More curling in Kent

On our second visit to England's only curling rink RSC Belgium has recorded a famous victory! Our return visit to the RSC Kent organised event at Fenton's curling rink near Tunbridge Wells was on Saturday 8 December and victory was secured with the final stone.

RSC Kent local section have been holding an annual festive curling event for a number of years and invited RSC Belgium to participate for the first time in 2017. The invite was repeated this year.

This year's RSC team consisted of section chairman Tim Reynolds (pictured 'in action' below), recent ex-section secretary Becki Scott (now a resident of Kent), Helen Lee (Mrs Chairman), Antony Lee Reynolds (Chairman's son) and two locally recruited 'ringers' (friends of the chairman) Sally Wellsteed and Richard Hucker (also pictured below).

Curling has been an Olympic Winter sport since 1988 and is one of the few events everyone can try. It is fair to say that curling is a game that is easy to play, but may take several lifetimes to master... however it was great fun and RSC Belgium participants aim to return again!

The game is suitable for young and old, and can be played as a social or competitive sport. As England's only dedicated ice curling rink, Fenton’s three lanes offer a unique opportunity for people to give curling a go or just meet up for some fun. And there was very little slipping over thanks to the special 'sticky' shoes supplied by the venue.

Warm welcome
The Kent section have been organising a curling event for a few years now and the main protagonist, Dave Alker, has seen the event grow and grow in recent years. For 2018 demand was such that he had booked three two-hour sessions. A fine lunch of Lasagna and salad followed by Lemon Drizzle cake was included and the rink has its own cash bar too.

Participants were a mixture of ‘regulars’ i.e. those who had embarrassed themselves on the rink in previous years, and newcomers. The participants ranged from 18 to 80 and included RSC members, guests and partners as well as ex-RSC staff members and, of course, our Belgian contingent. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Dave and the Kent section are already preparing for the 2019 event with the venue provisionally booked for Saturday 30 November - appropriately on St. Andrews Day. See you there?

Potteries of the Caribbean

Our last lecture of 2017 took place on Friday 24 November and was given by our departing section secretary Dr Becki Scott who described her recent scientific adventures in the Caribbean in ‘Potteries of the Caribbean’. The lecture took place in the social area behind Brel Theatre at the British School of Brussels.

The Caribbean has a rich and varied past, often represented by ceramic objects. Ceramic objects are usually prolific on archaeological sites and therefore form a focus for many interdisciplinary studies.

These remains can provide a wealth of information about past cultures, relating to style, manufacturing technology, and ultimately past trade and resource management. Stylistic and typological studies can be used to create relative chronologies for a site, while chemical and petrographic analyses are used to provenance the raw material(s) used in the manufacture of the object. Although fragments of ceramics are sometimes available for destructive analyses, many objects held in collections are not. Likewise, these precious objects cannot always be transported to laboratories for further study.

Provenance
Becki was involved with a couple of projects focusing on the provenancing of ceramic objects from the Lesser Antilles. Ceramic fragments from excavation contexts in the Caribbean had been sent to Europe for destructive chemical and petrographic analyses. However, larger, more complete objects in collections on the islands of Grenada and St. Vincent could neither be sub-sampled nor exported.

Becki developed a method of using a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (pXRF) to analyse these objects. In other words, she took the instrument to the objects, rather than the objects to the lab. The result of this work has meant that objects, which would otherwise not be analysed geochemically, could be used to contribute to studies determining the cultural interactions between the islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Find out more about Becki's Caribbean adventures and her work in other areas on her blog.

Bye-bye Becki
The event will also be a chance to say ‘au revoir’ to Becki (pictured below with her pXRF spectrometer) as she is now working at Greenwich University in the UK and is resigning as section secretary. However Becki did manage to make a final appearance for RSC Belgium as part of our curling team in December.

Dr Rebecca Beasant Scott – Becki - has been an active member of our section committee, which she joined in 2012, and has acted as section secretary for the past two years.

Born and brought up in Norfolk, Becki had an early interest in archaeology and took a BA in the subject at the University of Wales, Lampeter including a dissertation that focused on an area of south Norfolk that may have been in continuous occupation and use from the Iron Age to today. Joke?

She then took an MA in Cultural Landscape Management at Lampeter, followed by a MSc in Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology at Cranfield University awarded in 2008 for which she won the Inforce Prize for best overall academic performance.

