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.

SciFinder is a research discovery tool that allows college students and faculty to access a wide diversity of research from many scientific disciplines, including biomedical sciences, chemistry, engineering, materials science, agricultural science, and more!

Follow along and explore the Nutrition of Plant Compounds in SciFinder:

I blogged on these more than a year ago, but thought it time to revisit these outstanding resources.

Encyclopedia of Life is a wiki-styled web site, where individuals can add content and images to the information, with the goal to have every species on Earth listed.  The site has grown and is a useful site for information and images.

Biodiversity Heritage Library is a full text library of natural science books and is closely allied to EoL.  Search results within EoL will contain links to relevant material in the BHL.

The National Geographic Society has just made available a database index to their collection of publications, including the main magazine, various children editions, books and tv/video offerings.  The search interface offers basic and advanced search options, limiting to date ranges, and several sorting options.  The database covers the complete publication output of the society back to 1888.  This kind of extensive coverage, to my knowledge, is not available through any other aggregating service, let alone FREE!

This index contains records describing each NGS magazine article, book, map, video, and more. For full-text you can visit your local library or purchase available products and publications at 1-800-NGS-LINE.

National Geographic Society Publications Database

Enjoy!

National Library of Medicine | National Institutes of Health

PubMed® Redesign 2009

This week it was announced at the 2009 annual meeting of the Medical Library Association in Honolulu, Hawaii that PubMed will undergo a redesign of the interface. The goals of PubMed Redesign 2009 are to make PubMed easier to use, simplify the interface, refresh the look, better organize the text on the screen, and promote scientific discovery. We anticipate the redesign to be ready in late summer 2009. More specifics about the release date and tips for transitioning will be published here when that information is available.

Advanced Search and My NCBI will also undergo changes in the coming months although those changes will be released independently of the PubMed redesign.

It was also mentioned at the meeting that although there had been discussion about removal of the Single Citation Matcher, that will not happen; the link to Single Citation Matcher will remain on the PubMed homepage.

By Annette M. Nahin
MEDLARS Management Section

This recently redesigned site is an information hub helping advocates push for improved access to government held information on the environment, health, and safety.  It provides links to news items, databases and issues on pollution, health, policies, science, ets.  The databases provide free public access to environmental information managed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Much of the information is provided as data.

Through RTK Net, you can access databases dealing with: Toxic pollution (TRI) Generation and transport of hazardous wastes (BRS) Handlers of hazardous wastes (RCRIS) Spills of hazardous materials (ERNS) Plans for dealing with emergencies (RMP).

Explore this site for current issues, policies and environmental data.

http://rtknet.ombwatch.org/

PBS has launched a new web portal of their video presentations.  This slick new site makes finding videos on topics a whole lot easier.  I did a search on “turtles” and found this video on invasive species, “Silent Invasion“, which I found to be very interesting.  Topic searches will lead you to the “chapter” or “segment” within the video where the topic is treated.  Wonderful fine tuning of searching within a video.  If you are hunting for videos to support course work, seek out this resource.  It is pretty fantastic.