizing about the superiority of preventing problems rather than trying to fix them after the fact, his 18^th-century idiom applies quite aptly to modern medicine.

Jell-O is having a mini-moment. Its cheerful, jaunty colors can be found in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Martha Stewart Weddings, and even a spread in Vogue. If this is a fad, it wouldn't be the first; molded gelatin has a surprisingly long history.

One second after the Big Bang, our universe consisted only of protons, neutrons, electrons, and other elementary particles. From the first three minutes to the first 20 minutes of our universe, the hydrogen nuclei combined to make helium and even a little lithium. The story of the heavier elements, however, is a little more explosive.

One luxury of an oral history is the space it permits for exploring lesser-known, but no less important, parts of a subject’s life. Henry Earl Lumpkin, for example, who was interviewed in 1992 for the American Society for Mass Spectrometry project, had a long and distinguished career in the field. But during World War II, he also served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, a fore-runner of the U.S. Air Force.

Nothing much to report this week, mainly because I’m on vacation. In case you are curious, the location is Lake Sebago, Maine where my wife and I have been going for over 30 years to escape the pressures and realities of contemporary life.