This page contains the material submitted to the local paper - The Davis Enterprise - for Explorit Science Center's news column published in that paper on Fridays.

I hope you haven’t tried to pass as anyone’s secret admirer this summer. If you’ve written any emotional, yet anonymous notes lately, your admiree may have taken them over to Explorit Science Center’s latest exhibition, “Solving Mysteries with Science,” and run some paper chromatography tests on the ink to determine if the note was written using your favorite pen. (Of course, he/she would have first had to borrow or sneak off with your favorite pen for an ink sample to compare to the note. But isn’t this cleverness, this rationality spiced with deviousness one of the reasons you’re nuts about him/her?)

Chromatography, from the Greek for "color writing," is a method used in analytical chemistry to separate and identify components of mixtures. The paper chromatography exhibit at Explorit allows visitors to make chromatograms of three different types of black ink. The crime that Explorit staff need help solving involves a pottery class, a potty run, and a perpetrator who writes backwards.

Exhibit staff have made a sample chromatogram of the ink from the perpetrator’s note. By placing one dot of ink from each of the suspects’ pens on a piece of chromatography paper and holding the tip of the paper in water, visitors can watch as the absorption of the water through the paper separates the ink pigments into a distinct pattern.

Visitors’ chromatograms from the three suspects’ pens may not look exactly like the sample chromatogram, but one might resemble the sample more closely than the others. That’s the beauty of scientific discovery–you can’t predict exactly what will happen, but you hope your results will be useful in some way.

In 1903, a lab assistant at the University of Warsaw developed the first technique of chromatographic analysis as a method of separating plant pigments. For this handy feat, the lab assistant, known to history as botanist Mikhail Sememovich Tswett, became the father of chromatography.

Since then, many chromatographic techniques have been developed that provide for specific needs. Among others, they include thin-layer chromatography, high performance (or pressure) liquid chromatography, gel permeation chromatography, ion chromatography, and countercurrent chromatography.

Although English philosopher Francis Bacon maintained that “a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral,” it’s best to think twice before penning any anonymous notes this summer. Science helps uncover the secrets of both nature and human nature, and the chromatography exhibit, along with a number of other hands-on exhibits, will only be up through October 1 as part of Explorit’s “Solving Mysteries with Science” exhibition. In fact, tomorrow is the perfect time to check out the exhibition, since it’s a free admission day at Explorit.

So explore DNA analysis, try your hand at matching blood types, discover the intracacies of your own fingerprints and, of course, uncover the mystery of the pottery perpetrator all for free at Explorit.