Studio 3 provides many tools for designing pits, dumps and other types of surface excavations. This introduction will identify some of these tools and suggest an approach to pit design.

Studio 3 provides a new, industry standard interface that allows you to write scripts using JavaScript or VBScript, or any COM-aware scripting language. These scripts can be embedded into an HTML document, which can be loaded into the Studio 3 Customization window to execute commands.

This special issue of Geoderma is the result of the work of members of the “International Working-Group on Submicroscopy of Undisturbed Soil Materials (IWGSUSM)”. The papers are from the second workshop of IWGSUSM, organized in 1981 by J. Ducloux at the University of Poitiers, France; the symposium on “Submicroscopy of Undisturbed Soil Materials” organized in 1981 by M.L. Thompson in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. during the annual meeting of the Soil Science Society of America, and work done in 1982. The papers mainly concern in situ electron microscopic studies of materials in thin sections of soils and of unimpregnated soil constituents in peds. Ion microscopy is discussed in one paper.

Sulfur is the fifteenth most abundant element in the continental crust of the Earth (260 ppm), and the sixth most abundant element in seawater (885 ppm). Sulfur (atomic number 16) has the ground-state electronic structure [Ne]3/V, and is the first of the group VIB elements in the periodic table (S, Se, Te, Po). In minerals, sulfur can occur in the formal valence states S S°, S4+, and S6+, corresponding to the sulfide minerals, native sulfur, the sulfite minerals, and the sulfate minerals. In the sulfide minerals, S2~ functions as a simple anion (e.g. CuFeS2, chalcopyrite) and as a compound S2 anion (e.g. FeS2, pyrite). In the sulfosalts, S2~ functions as a component of a complex anion (e.g. ASS3 in tennantite, CU12AS4S13).