To celebrate our 350th anniversary in 2010, Royal Society Publishing will be launching several commemorative initiatives, details at http://royalsocietypublishing.org/seefurther. Today Trailblazing takes most of the headlines on launch day and it has already received international media interest. Trailblazing is a user-friendly, ‘explore-at-your-own-pace’, virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010. It can be found at http://royalsociety.org/trailblazing. Each article has a short commentary and is presented in the form of a timeline alongside a series of major world historical events to illustrate the content in which each discovery was made.