This is from ECS President Paul A. Kohl.

One of the joys of being President of ECS is contacting ECS contributors about good news. I am especially excited about ECS journals and the direction they are taking. I believe they are the quite simply The Best Place to publish electrochemical and solid state papers – especially now they are also enabling Open Access (OA). In short, ECS journals (JES, JSS, EEL, SSL) are:

• well-established–we have been publishing since 1902
• high quality–our peer-review is excellent and we publish one of the most-cited journals
• fast–submission to first decision regularly takes less than a month; and once the paper is accepted it usually takes ten days or fewer for the Version of Record to be published online–faster than any other journal in our field
• open access–authors now have the choice of publishing as Open Access, which enables the widest possible distribution because there is no subscription or barrier for readers to access your paper
• FREE open access for many of our authors: publishing OA is free to ECS members, ECS meeting attendees, and authors coming from subscribing institutions

No other journal offers this combination of quality, speed, and full open access at no cost to the author.

By publishing your research in our highly respected journals–and choosing to make your papers Open Access–you’re helping us make OA widespread and sharing the outputs of your important research with scientists around the world. I did (see my latest article) and will be doing so in the future.

Yours,

Paul

Paul A. Kohl
ECS President

PS: Find out how to publish your manuscript.

Luckily someone is saving everything.

Zoltan Nagy calls himself a semi-retired electrochemist, but he’s doing anything but being retired. After 15 years in a variety of electrochemical industrial research, he spent 30 years at Argonne National Laboratory carrying out research on electrode kinetics and surface electrochemistry. Now he’s at the Chemistry Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He wrote to ask that we let people know the two rather popular and often visited websites:  ‘Electrochemistry  Dictionary and Encyclopedia ” and “Electrochemical Science and Technology Information Resource (ESTIR)” which were hosted by the Yeager Center at Case-Western Reserve University went off-line in January because their  computer died, and it could not be restarted there because of some new university regulations.

Work is on the way to relocate these websites to a new host, hopefully in the not too distant future.

You can have a look at what they used to be on what’s called the WayBackMachine (check out any old versions of websites BTW). Once you get there paste in electrochem.cwru.edu/encycl/ and click on January 1, 2014. Then try http://electrochem.cwru.edu/estir/ and select February 3, 2013.

It’s a gold mine of electrochemical information.

Registration rates include all-inclusive accommodations

Early-bird registration is now open for the 2014 ECS and SMEQ (Sociedad Mexicana de Electroquímica) Joint International Meeting to be held October 5-9, 2014.

This major international conference offers a unique blend of electrochemical and solid-state science and technology; and serves as a major forum for the discussion of interdisciplinary research from around the world through a variety of formats, such as oral presentations, poster sessions, exhibits, and tutorial sessions.

Find out more and register online now.

The beautiful, all-inclusive Moon Palace Resort Hotel is located on the best beach in Cancun and just minutes from the Cancun Airport.

Daily room rates include all of the following.

• Unlimited meals, snacks, and beverages (including all alcoholic beverages), in twelve onsite restaurants featuring varied cuisine, including Italian, Asian, Mexican, Brazilian, and Continental;
• Mini bar in room;
• All gratuities (restaurants, lounges, poolside, bellmen, and housekeeping) and hospitality tax;
• Water-sport facilities with non-motorized equipment such as sailboats, kayaks, and paddle boats at Moon Palace Marina;
• Complimentary tennis, bicycling, miniature golf, and use of the health club;
• Jacuzzi in every room; and
• Wireless Internet access from your laptop!

The hotel has four water purification plants onsite, so all water is completely safe to drink.

All meeting activities will take place in the Moon Palace Sunrise Conference Center and the Moon Palace Expo Center. The Early-Bird reservation is open.

Sign up now!

2014 ECS and SMEQ Joint International Meeting

Four Short Courses will be offered in Cancun on Sunday, October 5, 2014 at the start of the 2014 ECS and SMEQ Joint International Meeting .

ECS Short Courses are all day instruction designed to provide students or the seasoned professional a wide range of topics. Taught by industry experts, the small class size makes for an excellent opportunity for personalized instruction.

The registration fee for the Short Courses is $425 for ECS Members and $520 for Nonmembers. Students may register for a Short Course at a 50% discount—ECS Student Members: $212.50, and Nonmember Students: $260.

The registration fee for the course includes participation in the course, text materials, continental breakfast, luncheon, and refreshment breaks. The Short Course registration fee does not include or apply to the general Meeting Registration, and it is not applicable to any other activities of the meeting.

Here’s the line up:

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“Hydrogen will be an important fuel of the future and its safe storage will be key to its success.”

This from Powder Metallurgy Review:

GKN Powder Metallurgy and McPhy Energy SA have announced a technology partnership agreement to accelerate the deployment of cost competitive solid state hydrogen storage.

Industrial markets already consume large volumes of hydrogen and in future the gas will play an important role in storing renewable energy as well as in CO2 free hydrogen fuel cell vehicle development. Solid state storage is stated as being a safe way to store large quantities of gas with high density at low pressure.

