The journal Science is produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an organization that takes its role in promoting science education and outreach seriously. This year, the organization started a program called SPORE, for Science Prize for Online Resources. These prizes honor online materials that help provide high quality and informative science materials for educators and their students. The journal hosts a page to honor earlier SPORE winners; the ones we've looked at clearly deserve the praise they've received.

This week, the latest SPORE recipient is one I'm actually familiar with: the Periodic Table of Videos, a product of the University of Nottingham's Chemistry Department. The prize announcement provides some details on how the program came about, and how it has maintained its atmosphere of spontaneous fun and wonder even as the chemists tackle elements that they're largely unfamiliar with.

The project evolved from work by a video journalist who had had been filming in the chemistry department in an effort to capture scientists at work. Struck by the idea that a series on all the elements might be interesting, the cameraman and department members managed to plow through all 118 elements in only five weeks. It turns out that the team filmed everything unscripted and without a storyboard; Brady Haran, the cameraman, simply splices things together to make what he feels is a compelling video. As a result, you get a healthy dose of all the things that actual scientists experience: enthusiasm, confusion, and a number of failed experiments (or, in this case, demonstrations).

The article describes how Martyn Poliakoff, a faculty member with a delightfully mad-scientistesque appearance, greeted the request to talk about hassium by stating "I know nothing about hassium. Shall we make something up?" That response has been retained in the updated hassium video, although Poliakoff clearly knows much more on his second go. The same sort of spontaneity appears in the cesium video, embedded below. The team has retained clips from its first video, where a home-made "small metallic collider" failed to release the metal into water, which caused a lot of on- and off-camera laughter. As they prepare for try two, one of the chemists gets her first look at pure cesium, and bursts out, "it's pretty cool—it's really gold!" Later, the crew is surprised to find their metal has melted on a warm day, and have to improvise a liquid nitrogen chill in order to get their demo to work.

Obviously, the crew behind PToV consider it a success, or they wouldn't be redoing their videos, much less hitting the road to film at the sites where some elements were identified or produced (as with hassium above, or Yttrium). And, by most measures, they are doing well. The least-watched video has been viewed over 12,000 times, and the PToV YouTube channel has nearly 50,000 subscribers, with almost every country on the planet represented.

They've also gone beyond simply tackling the elements. There's now an entire section of the site devoted to molecules, which includes their most-watched video yet, one that shows what happens when a cheeseburger meets hydrochloric acid.

Overall, the site provides a great view of the Nottingham chemists: they're smart but not omniscient, love the chemistry that they get to do for a living, and have a good sense of humor when things go wrong. In this respect, the lack of scripting seems to work in their favor, since you can catch the moments of genuine ehtusiasm when they appear. As the article that describes the series says, "they are not 'selling' anything apart from a shared love of chemistry."

Science, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1196980 (About DOIs).

Listing image by PToV team image courtesy of L. Gilligan-Lee