When I was a lad, we were taught that carbon had two allotropes, graphite and diamond.  Although they’re both covalently connected, in neither of these is there anything that one would regard as a ‘molecule’. 

You may recognize the famous Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, whose best known work is “Pictures at an Exhibition”.  But the pictures that follow are from a totally different exhibition, that of the Association for Science Education Annual Conference 2011, held at the University of Reading from 5^th to 8^th January.
 

When I were a lad (ay!) my father suggested that map projections was something I ought to interest myself in.  So I got hold of paper, ruler and pencil, drew a square grid, and then started filling in the outlines of the continents.  What emerged was something like this (maps like this are generated using this wonderful program from Brazil):



Now that wasn’t too good, was it?  Africa doesn’t look too bad, but Greenland’s horribly squashed, isn’t it?  So I borrowed some books from the library, and started to learn about all sorts of different projections.