Sunday, August 22, 2010

In case you missed it, the 240th Meeting of the American Chemical Society kicked off this morning. I deeply miss hearing about awesome chemistry and biochemistry and long for my return to that field. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, I'm not able to attend-at least, not in person.

But, hark, yesterday I heard from a little bird that there was another way to keep up with the meeting. With the invaluble aid of free wifi, some folks at the meeting are/will be tweeting and live blogging sessions, including some ACS journos and bloggers.

The official hashtag is #ACS_Boston, which is now trending on Science Pond. Penelope Lewis, Acquisitions Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society, has been tweeting tidbits from sessions for @ this morning. One of the cool things she referenced is a talk by John Rogers, who's developing "waterproof bendable electronic tapes to wrap around beating heart and map cardiac rhythms" and for brain mapping.

Leigh Boerner and Carmen Drahl, blog for Chemical & Engineering News, will also be blogging and tweeting from sessions that interest them. They'll be covering a session Tuesday about chemistry/pharma blogging, which features two bloggers I love-Derek Lowe and Abel Pharmboy (aka David Kroll).

@ACSPressRoom is posting notices of press briefings that are being streamed live and archived at ACS_Live on UStream. Earlier this morning, Robert Atcher of Los Alamos National Labs discussed the worldwide shortage of radioactive isotopes used in industry and medical imaging. Teams from Merck & Pfizer talked about the development of Januvia (a drug for Type II diabetes) and Chantix (a non-nicotinic partial agonist for a nicotine receptor), respectively-achievements for which they will be inducted as ACS Heroes of Chemistry. They just finished talking about self-cleaning solar panels! Moderators for the press conferences will pass on questions from bloggers and media online.

I've already picked up some interesting bits from the online coverage of the meeting. If you have any interest in chemistry, materials, drug discovery, etc., go check it out!