This was followed by a PhD at Cranfield on the investigation and characterisation of colourless glass from forensic and archaeological contexts using multiple interdisciplinary analytical techniques.

A postdoctoral position at KU Leuven brought her to Belgium to research on the use of trace elements to provenance archaeological glass in 2010-2011. Followed by a second post-doc position in Leiden University in The Netherlands. Becki has now returned to the UK where she is employed as an Analytical Geochemist at the University of Greenwich on its Chatham campus.

Read about Becki's Caribbean Adventure

RSC Belgium’s section secretary Becki Scott is a post-doctoral researcher with the NWO Island Networks project at Leiden University and is currently on a month long archaeological holiday mission in the Caribbean! There she is using her trusty phaser pXRF machine (see right) on ceramics and sampling clay deposits. And what is more she is keeping a daily blog diary so we can keep up with her Caribbean adventure!

Becki has a BA in Archaeology and an MA in Cultural Landscape Management from the University of Wales, Lampeter, and an MSc in Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology. She was awarded her PhD in 2011 in Archaeological and Forensic Glass Analysis from Cranfield University and joined the RSC Belgium section when she moved to KU Leuven in Belgium as a as a post-doctoral researcher on the ERC funded ARCHGLASS project analysing the effects of recycling on Roman glass compositions.

During this time, she developed an interest and expertise in the use of portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF) for the non-destructive analysis of archaeo-materials: a skill that Becki has used in a variety of projects for museums, archaeological units, and heritage institutions.

Island Networks
While working for KU Leuven, Becki began collaborating with the HERA Carib Connections project, developing a method for analysing the composition of indigenous ceramic objects from the Lesser Antilles. Becki's work helped identify the provenance of ceramic objects in the field, whilst working in Grenada. Her current role on the NWO Island Networks project continues this work to cover other islands in the Lesser Antilles.

The focus of the NWO Island Networks programme is the inter-community social relationships and transformations of island networks in the Lesser Antilles across the historical divide. The period AD 1000-1800 represents an archaeologically understudied and turbulent era during which the islands’ inhabitants came under increasing influence from South America and the Greater Antilles and participated in the last phase of indigenous resistance to colonial powers.

Caribbean archaeological research has focused on patterns of regional and pan-regional mobility of peoples and the exchange of goods and ideas during the pre-colonial period (pre-1492). Recent investigations have for the first time provided insights into early colonial period indigenous archaeology in the Lesser Antilles through the discovery of 16-18th century Amerindian settlements and associated material culture repertoires.

These discoveries offer a unique opportunity to study continuity and change in inter-community social relationships, and transformations of island networks at the advent of European colonialism using a multi-disciplinary approach.

Other interests
As well as being the secretary of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Belgium Section, Becki is also a member of No Man's Land (NML) the society for Great War Archaeologists and she was a winner in the 'I'm a Scientist, get me out of here' online science communication competition and is in the process of developing an 'Archaeometry' card game.

You can read Becki’s blog here and she is also on Twitter! Alternatively you could catch up with Becki’s adventures at our AGM on Friday 10 February at Les Amis Dinent Restaurant in Wezembeek-Oppem.

Silver Jubilee AGM Report

Les Amis Dînent restaurant in Wezembeek-Oppem was once again the location for the section's Annual General Meeting (AGM) and Annual Dinner on 16 January 2015. The 2015 Committee was elected and reports on the activities of the section in 2014 and the state of the section's finances were received. Tim Reynolds was elected as the new section chairman and Becki Scott becomes the new section secretary. Outgoing chairman Bob Crichton received a vote of thanks for his excellent leadership over the past six years. And we discovered that 2015 is the section's silver jubilee year!

Following the announcement of apologies and noting of those section members who had asked the chairman to act as their proxy during the meeting, the minutes of the previous AGM held on 17 January 2014 were reviewed and approved.

Tim Reynolds then gave the 2014 secretary's report on section activities. "2014 had been another successful and busy year for the section," he said. "During year the section had organised seven public events, a Saturday social excursion and participated in a number of other activities fulfilling our charitable objectives to provide popular (chemical) science lectures for our members and the public and raise the profile of the chemical sciences  schools."

