School chilli project awarded Royal Society grant

Students at The Cheltenham Ladies' College in Gloucestershire, UK, will get a taste for chemistry with an innovative new project. The school been awarded a Partnership Grant by the Royal Society to develop an actvity entitled 'Red hot science - chillies, capsaicin and chocolate'. 

The project will see 11-19 year old students growing their own chilli peppers and then using chemical sensors recently developed at Oxford University to measure their heat. The activity aims to give an introduction to botany, statistics and electro- and organic chemistry, and will also highlight the importance of chemical sensing in the modern world.