Registration is open!

About the webinar

James Kennedy will explore the rise of chemophobia, an irrational fear of compounds perceived as ‘synthetic’, and the damage it can cause in this interactive webinar. We’ll examine its evolutionary roots, the factors keeping it alive today and how to fight chemophobia successfully.

What You Will Learn

• Origins of chemophobia as an irrational psychological quirk
• Chemistry teachers, Walter White, materialism and advertisements are all fuelling chemophobia today
• Fighting chemophobia needs to be positive, respectful, multifaceted, and good for consumers

Webinar Details

• Date: Thursday, August 11, 2016 @ 2-3pm ET
• Fee: Free to Attend
• Download Slides: Available Day of Broadcast

Register your attendance here.

Slide from the lecture. Click to register to attend.

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‘Chemophobia’ podcast with Sam Howarth

Click to listen to the podcast via Soundcloud

In a debut podcast, Sam Howarth discusses with chemophobia research-enthusiast and chemistry teacher, James Kennedy, the evolution of fearing chemicals and the people who are driving it behind the scenes.

Sam Howarth is a self-taught nutrition and fitness enthusiast – a fanatic learned through trial and error over 3 years of research and over 10 years of personal struggles with food and body image.

In the podcast, we talk about chemophobia, its origins and the money that keeps it alive.

Subscribe to my Apple News Channel

Subscribe to this website via Apple News (requires iOS 9 and above)

I was recently accepted as a contributor to Apple News. This means that readers can now access this website’s content via the Apple News app from any iOS device. The latest posts will appear directly in readers’ Apple News feeds. This is quicker and much more convenient than using the mobile version of this website.

I’ve been using Apple News for a while now, and I love having quick access to important news from various sources. You can customise which news sources you want to appear in your news feed: there are around 2000 news sources to choose from, and this website has now been added to the mix.

Click here to check out my Apple News channel.

My Apple News channel as of March 2016. Click to subscribe.

Subscribe to Chad Jones’ New Chemistry Podcast

New podcast ‘Chemical Dependence’ is hosted at The Collapsed Wavefunction

I first came across Chad Jones when I did an interview with him on The Collapsed Wavefunction back in 2013. We discussed ingredient labelling, chemophobia and my motivations for making the Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana poster series.

Chad Jones works at Intel Corp. in Utah, USA. He’s the founder and chief science writer for The Collapsed Wavefunction, a science advocacy podcast featuring episodes on science instruction, science in popular culture, and current science news items.

In 2016, Chad’s launched his latest venture in chemistry outreach with a fantastic new podcast called Chemical Dependence. In each of the podcast’s punchy, 5-minute episodes, Chad explores interesting chemical compounds and how they’re used in society. The podcast is a great source of interesting facts to liven up any chemistry lesson. All Chemistry teachers should subscribe!

He’s even teamed up with Andy Brunning from Compound Interest for his latest episode on pipeline. Check it out here.

Check out all the episodes and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here. Support the podcast via Patreon here.

All-Natural Banana Poster Series PDFs

New for 2016: Click to download free PDFs of all twelve All-Natural Posters

It’s been two years since I posted the All-Natural Banana. Motivation behind this poster was to dispel the myth that “natural = good” and “artificial = bad”. It’s been a very successful project. It’s spawned 11 more “Ingredients” posters, a successful clothing line, and has sold thousands of print copies worldwide via this website.

Online news portal io9 then published a news story about the All-Natural Banana, which was followed in quick succession by articles in Vox, Forbes, Business Insider, the New York Times and more.

The All-Natural Banana has now received over 700,000 views via this website and millions more views via social media.

From today onwards, you can download the original PDF artworks for free. They come with a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons License, which means that you can share them, print them and modify them as much as you like for non-commercial purposes only.

I’ll be following this up with an article on the ‘Origins of Chemophobia’ next week. Subscribe to this website below or subscribe via my Apple News channel here.

Click here to download the whole poster set.

All-natural Banana by James Kennedy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredients-of-an-all-natural-banana/.

Elements 113, 115, 117 & 118 are now Confirmed!

Image courtesy of RSC

Article originally posted on rsc.org

Confirmation that four new elements – those with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 – have indeed been synthesised has come from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (Iupac), completing the seventh row of the periodic table.

The groups credited for creating them – in Japan, Russia and the US – have spent several years gathering enough evidence to convince experts from Iupac and its physics equivalent, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, of the elements’ existence. All four are highly unstable superheavy metals that exist for only a fraction of a second. They are made by bombarding heavy metal targets with beams of ions, and can usually only be detected by measuring the radiation and other nuclides produced as they decay.

Continue reading on rsc.org…

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Coming to Australia!

Think Inc as officially announced Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 2015 Australian tour.

Buy tickets to see Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Melbourne MCEC here.

You might remember when I put Neil deGrasse Tyson’s viral video The Most Astounding Fact up on this website. I love that video because it communicates the importance of Science at a level deeper than any other. It’s a video I try to play to all my classes just once at an appropriate time in the year because it teaches what Tyson calls the Cosmic Perspective.

I’m thrilled to say that Think Inc has announced this week that the legendary Neil deGrasse Tyson, passionate science communicator and Director of the Hayden Planetarium, is doing a four-stop tour of Australia including Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra from August 7th-23rd 2015.

See the organisers’ official announcement here.

Science Questions with Surprising Answers

Science Questions with Surprising Answers website

I came across an amazing website today called Science Questions with Surprising Answers. The website is run by Dr Christopher S. Baird, who teaches at the Department of Physics at University of Massachusetts Lowell. The website answers fascinating (and sometimes bizarre) questions with a rare balance of accuracy and clarity.

I particularly like the Chemistry section, which answers the question, “Are two atoms of the same element identical?” His answer is as follows:

“No. Two atoms of the same chemical element are typically not identical. First of all, there is a range of possible states that the electrons of an atom can occupy. Two atoms of the same element can be different if their electrons are in different states. If one copper atom has an electron in an excited state and another copper atom has all of its electrons in the ground state, then the two atoms are different…”

The blog actually reminds me of the book, What If?, which is a more comical (and less relevant) companion to this blog.

Browse his website and introduce it your students this semester!

On a Podcast, I Explain Why I Made These Graphics

I went on a science podcast explaining why I made the Banana posters. The episode’s called “Bananas, Eggs and Blueberries”, and is presented by Chad Jones and Sam Matthews of The Collapsed Wavefunction.

It was an excellent conversation. Listen to it on iTunes here or online here.

Show Notes (all times are approximate):

• 1:30 – Where did the idea for these posters come from?
• 4:00 – Chemophobia and the posters. James says that relevance – not chemophobia – was the driving motivation for the posters.
• 8:00 – You can now get T-Shirts with the ingredients.
• 9:00 – How did James determine what chemicals are really in these foods?
• 10:30 – Why isn’t potassium listed in the ingredients for a banana? Aren’t bananas full of potassium
• 11:30 – “E-numbers”: What are they and what is the fear about?
• 15:00 – As a high school teacher, what opinion does James have about the state of science education?
• 17:00 – What else can we do to make chemistry relevant? A KickStarter perhaps?
• 21:00 – The Fortnightly Scientist: Luca Turin (TED talk)
• 28:00 – Table of Esters and their Smells
• 31:30 – Why James made all these posters
• 35:45 – How can I do what James does?