2014 Highlights

Among highlights of the year were the Café Chimique on Energyon 27 January, Dr Hal Sosabowski’s series of demonstration lectures for schools and the public at the beginning of April, our guided walk discovering a range of former famous residents of Brussels led by Sarah Strange, Nick Lane’slecture on the origins of life and our International Year of Crystallography event with Gordon Leonard of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The section had run another ‘mega’ Top of the Bench qualifier in November with 12 teams from six school. And the winning team was from a new entrant: the European School Brussels IV in Laeken. This year’s Chemical Challengecompetition also attracted increased participation with prizes given out at Nick Lane’s event in October.

Tim also noted that the first Norman Lloyd scholarship atCardiff University had been awarded in November to Ms Dale Lyons.

Financial Report

Rita Woodward presented the 2014 financial report and accounts. Rita estimated that the sections activities in 2014 has been supported by 450 adults and over 500 young people. At the beginning of the year the net assets of the society had been at an all-time high (€18600 but this included over €6300 in the Norman Lloyd fund). During 2014 the section made a net deficit of €4700 leaving us with total net assets of €7564 as of 31 December 2014. An amount much more in line with our historical level of assets.

Chairman’s Remarks

The Chairman thanked Rita and Tim for their reports and all members of the executive committee during 2014 for their hard work and support during this year and the previous five years of his chairmanship. He felt that the section now was more dynamic, had much greater reach and was doing more activities with younger audiences than ever before. He highlighted the contribution of Rita and Peter Woodward in providing the drinks and nibbles for many of the events during the year that added so much to the evening meetings.

A formal vote of thanks was made to Bob for his work and inspiration as Chairman over the past six years.

Elections

The elections for the new RSC Belgium Executive Committee saw some changes as well as continuity. Mr. Tim Reynolds was elected as Chairman, Mrs. Rita Woodward was re-elected as Treasurer, and Dr Becki Scott was elected as Secretary. Elected as members of the committees were Prof Bob Crichton, Prof Brian Sutcliffe, Dr David Terrell and Mr. John Swift. Dr Ian Carson is also an elected member of the committee in the middle of his two-year term. 

The full composition of the 2015 Executive committee can be found here. The first meeting of the new Executive will be on 19 February where co-opted members for 2015 will be confirmed.

The Treasurer expressed her gratitude to our auditor, Ralph Palim, and announced that he had agreed to be appointed as auditor for the section accounts for 2015.

David Terrell moved a vote of thanks to Tim Reynolds for his work as section secretary over the past five years.

Jubilee year!

During discussion under any other business it was realised that 2015 would be the section’s Silver Jubilee year. So we will need to think if some special events to celebrate!

Following the close of the meeting at 19:43, the 2015 Annual Dinner of the RSC Belgium section (see pictures above - courtesy of Ian Backhouse - and below - courtesy of Helen Lee) took place. The draft minutes of the 2015 AGM can be found here.

Go Becki! Go Bob!

A couple of RSC Belgium committee members are in awards mode: our Chairman Prof Bob Crichton has just won a prestigious award for one of his text books and Dr. Becki Scott is entering the 'X-Factor' of science - 'I'm a Scientist, Get me out of Here'.

Prof Crichton's award is for his tome entitled 'Biological Inorganic Chemistry - A New introduction to Molecular Structure and Function (Second Edition)' - see picture right' that has been chosen by the panel of judges as the recipient of the 2013 "Texty" Textbook Excellence Award awarded by the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA).

The association created the Textbook Excellence Award in 1992 to recognize current textbooks and learning materials. To be nominated, a work must carry a copyright date for the previous or current year. TAA designed the award, called the Texty, because text materials did not have awards of their own. Entries are not limited to books but may include learning materials in all mediums.

The award ceremony will take place in Reno, Nevada on 22 June during the Association's 26th annual conference. Unfortunately Bob cannot be there in person to pick up the accolade.

X-factor

Meanwhile committee member Becki Scott has registered for ‘I’m a Scientist, Get me out of Here!’ - a free online event where school students get to meet and interact with scientists. The concept is a free X Factor-style competition between scientists, where the students are the judges.

Students challenge the scientists in intense, fast-paced online live 'chats'. They then ask the scientists all the questions they want to, and vote for their favourite scientist. The winning scientist wins a prize of £500 to help them communicate their work with the public.

The 2013 event will be taking place from Monday 17 to Friday 28 June. Teachers and scientists, sign up now to take part!.

Take a look at the 60 second video on the I’m a Scientist site to get a feel for the competition.