Listen to the words

The Web grew out of the world of research and has become a fixture of popular culture. Now popular culture is giving something back to research, in the form of the Podcast. In essence a podcast is just a sound file that you can listen to on a computer or on an MP3 player such as an iPod. (See Wikipedia entry for podcast for more detail). Some scientific publishers are starting to use this technology. The added value of a podcast is that you can subscribe and be alerted on a regular basis, using RSS (see Blog entry for April 11th).

• Nature's weekly podcast features highlights from news and articles published in Nature, including interviews with the people behind the science. It started in October as an experiment and Nature suddenly found they were regularly in the iTunes top 50, with an average of 20,000 downloads per week.
  
• Science's offering is twice a month, badged as a pilot service. It is built around interesting stories in the journal and on its sister sites.
• The Scientist also has a weekly podcast "The Week" which takes a comprehensive look at the important stories shaping the life sciences over the last 7 days.
• The Royal Society have both audio and video podcasts of some of their major lectures.
  
• On the medical side, the New England Journal of Medicine has an audio summary of each issue, and a number of audio interviews.
  
• Both New Scientist and Scientific American have established weekly podcasts too.

On the more general media side, the BBC Radio 4 science output is also available on the listen again service while The Guardian also makes a science podcast available.

Podcast.net has a useful directory of other science and health related podcasts.