Actress, comedian, and author Amy Poehler has put a lot of effort into empowering young girls in science for some time now. Her Smart Girls project took off in 2008, which serves as a place where future women can foster their curiosity and pursue opportunities in STEM. Now Poehler and her Smart Girls group are adding to the women in STEM conversation with their new series, “Experimenting with Megan Amram.”

Amram is a Harvard graduate, author, and comedian. The new web series serves as a perfect platform to continue what she already started in her book Science… for Her!. The parody science text is comedic in nature, but takes a hard look at the gender gap in STEM and offers up some pretty solid science as well.

As an added bonus, you can even get a step-by-step instructions on how to conduct Amram’s experiments.

PS: Head over to the ECS YouTube page to find more educational science videos.

Here at ECS, we strive to encourage research, discussion, critical assessment, and dissemination of scientific knowledge. What better way to do that in the digital age than with social networks?

Twitter has been one channel that scientists have adopted in the pursuit of disseminating information and advancing the science though education. Accordingly, we’ve compiled a short list of some of the best scientists to follow on Twitter.

Donald Sadoway, @dsadoway
Professor of Material Chemistry at MIT
ECS member Donald Sadoway is a battery expert and renewable energy guru. Check him out on Twitter to learn about the latest developments in battery technology and current issues in energy and climate.

#Energy#Storage still far too costly and without it, intermittent #renewables are paralyzed. Time for innovation.

— Donald R. Sadoway (@dsadoway) May 11, 2015

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Mary Yess, ECS Deputy Executive Director & Chief Content Officer, and Logan Streu, ECS Content Associate and Assistant to the CCO, recently came across a great video series that addresses a hot button topic here at ECS: access.

Through our mission to disseminate content to the largest possible audience with as few barriers as possible and our move towards full open access publication, ECS is working to help change the nature of scientific communication itself.

However, sometimes these technical research papers do not tell the important scientific stories that the everyday reader needs to know. For ECS, the Redcat blog was the answer to that issue. For Johns Hopkins University, their series “Science: Out of the Box” focuses on translating complex scientific concepts into understandable and entertaining stories.

Computing pioneer Rear Admiral Grace Hopper as a LEGO minifigure.
image by: pixbymaia, image license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

One of the quotes I like to keep on my desk is, “A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.”

“Amazing Grace” Hopper, who said those words, certainly did new things. She was a computer programming pioneer, and the first woman at Yale University to earn a doctorate in math.

She is perhaps most noted for having invented key software technologies that laid the ground for today’s computer languages, and which remain a part of our everyday life. She was able to convince industry and government agencies to agree on a common business programming language, called Cobol, which (among many uses) is still used when you withdraw money from a cash machine.

She also worked on a device called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, which worked out flight trajectories for rockets. Named for her are many places and objects, including the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hopper, the Department of Energy’s flagship computer system “Hopper,” and the Cray XE6 “Hopper” supercomputer at NERSC.

Read about just ten of the many women who changed the tech industry forever.

Best-selling American author Julia Quinn once said, “Love works in mysterious ways.” Well, it turns out love isn’t quite as mysterious as we once thought.

With countries across the world celebrating Valentine’s Day on February 14th, we figured we’d take a look at the science behind romantic love.

However, the answer to the age old question, “What is love?” really comes down to what aspect of science you’re looking at. Here at ECS, we’re going to delve into the chemical reactions that occur to make a person feel sensations associated with love.

While the heart is the most common image associated with the idea of love, it’s really the brain that’s doing all the work. When we make a connection that falls along the path of romantic love, our brain releases a plethora of chemicals that cause us to experience excitement, euphoria, and bonding.

Chemicals such as adrenaline, norepinephrine, and dopamine are released in the early stages of love. Along with being able to see these chemicals at work on a brain scan, electrochemistry also offers us the option to track them and pick up patterns via sensors.

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A mouse brain before and after it’s been made transparent using CLARITY.
Image: Kwanghun Chung and Karl Deisseroth, Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Stanford University

Researchers in the biomedical sciences, such as bioelectrochemistry and biomedical engineering, work every day to create new processes and technology that will better the lives of all. The scientific community is recognizing one expert – Karl Diesseroth – for his two innovative techniques that are now widely used to study Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and other brain disorders.

Disseroth has just been awarded the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences for his achievements in the advancement of brain research technology. Disseroth is the pioneer behind a process called CLARITY and the technique called optogenics. In case you missed them, here’s a brief recap:

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Cancer is among the leading causes of mortality worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer related deaths were recorded in 2012. If no major breakthroughs are made in the field, that number is expected to rise by 70 percent over the next two decades. In honor of World Cancer Day, we’re taking a look at a few ways electrochemical and solid state science aids in the fight against cancer.

Electrochemical Biosensing for Cancer Detection
By taking biopsy slices for colon cancer, researchers were able to use electrochemical biosensors to distinguish between cancerous and normal epithelial tissues. This development helped promote rapid cancer detection by eliminating pretreatment and providing results obtained within minutes of biopsy removal. Read the full paper here.

Polymer Based Sensors to Diagnose Breast Cancer
There are many issues that mammography faces, including the uncomfortableness of the screening and exposure to radiation. In order to solve this issues, electrochemical scientists developed an Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) system. This radiation-less technique aims to enhance early detection capabilities by generating a 3-D map of the breast. Read the full paper here.

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Voltage profiles of charge-discharge cycles of the Li/Li3PS4/S battery.
Image: Journal of The Electrochemical Society

A team from Japan’s Samsung R&D has worked in collaboration with researchers from the University of Rome to fabricate a novel all solid state Lithium-sulfur battery.

The paper has been recently published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. (P.S. It’s Open Access! Read it here.)

The battery’s capacity is around 1,600 mAhg⁻¹, which denotes an initial charge-discharge Coulombic efficiency approaching 99 percent.

Additionally, the battery possesses such beneficial properties as the smooth stripping-deposition of lithium. In contrast to other Li-S cells, the new battery’s activation energy of the charge transfer process is much smaller.

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Lynn Owens, former chairman of the Centennial Light Bulb

Since 1901, just a year before The Electrochemical Society was founded, a light bulb was installed to bring light into a firehouse in Livermore, California. Back then, if a call came in for the firemen at night, they would have to dress, assemble their gear, and organize the hand water-trucks (no motorized firetrucks yet) in the dark. By adding what we now consider the simple light bulb, a fire station was much more readily able to handle emergencies. And that light bulb, now more than 113 years old, is still burning today.

This incandescent light bulb, invented by Adolphe A. Chaillet, was produced by the Shelby Electric Company. Originally giving off a glowing 60 watts, it now burns steadily at 4 watts. It has been moved several times, most recently in 1976, as the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department has changed locations.

“According to a website dedicated to the bulb, Debora Katz, a physicist at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., has conducted extensive research into the Livermore light bulb’s physical properties, using a vintage light bulb from Shelby Electric Co. that is a near replica of the Livermore light.

“The Livermore light bulb differs from a contemporary incandescent bulb in two ways,” says Katz. “First its filament is about eight times thicker than a contemporary bulb. Second, the filament is a semiconductor, most likely made of carbon.”

Watch the live webcam here to see the longest-burning light bulb in the world.

Listen to the 99% Invisible podcast for an in-depth look at the bulb.

Learn more about light bulbs in the ECS Digital Library.

One brave man is distilling his own potent, yet drinkable, biofuel. Of course, there’s quite a bit of electrochemistry involved via this reflux still.

WARNING: Distilling alcohol is illegal in many places. (It can also be pretty dangerous for the novice distiller, so let’s leave this one to Hackett.)