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A while back we invited viewer questions for The Periodic Table of Videos.

Well I've finally recorded all the chemists giving their answers and arranged them by category (see the editing timeline below from my computer screen).

It's a whopping two hours and forty minutes of footage!

Obviously I won't be uploading that all at once but will break them up into individual questions, etc.

The topics have ranged from catalysts to Professor Poliakoff's hairstyle.

If the videos prove popular, I'm sure we'll take more questions.

We have done similar question sessions on the sister site Sixty Symbols and they have been incredibly successful.

Click here to see some of the questions we answered about physics and astronomy.

Here's one we did about the Large Hadron Collider:

Here's a glimpse of some new cards we've made for The Periodic Table of Videos.

There are five designs and they all have the same simple design on the reverse.

The cards will help promote the project by reminding people of our URL - www.periodicvideos.com

The design featuring Pete and Neil is a special "limited edition" card, with fewer of them printed!

Members of our team will use the cards to give away on their travels or at public events.

They're also being distributed at our display within the University of Nottingham's Technology Demonstrator.

Our thanks to George Rice for helping with the cards.

A few members of the Periodic Table of Videos team picked up prizes lately.

The University of Nottingham's Vice-Chancellor's Achievement Award was awarded to three of our chemists - Pete Licence, Sam Tang and Martyn Poliakoff.

It was presented for their work on the PToV project.

The photo below shows Sam and Pete picking up their awards from the VC himself, Profesor David Greenaway. Professor Poliakoff was unable to attend.

Meanwhile, Professor Poliakoff's trophy cabinet must be overflowing... he has also picked up a prestigious award from the Royal Society.

The Leverhulme medal is awarded every three years for significant contributions to pure or applied chemistry or engineering, including chemical engineering.

Professor Poliakoff was recognised for work on "Green Chemistry and supercritical fluids by the application of chemistry to advance chemical engineering processes".

He was given a fancy gold medal and a £2000 gift.

Last week we posted a video about The Professor's own research in the field of automatic chemistry (see video below).

Since then a number of people have been frustrated trying to read the article in "Angewandte Chemie" because it is available only by subscription.

Well, we're pleased to say the publishers have agreed to make the paper free until May 31, 2011.

Looks like they want to make sure all the YouTubers out there are fully informed!

Here's the link to download the paper (but be warned it is quite technical):

Self-Optimizing Continuous Reactions in Supercritical Carbon Dioxide

And here's the video:

At a recent event I was asked which science video have I most enjoyed making.

It was a very tough question.

But on the spur of the moment I chose our video about Ytterby, in Sweden.

It was one of the very early videos from The Periodic Table of Videos - our first chemistry "road trip".

I traveled with chemist Pete Licence to the small, disused quarry where FOUR of the elements on the periodic table were first discovered.

They were Erbium, Terbium, Yttrium and Ytterbium - all named after Ytterby!

The video was uploaded quite a while ago and I noted that it had quite poor picture quality by more recent standards.

So today I went into the archives and re-uploaded the video at higher resolution. Here it is:



Pictures from the trip can be found on our Flickr site at this link.

One of the video projects I work on is called Bibledex.

It's a series of videos about every book in the Bible and other Bible-type stuff.

Some of it was filmed in Israel.

I think some people find my passion for the project surprising because I spend so much time focused on science.

Of course I'm aware that science and religion are often at odds.

But Bibledex is not supposed to be religious - it's just a bunch of academic experts talking about a famous and important book.

Like my channels about chemistry and physics, I'm just trying to find out interesting stuff and share it with like-minded, curious people.

This comment, recently posted on the Bibledex YouTube channel, summed up the project in a more eloquent way than I ever have... So I thought I'd share it:

"This is not a channel related to religion per se, but rather the Bible, the book which has influenced more people in history than any other. 2000 years of sculpture, painting, literature, poetry, philosophy, ethics, law and yes, science, too, were influenced by this book alone, and to underestimate this book's influence or ignore it is to purposefully render yourself blind to the context of much of Western History and Civilization. Great channel."

Many thanks to "dogbishop" for posting this.

And I should point out that many (athiest) scientists who I work with have cast an eye over Bibledex and really enjoy it.

We may have covered every book in the Bible, but Bibledex will be returning in a few weeks with a new series of videos. More soon.

In the meantime, here's our video on the book of Revelation - always a favourite.

The latest Sixty Symbols video deals with the smallest unit of time - the so-called Planck time.

It is calculated by dividing the unimaginably small Planck length by the unimaginably large speed of light.

The video was made in response to a viewer question.

For the full collection of answers to viewer questions you can click on this link.



And here's our earlier video about the Planck length.