image: An American Chemical Society Podcast view more
Credit: American Chemical Society
WASHINGTON -- The American Chemical Society (ACS) Office of Communications has launched a podcast that will make cutting-edge scientific discoveries from ACS journals available to a broad public audience at no charge.
The podcast, Science Elements , (http://chemistry.org/science_elements.html) describes research reported in ACS’s prestigious suite of 35 peer-reviewed scientific journals and Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’s weekly news magazine. Those journals, published by the world’s largest scientific society, contain about 30,000 scientific reports from scientists around the world each year. The reports include discoveries in medicine, health, nutrition, energy, the environment and other fields that span science’s horizons from astronomy to zoology.
Those discoveries improve peoples’ lives, and Science Elements will make that information more widely available. The podcast draws on an Office of Communications product, PressPac, which initially was developed to assist science journalists in researching and reporting news.
The podcaster for Science Elements is Steve Showalter, Ph.D., a chemist at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Showalter’s work at Sandia focuses on the design and development of new batteries. “As an active member of the ACS since 1987, I view these podcasts as part of a broader commitment to improving public understanding of chemistry,” Showalter said. He also works toward that goal as a member of the ACS Committee on Public Relations and Communications and as a councilor for the Central NM Section, ACS.
Podcasting is an increasingly popular way of accessing news, information, and entertainment content from the Internet. The term was derived from Apple’s “iPod,” a portable digital audio and video player, and “broadcasting.” Podcasts allow users to subscribe to a “feed” and receive new files automatically whenever posted to the Internet. New installments of Science Elements will be posted weekly and available without charge.
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization, chartered by the U.S. Congress, with a multidisciplinary membership of more than 160,000 chemists and chemical engineers. It publishes numerous scientific journals and databases, convenes major research conferences and provides educational, science policy and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.