Pimp my periodic table

Surely the most successful image to communicate a scientific concept is the the periodic table—science's equivalent of the London underground map. Now the table has been turned into a spiral (via 3quarksdaily). Gone are the familiar rows and columns, replaced instead with a continuous sweeping curve resembling a spiral galaxy, an aesthetic allusion to our heavenly origins.

Creator of the chemical galaxy, Oxford ecologist Philip Stewart was inspired by Edgar Longman’s 1951 spiral form of the table: "I realized that the atoms that make up a galaxy can be arranged in just the same form as the galaxy itself."

In his conversation with Slate’s Jon Lackman, Stewart explains that the old table was ready for a makeover:

The old table arose and survived because we live in a world of boxes. We're used to them. But I think the human brain is actually more comfortable with curves. The old, square forms were very convenient for old-style industry. But until a few thousand years ago, humans lived happily in a world without rectangles.

All this talk of boxes reminded me of Roald Hoffman’s rebut of chemical reductionism in The Same and Not the Same:

The world out there is refractory to reduction, and if we insist that it must be reducible, all that we do is put ourselves into a box. The box is the limited class of problems that are susceptible to a reductionist understanding. It’s a small box.

Like Hoffman, Stewart is helping show the humanity of chemistry by encouraging us to step out of the box.

Every picture tells a story

Larry Gonick pioneered a blend of art and science to communicate abstract scientific concepts in cartoon form. As a science teacher trying to make Mendel's peas palatable for 15 year olds, I drew inspiration from the pages of Gonick’s 1981 collaboration with biochemist Mark Wheelis, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics.

Larry was a participant (alongside my favourite chemistry writers Peter Atkins and Roald Hoffman) in MIT’s Image and Meaning conference at which scientists and artists collaborated to explore the use of images to communicate scientific concepts.

Freelance science writer Phil Ball was there too and he ends his conference coverage for Nature.com with this Gonick gem, "Sometimes what one needs to understand a concept is a story."