This week celebrates the birth of Erno Rubik, born on 13^th July in 1944. Rubik is a Hungarian Mathematician, architect, educator and in 1974 the inventor of the Rubik’s Cube. I love games and I will confess to you all I am yet to complete the Rubiks Cube. Apparently, there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations, so I don’t feel too bad about my lack of success.

One of the unexpected outcomes of this last winter is we have really had to improve our home-based family game time. We now have Uno down to a T and Scrabble is a firm favourite but let me ask, have any of you played Frenetic?

Frenetic is a word play game using the elements of the periodic table. That’s right – your read correctly: elemental symbols used to make up words, against the clock. Not even all the elements too. Conclusion: it’s really HARD!

Now most employers in the Scientific Industries won’t expect you to know your Periodic Table enough to be able to create words from it, but there are live vacancies on the website requiring a working knowledge of chemistry. High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) are great chemistry skills in high demand in the lab. Used to analyse materials, to answer questions such as ‘is this white powder API which looks exactly the same as all these other white powders actually what we think it is?’ is just one example.

What science related games do you like playing?