Compound Interest has come a way since I started it back at the tail end of 2013. It’s now got almost 200,000 people following its posts on Facebook alone, there’s a book on some of the food chemistry graphics from the site, and plenty of other fun projects in the works too! The latest of these is Chemunicate: a new site side-project which I’m hoping to use to make chemical research easier to understand for chemists and non-chemists alike.
Most of the general public don’t read jargon-filled chemistry research papers – they’re written primarily with other scientists in mind. Chemunicate hopes to communicate this research in an accessible but accurate way. This was one of the things that people said they wanted to see more of in the site’s end of year survey a few months ago.
This project isn’t, strictly speaking, something new. Obviously on the site itself, the topics covered often draw on research papers for information, but I also worked with chemistry researchers during last year’s #RealTimeChem week, creating a series of graphics based on their research:
In addition to these, I also made a series of graphics to explain last year’s Nobel prizes in simple terms, as well as a handful of graphics to accompany stories in the ‘This Week in Chemistry’ news summaries:
Chemunicate will have its own separate Twitter and Facebook identities, so your best bet to keep up with any commissioned content is to follow those. I’ll be posting selected graphics to the CI site itself too.
If you’re a chemistry researcher, institution, or publisher, and you’re interested in learning more about commissioning a project with Chemunicate, click through to its dedicated page on the site here.