ACS Podcasting Science for Members and Public

ACS members now have the opportunity to share exciting, cutting-edge scientific discoveries with their children, local science teachers, museums, libraries, and others through a new podcast launched this summer by the ACS Office of Communications. The science podcast, unveiled in July, reports on the latest studies published in the ACS journals to a broad public audience at no charge.

The podcast, Science Elements, is available via www.acs.org and on iTunes. It describes research reported in ACS’s prestigious suite of 36 peer-reviewed scientific journals and Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’s weekly news magazine. Those journals, published by the world’s premier scientific society, contain about 30,000 scientific reports from scientists around the world every year. The reports include discoveries in medicine, health, nutrition, energy, the environment, and other fields that span the horizons of science, from astronomy to zoology.

Those discoveries improve people’s 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, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. 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 ACS Central New Mexico Section.

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 they’re posted to the Internet. New installments of Science Elements will be posted weekly and will be available at no charge.

For more information, contact the Office of Communications.

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