The useful tools of lab life, a link between kindergarten and crystallography and nanoparticles turn 'tec'.

“If you had to list 5 items that you would buy for yourself in the lab, what would they be?” Chemjobber (http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/) posed this question about the things “worth buying for your personal happiness” on The Chemistry Blog (http://go.nature.com/7GO1Wd). His own lab must-haves included a multitool, a permanent marker and “a nice pen — writing in your notebook should be a pleasure”. The commenters on the post suggested additions ranging from pipette bulbs and tweezers to music and nice colleagues! Regular contributor Noel made the important point that it can be difficult “to find the right safety goggles for Asian people”. She continued “We have slightly shallower facial features, making it very hard to wear anything that doesn't have the nosepiece.”

Jyllian Kemsley marked her daughter starting kindergarten with a post at C&ENtral Science (http://go.nature.com/kaAZQs) linking the origins of kindergarten to crystallography. The man credited with inventing kindergarten is Friedrich Fröbel, who “spent two years cataloguing crystals for Christian Samuel Weiss, learning an early crystal classification system based on the axial intercepts of developed facets”. These are essentially the reciprocals of the Miller indices we use today, and Weiss is credited (at least in Wikipedia) as one of the founders of modern crystallography. Kemsley lists the toys that Fröbel directed children to play with, which sound almost guaranteed to drive children towards patterns, symmetry and all things crystallographic.

And finally ... potential lead thieves, beware nanotechnology! Matt Wilkinson on the Chemistry World blog (http://go.nature.com/udWbWo) reported that Kent Police in the UK secured the conviction of “three men who pleaded guilty to stealing lead from the roof of a church”. Little did these felons know that the roof had been painted with a nanoparticle-based paint that fluoresced under UV light, identifying the origin of the purloined metal.

The definitive versions of these Research Highlights first appeared on the Nature Chemistry website, along with other articles that will not appear in print. If citing these articles, please refer to the web version.