Secondary School Feature Articles Is Every Transparent Liquid Water?, by Muhamad Hugerat and Sobhi Basheer. Making Assumptions Explicit: How the Law of Conservation of Matter Can Explain Empirical Formula Problems, by Stephan DeMeo. The Conductivity of Molten Materials, by Monica E. Thomas, Audrey A. Cleveland, Rubin Battino, David A. Dolson, and Michael R. Hall.

Looking Ahead: A New Year Is upon Us

The New Year arrives in the late summer for teachers. Not with parties, falling spheres, and fireworks, but with professional development sessions, faculty meetings, and administrative directives. For many of us who teach, it is August that marks the beginning of a new school year, and thus opening the August issue of JCE cannot help but bring thoughts of greeting a new set of faces and personalities. What will I do differently? Am I ready to implement the good ideas I had last October and March and May? How can I be more effective in reaching the most capable students? Or the less capable, who are equally important as individuals, not to mention as future voters and taxpayers? Only teachers can understand the feelings and anxieties, both the good and the not so good, that accompany the beginning of a new school year.

For science teachers, the increasing rate at which new discoveries and new applications appear presents an additional challenge. Many applications of chemistry familiar to today's students have come into widespread use within the lifetime of the newest teachers. The lead article in this issue presents a familiar, but quite recent, application of chemistry. LEDs: New Lamps for Old and a Paradigm for Ongoing Curriculum Modernization, pp 1033-1040, discusses the uses of LEDs in a variety of applications, including automobile brake lights, traffic signals, and those large video displays used in stadiums. Applications are followed by an explanation of the chemistry of LEDs and how LEDs are prepared. Periodic trends in atomic radii and electronegativity, for example, are key to the production of relatively new blue light-emitting LEDs. Recently I realized that the traffic signals where I live appear to consist of a cluster of many very bright but individual light sources. I supposed that LEDs were used but they seemed so much brighter than those used in applications with which I was familiar. This article provides the explanation, as well information about the large energy savings that result when LEDs are substituted for incandescent light bulbs. A large number of references, several of which are from JCE, are given at the end of the article.

A New Moderated Online Forum for High School Chemistry Teachers

No matter how many relevant articles are published, there will always be questions that beg for an immediate and specific answer. It could be a question about a new scientific discovery reported in the media, where to find a laboratory investigation to help teach a particular concept, or myriad other possibilities. Whatever it is, you want a specific answer right away! Soon JCE will be able to help you with your questions and afford you the opportunity to lend your expertise or experience to help others. A moderated online forum for high school teachers will be introduced in late August at the ACS National Meeting in Chicago. But you do not have to wait until then; you can preview the site and offer suggestions now. Don't miss this opportunity to participate in making the forum as useful as possible to you and your secondary school chemistry colleagues around the world. Information about accessing the Forum is given by Jon Holmes in Only@JCE Online, p 1136.