Notables

David Wohlers, professor of chemistry, and Dana Delaware, professor emeritus of chemistry, traveled to West Lafayette, Ind., Aug. 17-20 to participate in a meeting of the ad hoc subcommittee on Braille notation for chemistry of the Braille Authority of North America (BANA). The subcommittee was tasked with three charges by BANA on which to make recommendations: (1) how to represent the Periodic Table in Braille; (2) whether to use the English letter indicator before elemental symbols; (3) to make any other recommendation to improve Braille notation for representing chemistry. The subcommittee unanimously agreed to recommend that the English letter indicator be dropped for chemical symbols no matter where they appeared—in prose, equations, graphs or tables. Minimum standards for the representation of the Periodic Table were established contingent upon Braille production capabilities. The third recommendation to BANA is that the current edition of the Braille chemistry code copyright 1997 be updated to include the recent IUPAC standards for chemical notation adopted by all modern print chemistry textbooks.