Periodic celebration
The United Nations has proclaimed 2019 as the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements being 150 years since Mendeleev produced the first version. An 1885 version, printed in Vienna by Verlag v Lenoir & Forster, has been found at the University of St Andrews. It was bought by mail order in 1888 for three German goldmarks, the equivalent of about €20/$22/£17 today.

PVD Products, Inc.
It’s All in the Delivery: The Evolution of Combinatorial Deposition 

k-Space Associates, Inc.
Template analysis now available for the kSA BandiT substrate temperature monitor 

Thermo Scientific
New Apps Note: Composition, coverage and band gap analysis of ALD-grown ultra thin films

A National Academies of Sciences report considers that it is still too early to be able to predict the time horizon for a scalable quantum computer. 

During 2018 we often searched about the World Cup, Agent immobilier, Daniel Küblböck and Hurricane Florence.

A 64-year-old letter by Albert Einstein, known as the “God letter” because of its ruminations on formal religion, sold for almost $2.9 million in Manhattan last month.

The cost of counting
Measurement is an integral part of science and the search for understanding the world. In business we often say you cannot manage what you cannot measure. An interesting essay on measuring things does not directly contradict these thoughts but reminds us to be objective in deciding what we measure. Remember that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Congratulations to Professor Peter Cumpson of receiving the Rivière Prize from UKSAF. Amongst Peter's contributions in the field of XPS have been the development of Angle Resolved XPS quantification and improved spectrometer calibration.

Social science?
Aimed at tackling scientific misconduct, the Chinese government has expanded its controversial social credit system to include infractions made by research scientists. According to a report in Nature News researchers in China who commit scientific misconduct could soon be prevented from getting a bank loan, running a company or applying for a public-service job. This may, in part, be a reaction to He Jiankui’s gene editing babies experiments.