UNESCO has designated 2019 as the International Year of the Periodic Table (IYPT) to commemorate 150 years since the first periodic table was created by Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev. Many people who are celebrating this anniversary might want to make a pilgrimage up to the University of St Andrews, Scotland, home to what is thought to be the oldest classroom periodic table in the world.
This historic chart, which dates back to 1875, was found by accident during a storage room clear-out back in 2014. It has since been restored and is now being kept in climate-controlled conditions, while a full-scale replica is put on display in the School of Chemistry. The University has already planned several events to fuel the interest around the IYPT celebrations.
On the other side of the world in Maddison, Wisconsin, US scientists are trying to work out how hagfish secrete copious amounts of slime to kill approaching predators. When attacked, a hagfish explosively releases many times its body volume in slime, choking its assailant.
Unlike mucus, which eventually hardens, hagfish slime remains soft and fluid – and has also been found to have many other interesting properties. It seems to be composed of densely entangled microscopic threads that spontaneously unravel as part of the creature’s defense mechanism.
In a new piece of research Gaurav Chaudhary, Randy H. Ewoldt and Jean-Luc Thiffeault suggest that the turbulent flow caused by a predator’s attack aids in the hagfish’s swift slime deployment. Their work is a joint research between the University of Illinois and University of Wisconsin and can be found here.
S’cool LAB, a new hands-on physics teaching facility at CERN, has developed schematics for a particle trap that anyone can build using a standard 3D printer. The schematics are available for free, and include helpful instructions and tutorials.
This particular particle trap is meant for isolating and suspending macroscopic particles such as spores, rather than particle physics. But the principles it’s based on are similar to those used in larger devices, providing a great opportunity to explore this type of physics at home or in the classroom.