Read the rest.

PS: ECS has a technical division that will interest you.

Multi-Scale Renewable Energy Storage (MRES) 2014

The 2nd Annual “Multi-Scale Renewable Energy Storage – MRES 2014″Conference
Northeastern University in Boston, August 19-21, 2014

The meeting will focus on the science, technology, policy and entrepreneurial challenges for enabling new novel energy storage solutions for the future sustainable green energy initiatives.

Conference highlights:
• Aqueous and non-aqueous flow batteries
• Next generation battery technologies and materials challenges
• Graphene, sodium and other new energy storage technologies
• Fuel cells and hydrogen storage development and infrastructure
• Safety, reliability and reproducibility across technologies and applications
• System integration, implementation and industrial application
• Government perspective and funding opportunities

Find out more.

This was posted in the ECS group on LinkedIn. Join us!

The 8th Energy World Forum
Rome, May 19-21, 2015

Each year more than 30 of the world’s leading Utilities/TSOs/DSOs gather at this exclusive Annual Forum to shape the future of Energy Storage. Find out more.

PS: Speaking of meetings in general, the 2014 ECS SMEQ Joint International Meeting in Cancun Mexico is Oct. 5-9. Early-bird registration is now open.

Websites of Note are gathered by Zoltan Nagy.

This is the latest Websites of Note, a regular feature in the ECS magazine Interface researched by Zoltan Nagy, a semi-retired electrochemist.

Physical and Interfacial Electrochemistry – M. Lyons, Trinity College
Ion-solvent interactions. Ion-ion interactions. Electrochemical thermodynamics. Electrode-solution interface. Electrode kinetics. Material transport. Hydrodynamic electrodes. (Lecture notes)

Surface Electrochemistry and Reactivity – J. M. Feliu and E. Herrero, Universitat d’Alacant
The surface of the metal substrate. Platinum single crystals. Charge displacement and anion adsorption. Adatom adsorption. Foreign adatom layers. Potential of zero total charge.

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Easy-to-search, high-tech platform ensuring a progressive atmosphere for the exchange of knowledge and ideas.

The proceedings of 18 Cancun symposia (B1, B2, F2, F3, H6, P1, P3, P6, P7, Q3, Q7, Q1, Q2, Q5, Q6, Q8, Q9, and Q10) from the 2014 ECS and SMEQ Joint International Meeting will be published in ECS Transactions (ECST) in late September, just before the meeting in Cancun.

Make sure to order your copies now with your early-bird registration!

Check out previous proceedings in the meantime.

Or … Better living through working with more stuff.

This is from the Summer 2014 edition of Interface which should have just arrived in your real-world mailbox. It’s Petr Vanysek’s “From the Editor” piece.

I think that I will need to change what I do. No, I am not thinking of quitting electrochemistry and opening a kennel for German shepherds. I like chemistry and I do not see eliminating it from my life, but the college freshmen students would probably prefer to see it, at least in the name, all gone. Now, it seems, that even the analytical chemistry specialty is in peril.

You see, I am going to give a recruitment talk at a chemistry department at one of the Wisconsin universities. This is how it works: our department sends neighboring schools fliers describing our PhD program and offers to send a professor to give a seminar presentation. The host department gets a free seminar out of it and our department may entice some students to apply to our graduate program. Even if nobody applies right there and then, the departments keep in touch, which is always nice. In preparation for the trip I offered a few topics I could discuss, all electrochemical, and I asked which would be the most appreciated by the students. The guidance I got was frank and disheartening. “For some reason,” the instructor in charge wrote, “the word ‘Analytical’ seems to cause student aversion – thus I’d counsel against its use in a title.”

Electrochemistry at U.S. chemistry departments is traditionally part of the analytical chemistry curriculum, so how long can I hide the fact that I am a chemist and an analytical one at that? The more pressing question is, what can we do about it? There are possibly two reasons why the present student population does not care much for chemistry. One goes back to their parents and grandparents. Larry Faulkner in his tribute to Bard and Goodenough, pointed out how the DuPont slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry,” adopted in 1935, lost the “through chemistry” in 1982.

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Electric bacteria connect to form wires.

Here a fascinating piece from NewScientist.com being passed around the home office at the moment.

Stick an electrode in the ground, pump electrons down it, and they will come: living cells that eat electricity. We have known bacteria to survive on a variety of energy sources, but none as weird as this. Think of Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life by galvanic energy, except these “electric bacteria” are very real and are popping up all over the place.

I love this quote near the end:

The discovery of electric bacteria shows that some very basic forms of life can do away with sugary middlemen and handle the energy in its purest form – electrons, harvested from the surface of minerals. “It is truly foreign, you know,” says Professor Kenneth Nealson. “In a sense, alien.”

There’s a video with the piece that shows the bacteria lassoing food. Watch and read.

Professor Nealson, the focus of this story, has published with us in the past. Read some of his work in The ECS Digital Library.