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SCIENCE students in London should find it easier than most to understand the periodic table, thanks to their chemistry teacher.

Alice Knox, at South Hampstead High School, has spent the last seven years hand stitching a nine-foot-wide tapestry of the table of the 118 elements, all carefully colour-coded according to their different properties. She has taken special care with the use of colours and fonts to ensure maximum readability, for people with different forms of colour blindness or with dyslexia. Alice is modest about her achievement, explaining that her software engineer husband wrote a computer program to help her with the layout, and her mother sewed about a third of the element squares. She is already thinking about her next stitching project which is likely to be just as ambitious, if not more so – current ideas are a model of particle physics, star classifications, and even the tree of life, although she admits that could go on for ever… Photo by Rehan Jamil