This web site contains 16 movies on life in the soil. Porduced by Dr. Tom Loynaachan of Iowa State University, each video replicates a lecture describing a living item found in the soil. Examples include nematodes, protozoa, mites, etc. This page is intended for high speed internet connections and requires macromedia flash player.

Enjoy: http://www.agron.iastate.edu/%7Eloynachan/mov/

I have added this site to the Environmental Science Research Guide.

I have just added this web site to the Plant Science Research Guide. It contains electron and scanning electron micrographs.

The url of the Glossary is: http://www.apsnet.org/education/IllustratedGlossary/default.htm

A pair of molecular biologists, Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey H Miller, has transformed the complex sequence of a protein into music. Reporting online 3 May in Genome Biology, the duo assigned a musical note to each amino acid–the building blocks of proteins. The team polished the process by assigning quarter, eighth, and half notes to the three codons that encode each amino acid.

Conversion of amino-acid sequence in proteins to classical music: search for auditory patterns
Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey H Miller
Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics and the Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1489, USA
Genome Biology 2007, 8:405 doi:10.1186/gb-2007-8-5-405

Listen to some proteins:
http://whozoo.org/mac/Music/samples.htm

Who knew proteins sounded so cool!

The full text of the article can be found at:
http://genomebiology.com/2007/8/5/405

Last week’s issue of Science devoted much of it’s content to The World of Undergraduate Education

A sampling of some of the articles:

Keeping Score
This map offers basic information on five important components of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education in the countries profiled in this special issue.

AUSTRALIA:
‘A Crisis in Student Quantity and Quality’
John Bohannon
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA–Kath Handasyde enlists native species, assertive Americans, and anything else on hand to rekindle a passion for science among undergrads.

UNITED STATES:
‘This Is the Front Line … Where I Can Really Make a Difference’
Elizabeth Culotta
AKRON, OHIO–Lisa Park and her colleagues take on creationism and other antiscientific attitudes in the classroom–and in the voting booth.

UNITED KINGDOM:
‘Much of What We Were Doing Didn’t Work’
Daniel Clery
LEICESTER, U.K.–Derek Raine sees integrated sciences as a potential savior for disciplines facing declining student interest and a dwindling number of departments.

FRANCE:
Opening Up to the Rest of the World
Martin Enserink
BORDEAUX, FRANCE–Antoine de Daruvar injects the real world into his bioinformatics classroom in an attempt to reinvigorate higher education.

BRAZIL:
‘I Do Not Make a Distinction Between Teaching and Research’
Marcelo Leite
RECIFE, BRAZIL–Antônio Carlos Pavão combines the ideal with the practical to bring science to the masses and create the next generation of scientists.

and more can be found at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol317/issue5834/news-summaries.dtl

Here are some recently added electronic books:

A dictionary of public health
Encyclopedia of underwater life: aquatic invertebrates and fishes
The new encyclopedia of birds

Access to these electronic resources are restricted to current Drexel students, faculty and staff.

Good News!

After considerable pressure by librarians, researchers and the public, Congress has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to restore its library network. In the fiscal year (FY) 2008 Interior Appropriations bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee orders EPA to reopen the closed libraries. Last year, EPA closed its Headquarters Library in Washington, DC, to visitors and walk-in patrons. EPA also closed several regional libraries, the toxics and pesticides library and the Ft. Meade Environmental Science Center Library.

For more on this breaking news go to: http://blogs.ala.org/districtdispatch.php

A fragment of the review of this book is lifted from the blog “Two Steps Forward. Sustainable Business. Clean Technology. Green Marketplace” by Joel Makower (http://www.makower.com/)

“The drumbeat of news stories, events, and other developments focusing on clean technology seems to gain strength every week. There are countless billions being invested each year in clean energy technologies, as well as technologies that more efficiently create clean water, advanced materials, or alternative transportation. The growing number of websites and magazines seem to capture pieces of the puzzle, but it’s easy to miss the enormity of the clean-tech world.

A new book, written by my colleagues Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder, manages to capture the big picture, as well as many of the salient details…”

To read the complete review, go to: http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/clean_tech/index.html