For the past several months, SteemSTEM has been marching towards its grand goal of building a novel science communication medium running on the Steem blockchain. We all recognize that science communication is a vital force worldwide and we believe Steem has a significant role to play in this space, through SteemSTEM.

Several decisions have been made to assist this in becoming a reality, and here we will describe each in full. Briefly, we are finalizing the development of a stand alone SteemSTEM app, SteemSTEM has now become fully active on other social media platforms and our curation guidelines have been updated in order to more effectively attract science bloggers and research institute press offices to Steem.

Finally, in continuing our trend of holding meetups in crazy (sciency) places, we are looking forward to a successful up-coming meetup at Virgo Labs.

The SteemSTEM App

In order to increase the visibility of high quality posts in any of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) topics, nothing will allow us to be more effective than a custom-tailored user interface.

The first beta version of our application should be released within about 10-15 days, and on this SteemSTEM platform, only posts supported by SteemSTEM curators along with those of white-listed high quality content creating authors, will be visible. This content selectivity will ensure we are able to present the world with a level of STEM quality in order to effectively attract: - Any potential investor who sees the value in monitization incentives (Steem) as an aid in effective science communicating. - Any top-notch science blogger and field expert who would enjoy the unique support of their work that only Steem can provide. - Any individual interested in learning/reading about fascinating, fact based, cutting edge STEM content.

With such an app at hand, we will be able to start touring research institute press offices from all over the world to bring them to Steem, showing them the varied advantages of using Steem as a tool for spreading news about what their research groups are doing. By making state-of-the-art research communications available on Steem, we will set the precedent of the Steem blockchain as a primary source of scientific information.

We hence aim to offer a space where both STEM professionals and passionate bloggers can freely distribute their knowledge in a social media environment that actively promotes and rewards them. With one long-term goal being to incentivise the direct communication between experts and interested viewers; helping to reduce the number of inaccuracies in reporting of STEM content, generated by journalists’ interpretations of data that are so prevalent today.

SteemSTEM on other social media

We have recently created SteemSTEM accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so that we have a way to provide updates about all new trending articles according to our standards and our actions to the outside world (i.e. anything lying outside the Steem ecosystem).

We believe that anything shared on Steem should not stay on Steem. Science communication is vital and information should be spread on a wider level, across the borders of Steem.

By expanding SteemSTEM beyond the frontiers of the Steem blockchain, we provide incentives for STEM experts and bloggers to communicate their work to the mainstream audiences both on a platform that rewards them, and through other mainstream media as a bonus.

Curation and honor members

Our curation team decides on the voting strength a post should receive amongst four levels: small (encouragement and motivation), medium (informative post), standard (post that goes beyond providing information about a given topic), high (discussion of state-of-the-art research, or something that cannot be found elsewhere).

Such rules allow us to provide our strongest support to universities, research institutes and STEM professionals on Steem who are the ones providing information that cannot necessarily be found elsewhere. In addition, STEM aficionados also get supported to a good extent when sharing their passion.

We have moreover set up a team of motivated and engaged honor members providing help and guidance for writing interesting and well-referenced STEM posts respecting copyrights. They furthermore motivate each member of the community to engage with each other, handle complaints and questions and help to track scammers and plagiarists.

Implication on Steem

As SteemSTEM runs on Steem, it is important to also work to support the Steem blockchain, without which none of our goals would be achievable.

To this aim, we are currently setting up a SteemSTEM witness and planning to deploy an RPC full node.

We will provide more information when we will be ready and when the server setup will be finalized, in the upcoming weeks.

Meet us in Italy, at Virgo Labs

To finish this status update post, let us remind that about 30 people will visit Virgo Labs in 3 weeks time. This research institute is one of the few places in the world tracking and detecting gravitational waves.

After having organized our first meetup inside the LHC, we naturally moved to another place important for science: a laboratory connected to the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. We are looking forward to this meetup, organized with our friends from Utopian.io. News, stories and pictures will be shared with those unfortunately not attending.

If you want to help us with the meetup organization, please do not hesitate to support us through our fundition campaign.

See you all next Monday for the next SteemSTEM distilled!

### Tobacco: The Plant and the Smoker An addictive habit is being discussed in this first post of our new week, that of smoking. @masterwriter has written a great piece on tobacco. From the plant and process of making cigarettes to the reasons people take up smoking and the effects on a smoker’s health, you will surely learn a lot by reading this post!

