Chemical Heritage Foundation produces Distillations, a weekly podcast

Chemistry International, May-June, 2008

In December 2007, the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, launched a new weekly podcast. Distillations: Extracts from the Past, Present, and Future of Chemistry offers entertaining reports on subjects ranging from alchemy to the contents of your kitchen cupboard to the chemistry of space exploration. It makes the wonders of chemistry available to listeners around the world.

Distillations airs every Friday and features host Robert D. Hicks, director of the Roy Eddleman Institute for Interpretation and Education at CHF, and guests. Recorded in Philadelphia and produced in San Francisco, Distillations has a radio-quality sound that you can listen to wherever your iPod takes you.

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In the premier episode of Distillations, "Communicating Chemistry," listeners can hear Paul Smith, a Michael Faraday reenactor from Purdue University, explain how public chemistry lectures enchanted Londoners in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this episode's installation of "The Element of the Week," a recurring segment, you'll hear how phlogiston was discovered and subsequently discarded in favor of the element we now call oxygen.

Episode 4, titled "Measurement," includes a brief interview with Norman Holden, Brookhaven National Laboratories, on changing atomic weights and the valuable work done under the IUPAC Commission on Isotopic Abundance and Atomic Weights (II.1). On a different issue related to measurements, a brief account of the debates over how to fix the standard kilogram is also included in that podcast. <http://distillations. chemheritage.org/?p=55>.

Each show lasts 6 to 10 minutes. Distillations is available free of charge through the iTunes store and at its website <http://distillations.chemheritage.org>.

Show topics are varied and have included the following: Wonder Drug, Color, Electronic, and Cleaning Up. Distillations is a presentation of CHF and is made possible by the generous support of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

http://distillations.chemheritage.org