The beautiful blue pigment pictured on this month's cover can be made according to the recipe that can just be made out as text underlying the pigment. The photographs illustrate chemistry done at the Art/Archeology interface by Mary Virginia Orna, who received the 1996 James Flack Norris Award for Excellence in Teaching of Chemistry. Her award address begins on page 373, and the recipe (in the original Latin and in English translation) is on page 374.

Medieval pigment synthesis is but one of the myriad applications of chemistry in our daily lives. Others reported in this issue include Doyle's description of olestra and some of the controversy surrounding its marketing and use (page 370), Knopp's demonstration showing how rayon can be obtained from clothes-dryer lint (page 401), a laboratory experiment on synthesis of a conducting polymer by Bunting, et al. (page 421), and another experiment involving extraction of myoglobin from hamburger, designed by Bylkas and Andersson (page 426).

Closely related to chemistry's many applications is the connection between chemists in academe and industry and their efforts to improve public understanding of our science. The need for improved public understanding of chemistry is documented by Nicoll (page 455) in a study of popular society's definition of a chemical and how it differs from a chemist's definition. Sabo, Sarquis, and Ennis (page 450) describe Partnership for the Advancement of Chemical Technology (PACT), a 300-member industrial/academic consortium, and its program for bringing industrial applications of technology to high school students. Matthews (page 452) describes Science ExpOlympics, an outreach program of competitive and noncompetitive events for high school students at Austin Peay State University. Waldow, Fryhle, and Bock (pages 441 and 442) describe a different kind of outreach aimed at chemistry students—a Web site that is a resource for undergraduate research and another that provides a collection of NMR data for students to analyze.

Those presenting public outreach programs are constantly on the lookout for instructive and exciting demonstrations and activities that will extend their repertoire and enhance their programs. Several are included this month. Vandaveer and Mosher have developed a series of colored-bottle experiments based on the well known blue-bottle demonstration. These are pictured here and described on page 402. Berenato and Maynard (page 415) have developed an inexpensive device in which audio pitch indicates conductivity. Roesky explains how technology can make small-scale demonstrations visible to an entire audience; he uses a gooseneck-mounted video camera and a video projector to show microscale demonstrations much larger than life size (page 399). Any or all of these would be useful in stimulating an audience's interest in chemistry.

As any editor will attest, writing about a subject is an excellent way to develop insight and understanding. This is certainly true of chemistry, and a variety of assignments have been devised to get students to write about our subject. Williams uses Chemical and Engineering News as a resource for student papers and describes on page 389 how such assignments are structured. McGowan and Sendall (page 391) use the World Wide Web as a resource for students and find that it helps get students into active learning modes. Comeford uses writing assignments in physical chemistry and reports on page 392 that student essays raise thoughtful questions and result in livelier classroom discussions. In a junior-level scientific writing course, Schmidt has students write about semester-long research projects based on household chemicals (page 393). Rossi (page 395) assigns students in an advanced organic course to write about the foundation, development, and application of a particular aspect of a famous chemist's research. Students reported that it was hard work, but was a valuable learning experience.

Student understanding can be facilitated and enhanced by apt analogies between situations they understand and chemical concepts they do not. Wynn develops an analogy between cash transfers to and from a bank and energy transfers to and from a reacting system on page 397. To help students understand the idea of electron distribution in atoms, Pendarvis (page 396) draws an analogy between the distribution of electrons in an atom and the distribution of students during summer vacation time. Sugata and Abe (page 406) have developed a concrete model for chromatographic separation that helps students understand the process, uses simple glass vessels, and requires no mathematical manipulations or calculations. Toong and Wang describe several analogies for conversion of one enantiomer into the other, including turning a glove inside out and a famous Chinese acrobatic act; pictures are on pages 403 and 404.