### Super Cool Science S#!t #24 - The Destroyer of Worlds You’ve definitely seen a bunch of posts on black holes around here, but @thatsweeneyguy’s is different. Enjoyable and well-written, it promises to teach you in a fun way. Don’t miss reading this one!

Wednesday - Friday

### The Quantum Theory: Can Quantum technologies revolutionize the 21st Century and ultimately change our lives? An extended and thorough post by @emperorhassy on quantum technology and how it can change our lives! Don’t worry, it’s in comprehensible English, you don’t need to be an expert to appreciate the post’s value!

### Biography of Bernhard Riemann (1826 — 1866) And moving on next, we have a beautiful post on the life of a great scientist. @romualdd presents us with the story of Bernhard Riemann, an excellent mathematical mind of the 19^th century.

Saturday - Sunday

### Would you love to see how I trained my small, tiny, powerful neural network? Do neural networks intrigue you? Then this is a post you shouldn’t miss! @nikolanikola shows us how he “trained” his very own neural network. Let’s follow him and see what he accomplished!

### INTRODUCTION TO CARTOGRAPHY - ELEMENTS OF ISARITHMIC MAPPING One of our cool engineers will close this week’s issue. @lordneroo, with his ongoing series on cartography, has published another fantastic piece! The elements of isarithmic mapping are being discussed here and if you’ve missed a few of the previous parts, you can always pay a visit to his blog to catch up with his series!

For some time, the editorial team behind this distilled series is made of a one-woman-team, @ruth-girl, and she chooses her favorite posts (potentially discussing with other curators and/or the management). Posts written by the SteemSTEM team are excluded from the nomination process.

Please do not be discouraged if you did not make it on this issue. We are picking up in total 14 posts a week out of more than 200. The chances are thus low ;) In the meantime, you may wish to check these guidelines for extra tips on how your writing could be more effective.

In the spirit of being transparent about our actions that are now supported by @utopian-io, @curie, our delegators, our trailers and our manual curator supporters, we release every week the list of authors who have caught the attention of the @steemstem curation team.

From August 19 to 26, we rewarded 96 different authors who have written a total of 126 different articles. The 78 authors who received votes from @steemstem, @utopian-io and @curie all together that week are:

@abdulmath, @abigail-dantes, @agbona, @agmoore, @ajpacheco1610, @akireuna, @aleestra, @alexaivytorres, @amestyj, @answerswithjoe, @callmejoe, @chloroform, @conficker, @cryptoitaly, @dexpartacus, @dirge, @donefezy, @drifter1, @dysfunctional, @elguajirohh, @elvigia, @emiliomoron, @endopediatria, @ennyta, @erickyoussif, @felixrodriguez, @florae, @francop, @funnel, @happydaniel, @highonthehog, @ied, @ikchris, @iradyjr, @jfermin70, @josedelacruz, @katerinaramm, @knfitaly, @lauch3d, @lorenzor, @lupafilotaxia, @lycos, @marjanko, @markgritter, @masterwriter, @mathsolver, @motaryo, @motoengineer, @mr-aaron, @n4zrizulkafli, @nonzerosum, @olasamuel, @osmy07, @paololuffy91, @photo-it, @rareghost, @roquejr, @rossyholg, @rscalabrini, @samest, @samminator, @scienceangel, @scienceblocks, @sciencetech, @sebbbl, @serialfiller, @simson1, @soanna, @spbeckman, @steemit-italia, @svemirac, @theaustrianguy, @thekittygirl, @torkot, @tsoldovieri, @ubaldonet, @yhubi, @zen-art

_{[Credits: @hightouch]}

All curation rewards earned will be used to fund @steemstem project functioning and activities.

See you all next MonTuesday!

_{[Credits: @hightouch]}

As you probably all know by now, our stat-guru-mammouth has triumphantly returned! That meas it is time to get some fresh information on how SteemSTEM curation is going.

Even though the summer time may be depressing in terms of the post flow, there are still very good authors around, who deserve strong support from our initiative. Please check our latest distilled for more detailed information on them.

In this post, we will instead provide numbers on how we are doing. But before moving further, here is a quick reminder about the SteemSTEM curation guidelines.

Curation with SteemSTEM

Our curation team searches for original and quality content posted on Steem and related to all fields of science, technology, mathematics and engineering (STEM) in six languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Serbian). Although the usage of the #steemstem tag is recommended, it is of course not mandatory. It depends whether authors want to make our lives easier, and themselves more visible to us!

