A vanilla orchid with flower and vanilla beans graces this month's cover. To learn more about this extremely popular flavoring agent, turn to the paper by Hocking on page 1055. Did you know, for example, that vanillin (the chief constituent of natural vanilla flavor) can be obtained from spent sulfite liquor, a waste product of paper mills? Or that the structure of vanillin is related to the structures of zingerone (ginger flavor) or capsaicin (hot pepper flavor)? Even if you are already familiar with flavor chemistry, Hocking's paper collects a lot of useful, interesting applications of chemistry into one concentrated extract that is bound to add spice to your classes.

A Potpourri of Flavors, Foods, Stimulants, and Drugs Vanilla is not our only flavor this month. Kjonaas, Soller, and McCoy (page 1104) report an interesting experiment in which flavors from a variety of candies and chewing gums are analyzed using GC/MS, and Stein describes a biochemistry lab on sweetness of aspartame on page 1112. Iron's role as a nutrient and as a poison is documented by Senozan and Christiano beginning on page 1060. Doyle discusses the importance of fatty acid structure on page 1030, reporting that chain length, unsaturation, and cis or trans structures all make a difference. If you are interested in separating and identifying fatty acids in commercial products, see the papers by Rubinson and Neyer-Hilvert (page 1106) and by Snow, Dunn, and Patel (page 1108). Beginning on page 1133, Bravo-Diaz and Gonzalez-Romero report on simple, inexpensive experiments with common dairy foods that illustrate the importance of foams in food chemistry.

If you overindulge on the foods in this issue, you may want to make certain that your pain reliever contains what it should. Charles, Martin, and Msimanga show how to analyze simultaneously for aspirin, salicylamide, and caffeine on page 1114. Thompson, Veening, and Strein (page 1117) use capillary electrophoresis to analyze several common analgesics. Conradi, Vogt, and Rohde use the same technique to separate enantiomeric barbiturates, and apply micellar electrokinetc chromatography to determine caffeine in foods and pharmaceuticals (pages 1122 and 1126). Yang, Orton, and Pawliszyn (page 1130) also analyze for caffeine, but their technique is solid-phase microextraction combined with GC/MS.

Solid State Chemistry and Curriculum Reform This year's winner of the ACS George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education sponsored by the Union Carbide Corporation is Arthur B. Ellis. His award address begins on page 1033. It describes a broad range of new materials that will help you to include the excitement of the latest solid-state chemistry research in your classes. Related articles include Heinhorst and Cannon's report from Nature on lubricant properties of elastic, hollow nanoparticles of tungsten disulfide (page 1026) Smith's derivation of the basis for constructing melting-point diagrams for nonideal binary systems (page 1080), Nelson's classification of electrical character (page 1084), and Butera and Waldeck's discourse on temperature dependence of resistivity (page 1090).

Especially interesting is Rapp's report (page 1087) on how a high school teacher makes effective use of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) designed for educational use. Rapp shows atomic-scale images, teaches about etching of metals by acids, and generates enthusiasm among students. If you want your students to learn the fundamentals of solid-state structures, try Window on the Solid State from JCE Software (page 1143). Written by William C. Robinson, this four-part program introduces students to most of what they need to know about structures of metals and ionic solids.

Closely associated with the Pimentel Award address and the paper by Rapp on STM is the first in a series of JCE Classroom Activities: A Refrigerator Magnet Analog of Scanning-Probe Microscopy, which appears on pages 1032A and B. This is a hands-on activity that can be reproduced and handed directly to your students. From it they can learn the principles that are the basis of state-of-the-art technologies for obtaining images of atoms on surfaces. Each JCE Classroom activity has a teacher side with background information and a student side that presents the activity and asks questions to help students discover the concepts on which it is based. The activity can be torn out and filed so that you can find it easily at the appropriate time during the school year.

On page 1076 Bunce and Robinson provide the first article in the Chemical Education Research feature column. In addition to their paper there is a mission statement that explains the purpose of the column and the types of articles that you can expect to find there. Mission statements for all of the feature columns in the Secondary School Section are also in this issue (pages 1042 -1044). We strongly encourage submissions by high school and pre-high school teachers, and these mission statements indicate some of the types of articles you might want to submit. In addition, feature editors and high school editor Emory Howell are more than willing to help any author develop, refine, and perfect an idea into an excellent article. If you are thinking of writing for the Journal, please contact them or the editor with your ideas.