Exploding cake marks first anniversary of the Periodic Table of Videos

PA 178/09 Take a university laboratory, a handful of chemicals, and a scientist from the School of Chemistry - mix them together and you have created a cake to celebrate the 1st anniversary of the hugely successful Periodic Table of Videos. An off-shoot of the award-winning Test-Tube project Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century — but their modern version features a short video about each one. With one hundred and seventy two videos, 174 now the two exploding birthday cake videos have been added, the site has become a massive YouTube success. With 14,000 subscribers worldwide it has had between six to seven million video views. To celebrate their achievements the team recruited the laboratory skills of Dr Sam Tang, the University's Public Awareness Scientist, to create the cake. But as a cake baked in the lab cannot be eaten it met a more chemically induced fate in a controlled explosion. To see more click on the following links: http://bit.ly/JJnmy http://bit.ly/rM7no Professor Poliakoff said: "Making the videos has been great fun.