Madeleine Jacobs, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the American Chemical Society.
Credit: Peter Cutts

Madeline Jacobs has held steadfast to the idea of improving lives through the transforming power of chemistry during her career. Now, after seeing all she set out accomplish during her time as the American Chemical Society’s director and chief executive officer come to fruition, Jacobs is ready to move on to something new.

Jacobs started her career with the American Chemical Society (ACS) as a reporter for Chemical & Engineering News in 1969. Here, she rose in the ranks – becoming the magazine’s editor-in-chief in 1995.

Her work at Chemical & Engineering News prepared her for the role that she would take on in 2003 as ACS’s executive director.

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A recently conducted experiment may give us a better understanding of how the Earth possibly began.

Scientists took to the lab with a powerful 500-foot laser to re-create what might have been the original spark of life on Earth.

This from Associated Press:

The researchers zapped clay and a chemical soup with the laser to simulate the energy of a speeding asteroid smashing into the planet. They ended up creating what can be considered crucial pieces of the building blocks of life.

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After 30 years of research at Argonne National Laboratory, ECS’s Zoltan Nagy edits and updates his Electrochemistry Knowledge Base and serves as the ECS Historian.

What is electrochemistry? Why should society as a whole care?

Long time ECS member, Zoltan Nagy, is partnering with The Electrochemical Society in an attempt to answer these questions with the relaunch of his Electrochemistry Knowledge Base.

Since the late 90s, Nagy has been compiling this huge network of electrochemical knowledge in order to showcase why electrochemistry is so vital to the growth and nourishment of society.

“It may sound selfish, but I think electrochemistry is very important for society and people know very little about it,” says Nagy.

He began compiling the site during the infancy of the internet – around the second half of the 90s.

“I decided to put together a website for the education of the public,” Nagy says. “The articles are written in every simple language so that people can understand and see what electrochemistry does for society.”

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The image to your right may look like a fine art print of an ocean scene at night, but it’s actually just a close-up of some dried Glenlivet 162, or for those of you who aren’t avid alcohol connoisseurs – it’s simply a photo of whiskey.

Maybe “simple” is not the best word to describe the chemical process that takes place, but the discovery that whiskey can make these beautiful images had a humble beginning.

Professional artist and photographer Ernie Button started creating photos of the patterns formed after letting a drop or two of whiskey dry at the bottom of a glass, which resulted in these clear and rhythmic images.

Though he loved the aesthetic value, Button wanted to understand why the images looked the way they looked.

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Today, families, businesses, charities and communities around the world are joining together to celebrate generosity and to give support through #GivingTuesday.

Join ECS and organizations around the world in celebrating #GivingTuesday
by making a donation today.

Support young scientists
Your generosity helps ECS support students and young scientists through:

• Fellowships to encourage innovative research
• Travel grants to enable students to participate in scientific meetings
• Awards to recognize excellence

With your help, ECS will remain committed to fostering the growth and development of electrochemistry and solid state science among the next generation of researchers, scientists and engineers.

Support the science of sustainability
From inventing renewable energy technologies to disposing of toxic wastes and keeping our water clean, the scientists that support ECS hold the keys to solving global challenges in energy, waste and water. Your Giving Tuesday gift will help ECS continue a legacy of scientific recognition, innovation and education.

Please be part of a new global tradition of generosity.
DONATE NOW!

Your donations make it possible for ECS to support students and scientists in the field of electrochemical and solid state science and technology. Thank you for your generosity!

ECS Executive Director, Roque Calvo marks 34 years of service

This week at ECS, we’re celebrating Executive Director Roque J. Calvo’s 34th anniversary with the Society. Through hard-work and a clear vision, Calvo has helped transform the Society into what it is today.

Here’s a brief look at Calvo’s roots with ECS and his 34-year journey with the Society.

Roque J. Calvo joined the Society staff in 1980 as the Accounting Supervisor, managing the financial operations for the headquarters. After two years, he was promoted to Assistant Executive Secretary. In 1991, ECS’s Bud Branneky retired and was succeeded by Calvo as the Executive Secretary – being only the fourth to claim this title in the Society’s 98-year history. The title was changed to Executive Director in 1994 – the title that Calvo holds to this day.

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Here at The Electrochemical Society, we give a crap about sanitation. With our recent partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which awarded $210,000 in seed funding to innovative research projects addressing critical gaps in water and sanitation – we’ve spent a great deal of time these past few months talking about poop.  We plan to keep that trend alive, which brings us to World Toilet Day.

Two and a half billion people – 36 percent of the world’s population – don’t have access to a toilet, according to UNICEF. Globally, more people have mobile phones than toilets. Most people in developed countries think of access to adequate sanitation as a right rather than a privilege.

For this reason, ECS hosted the Electrochemical Energy and Water Summit, where some of the brightest minds in electrochemical and solid state science came together to brainstorm innovative ways to address the global sanitation crisis. We’re not just flushing and forgetting, we’re attempting to make adequate sanitation a basic human right.

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Electrochemical Synthesis of Inorganic Compounds: A Bibliography

Zoltan Nagy, a visiting scholar with the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, asked me to post this kind offer:

I have written a bibliography book about Electrochemical Preparation of Inorganic Compounds (Plenum Press, 1985) with thousands of references.

I have continued to collect the references till the beginning of this year, many-many more thousands. But I realized that I will not be able to use them for anything worthwhile.

I am ready to donate the material to anybody who could make valuable use of it. I still have some of the manuscript of the book on disks.  The later ones are in a varied formats. Some on 3X5 cards, some pages copied from Chemical Abstracts with the appropriate abstract circled. And references with abstracts on CDs since 2005.

I would be ready to donate and ship to somebody interested.

I will keep them till the end of the year, if there is no interest, I’ll just get rid of them.

You can contact Zoltan at nagyz@email.unc.edu.

Here at the ECS Headquarters, we’re celebrating Halloween with a pumpkin decorating contest! Take a look at some of the staff’s creations while we send some interesting Halloween facts your way.

And don’t forget to take a look at the list we’ve compiled of Halloween-themed scientific experiments that are sure to make your holiday just a little bit more eerie.

Where It All Began
Halloween can be traced back about 2,000 years to a Celtic festival called Samhain. In Gaelic, “Samhain” translates to “summer’s end.” Though the exact nature of this festival is not quite understood, it is thought to have been a time of communing with the dead. Most experts believe that Samhain and All Saints’ Day – due to their close proximity on the calendar – influenced each other and combined into the modern day Halloween.

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All Hallows’ Eve. Dia de los Muertos. All Saints’ Eve. Day of the Dead. Halloween.

The name and celebrations may change throughout different parts of the world, but the mystery and thrill remain consistent. Here at ECS, we’re drumming up some ways to apply science to this holiday to make it even more eerie.

For kids or just kids at heart, here are some Halloween-themed experiments that are sure to get you in gear for this chilling time of year.

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