Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) <http://www.ornl.gov> and partners have launched DataONE (http://dataone.org) <http://dataone.org> , a global data access and preservation network projected to make vast amounts of information related to environmental research readily available. The network, which has received a $20 million grant through the National Science Foundation DataNet programme, will also receive $700,000 over five years.

With this effort, universities and government agencies are coming together to address the growing need for organising and providing large amounts of highly diverse and interrelated but often incompatible scientific data. The resulting computing and processing cyber infrastructure will be made permanently available for use by the broader international science communities. Studies will range from research that sheds light on fundamental environmental processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions.

A colleague (thanks Emily) just sent me this video of the master of French Cooking demonstrating, well the chemical soup that started life?  It is classic Julia Child.  Who’d a thunk, getting a chef to do science.

WorldWideScience.org

is a global science gateway—accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases and portals.

http://www.worldwidescience.org/ offers researchers the ability to search over 50 national databases simultaneously, providing anyone interested in science with free access to quality, authoritative information on cutting edge scientific research.

Launching on the 14 September, the UK will make its first major independent contribution of research data to the project with the upload of the Environment Research Funders’ Forum (ERFF) Research Database. The database holds information on some 20,000 publicly funded environmental research projects and programmes that have been funded by ERFF’s member organisations since 2005.

Developed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in the US, and chaired by Richard Boulderstone, Director of E-Strategy and Information Systems at the British Library, the project currently makes available over 357 million pages of scientific information covering energy, medicine, agriculture and the environment, but continues to seek new partners to expand the resource and help stimulate revolutionary advances in science.