After having found a post, a curator decides on the voting strength it should receive (small, medium, standard or high). Currently, small posts are voted with 5% strength, medium posts with 20% strength, standard posts with 65% strength and high posts with the full might and fury of our vote and trail votes, the 100% level. Our definitions of the different levels are simple: Small: encouragement, motivation, etc. Medium: informative post on some topic. Standard: good post that goes beyond providing information about a given topic. This could mean an interesting and unusual format, more information than what could be found elsewhere, etc. High: excellent posts, discussing the state-of-the-art of a given field, bringing something to the platform that cannot be found elsewhere.

Anything larger than small requires double curation, and we insist on the fact that getting higher support means bringing something to Steem that cannot be found anywhere else. This could for instance be an article about cutting-edge science not discussed anywhere else, or a novel and/or non-standard way of presenting a topic.

In other words, science communication is pushed forward!

In parallel, we try to be as generous as possible with the small and medium votes and use them as a mean to both promote informative content and make it more visible, as well as to nurture and incentivise the growth of our up and coming blogging talent.

Furthermore, a single person cannot get more than 3% of all steemSTEM votes cast during the previous 2 weeks. Note that curators receive guaranteed 70% upvotes for their STEM posts (as they are not entitled for curie votes), however they too must abide by the same 3% rule that all other posters do.

Finally, the juicy section you have all been waiting for…

Statistics

Since the beginning of our partnership with curie on September 13th, 2017, we have upvoted almost 11.000 posts written by about 1550 unique authors. The detailed weekly statistics are given below, in terms of number of supported posts, authors and the fraction of used weekly available voting power.

As can be observed, even in this dark times (in terms of post flow), we still do pretty good.

Thank you all for bringing your contributions in building this community.

### Missile Technology - the weapon of destruction. [2nd chapter] Our week begins with an “explosive” post by @ied and the technology of missiles! A very interesting piece that you will surely like. If you haven’t read the first part, we suggest you do so ASAP!!

### The Electric Vehicle Revolution Is Here | Answers With Joe @answerswithjoe earns a place in this week’s picks with his great video on electric cars! You should definitely watch this one!

Wednesday - Friday

### Argiope Lobata - Hellenic Version A great spider post is coming up next! @funnel has met a very interesting lady somewhere in the mountains of Northern Greece and he decided to introduce us to her. Check this post out and let us know what you think of Kali!

### Carbohydrates And Longevity; Is Eating Too Much Carbs Bad For Your Health? @conficker follows with another amazing piece of writing! This time he discusses carbs! An ally or an enemy in the battle of balancing your weight and staying healthy? Read this post to find out more interesting details!

Saturday - Sunday

### Crypto or Fiat Currency: It’s All About Trust And how about some history on the evolution of money and the revolution of crypto in the financial world? @agmoore has written a fantastic and detailed post and is waiting for you to read it! Trust us, you won’t regret it!

### The Myth Or Reality? El Dorado And The Bloody Grab for Gold in Venezuela. Last but not least, @highonthehog closes our productive week with a thrilling post that combines her travels with some interesting historical knowledge! Don’t be afraid to follow her to legendary El Dorado on a quest for gold! (By the way, the second part is already out. Don’t miss it!)

For some time, the editorial team behind this distilled series is made of a one-woman-team, @ruth-girl, and she chooses her favorite posts (potentially discussing with other curators and/or the management). Posts written by the SteemSTEM team are excluded from the nomination process.

Please do not be discouraged if you did not make it on this issue. We are picking up in total 14 posts a week out of more than 200. The chances are thus low ;) In the meantime, you may wish to check these guidelines for extra tips on how your writing could be more effective.

In the spirit of being transparent about our actions that are now supported by @utopian-io, @curie, our delegators, our trailers and our manual curator supporters, we release every week the list of authors who have caught the attention of the @steemstem curation team.

Unfortunately, for the third week in a row, our resident stat-wizard is on vacation. So you will have to wait in anticipation for his grand return this week. Yes that’s right, you will get all your SteemSTEM stat dreams fulfilled in next weeks distilled. Stay tuned!

_{[Credits: @hightouch]}

All curation rewards earned will be used to fund @steemstem project functioning and activities.

See you all next MonTuesday!