Last year the New York Times published an intriguing account of a new phenomenon in science education.

In several cities around the country, science presentations are offered to the public, usually by university types. Nothing new so far, but the modern wrinkle is that the occasions are aimed at young professionals and are accompanied by—horrors!—food, drink, and music.

Serious subjects are the order of the day (e.g., string theory, immunology, and the ever popular frog-mating calls), but the gatherings have beguilingly unserious names like Secret Science Club, Café Sci, and Science on Tap. Attendance is high, everyone is convivial, and presumably science literacy is rising.

And now there is even www.sciencecafes.org, a Web site complete with pointers to science cafés in your neighborhood.

So, all friends of CHF, is this a good idea? Should we consider spawning such an event at 315 Chestnut, or elsewhere?

If we did, and if it was successful in bringing people to chemical subjects whom we would never reach otherwise, would it reduce our gravitas in the technical, policy, and historical communities we now serve well?

Glad to hear any and all thoughts.

What is the first thing every kid who gets a chemistry set does?

Tries to make an explosion, of course.

Or at least that’s what kids used to do when they could still get chemistry sets with respectable chemicals and thick handbooks of experiments. These days, deferring to worries about liability, chemistry sets are tamer and more controlled. One only hopes they are just as effective at kindling scientific curiosity as in the “good old days.”

Modern day grown-up chemists also like explosions. Take David Chavez and his group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, for example.

These chemists build on the long tradition of synthesizing nitrate esters for explosives. Think nitroglycerine and the more contemporary PTEN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate). The former is a liquid and therefore more safely used by preparing solid dynamite. The latter is a solid, but is only worked into commercial preparations as an unwieldy material.

But suppose one had a low melting-point solid that had the workability advantages of a pourable liquid and the transport and stability advantages of a solid?

That’s what Chavez’s group showed in a new paper in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (47 (2008): 8307–8309). The target compound melts around 85 degrees so can be conveniently used in melt-casting applications. It also has impressively high explosive properties and the paper carries proper warnings to anyone attempting the synthesis.

The starting materials probably won’t be available in chemistry sets.

The dictionary defines heritage as something that is passed down from preceding generations. Works for me.

But why should we care about heritage?

This seems a pertinent question for someone at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. I usually answer it by extolling the importance of chronicling human achievement, of preserving the record of discovery, of showcasing the creative consequence of the scientific impulse.

Now I have a new reason.

In the 20 October issue of Chemical and Engineering News I noticed a news article called “Origin-of-Life Chemistry Revisited.” This is a reference to the canonical Miller-Urey experiments showing that biologic molecules like amino acids could be produced from simple compounds like methane, ammonia, and water. The experimental setup mimics the conditions existing on primitive earth and thus lays the groundwork for understanding the emergence of living creatures.

According to C&EN, preservation of Stanley Miller’s original samples from half a century ago has allowed the experiments to be reanalyzed. And with modern instrumentation and techniques, a much richer and more diverse set of biological molecules were produced than originally thought.

We haven’t had to rethink our understanding of the origins of life, at least not yet. But thankfully, someone who cared about preserving the heritage of an influential scientist showed exactly why it’s so important to do so.

There are only three kinds of people in the world. Those who are good at math and those who aren’t.

If you don’t get the joke you’re probably in the latter category. And probably not a chemist.

But on a more scholarly note, researchers at Johns Hopkins University delineate mathematical skills in two altogether different categories. Writing in Nature, Halberda et al. say mathematical competence originates in two different ways: from an inherent sense of numbers and from learned concepts (2 Oct 2008: 665–668).

The former is shared by all human beings (and even some nonhuman species) and is typified by the innate ability to estimate how many objects are in a field. An example of the latter is the learning of calculus, which happens only with formal instruction.

The new research shows that early indications of prowess in the innate numeric capability are a good predictor of high achievement in the learned types of mathematical ability. Missing from the analysis, at least so far, is whether math education enhances the built-in number sense all humans are born with. If you place your bets with education, you will predict a positive correlation, but only more research will tell.

Surely, though, only those educated in the digital age will know that there are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who know binary and those who don’t.