Monthly Archives: August 2009

Chemical Abstracts Service Registry to hit 50 million substances soon

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US CAS REGISTRY on track to reg­is­ter 50 mil­lionth chem­i­cal sub­stance - 18 Aug 2009

“Chem­i­cal Abstracts Ser­vice (CAS), a divi­sion of the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, has announced that it is on track to reg­is­ter the 50 mil­lionth unique chem­i­cal sub­stance on Sep­tem­ber 7. The CAS REGISTRY claims to be the most com­pre­hen­sive and high-quality com­pendium of pub­licly dis­closed chem­i­cal infor­ma­tion. This mile­stone comes only 9 months after CAS reg­is­tered its 40 mil­lionth substance.

REGISTRY is the only inte­grated com­pre­hen­sive source of chem­i­cal infor­ma­tion from a full range of patent and jour­nal lit­er­a­ture that is curated and qual­ity con­trolled by sci­en­tists work­ing around the world. For more than 100 years, CAS sci­en­tists and col­leagues in sev­eral nations have metic­u­lously analysed and indexed pub­licly dis­closed global sci­en­tific infor­ma­tion to build up the unique REGISTRY resource that pro­vides not only chem­i­cal names, the unique CAS Reg­istry Num­ber, and vital lit­er­a­ture ref­er­ences but also ancil­lary infor­ma­tion such as exper­i­men­tal and pre­dicted prop­erty data (boil­ing and melt­ing points, etc.), com­mer­cial avail­abil­ity, prepa­ra­tion details, spec­tra, and reg­u­la­tory infor­ma­tion from inter­na­tional sources.

CAS sci­en­tists fol­low rig­or­ous cri­te­ria that main­tain high qual­ity and reli­a­bil­ity of infor­ma­tion in its REGISTRY. Sci­en­tists iden­tify rep­utable sources and use con­sis­tent analy­sis before reg­is­ter­ing a sub­stance. REGISTRY is avail­able to sci­en­tists through CAS’ prod­uct, SciFinder, and its STN fam­ily of prod­ucts. With these advanced search and analy­sis tech­nolo­gies, CAS helps sci­en­tists find reli­able infor­ma­tion that is vital to their research process.”
 

Source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, 8/18/09

AAAS — Communicating Science

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“Sci­ence Com­mu­ni­ca­tion to take cen­ter stage at AAAS Annual Pacific Divi­sion meet­ing — 13 Aug 2009

The Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence (AAAS) has announced that atten­dees of its 90th Annual Pacific Divi­sion Meet­ing, sched­uled for August 17, 2009, in San Fran­cisco, will get to learn about the lat­est efforts in sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion from some of the lead­ing experts in the field. The sym­po­sium is called ‘Good Sci­ence is Only Part of the Job: Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Sci­ence to the Pub­lic’.

As sci­ence has become a larger part of the cul­tural land­scape, researchers have fre­quently found them­selves nav­i­gat­ing the dif­fi­cult waters of poli­cies and pol­i­tics. It has become increas­ingly nec­es­sary for sci­en­tists to work with the media to assure accu­rate por­tray­als of sci­ence issues so there can be bet­ter under­stand­ing by the pub­lic and there­fore bet­ter deci­sions by pol­icy mak­ers. Each of the pre­sen­ta­tions will address how sci­en­tists can be bet­ter equipped to man­age dif­fer­ent media when shar­ing research and infor­ma­tion with the public.

Hank Camp­bell, founder of ScientificBlogging.com, an inde­pen­dent online sci­ence com­mu­nity, will chair the sym­po­sium and present ‘Why Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Sci­ence Is Impor­tant.’ Greg Critser, sci­ence and health book author, long time sci­ence and med­ical jour­nal­ist, will dis­cuss how to use jour­nal­is­tic meth­ods to trans­form research into com­pelling media dis­course — from news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines to the Inter­net and the blogo-sphere, in ‘Inter­act­ing with sci­ence journalists.’

Prof. Michael Eisen, Depart­ment of Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­ogy, Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, will dis­cuss efforts to rein­vent sci­en­tific com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Dr. Euge­nie Scott, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor for the National Cen­ter for Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion, will dis­cuss how sci­ence is a prod­uct of human beings, which means it is affected by human insti­tu­tions includ­ing pol­i­tics. Dr. Michael White, Depart­ment of Genet­ics and Cen­ter for Genome Sci­ences, Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine, St. Louis, will dis­cuss sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion mis­fires and how sci­ence blog­gers deflated the hype over the Ida fos­sil, exposed a stealth cre­ation­ist paper in a peer-reviewed jour­nal, and have relent­lessly pum­meled dubi­ous claims about vac­cines, stem cells, cli­mate change, and per­son­alised med­i­cine, in ‘Blaz­ing Your Own Trail: Writ­ing Directly to the Public.’”

Source (ver­ba­tim):  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, August 13th.

Nature’s “Omics Gateway”

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“The Omics Gate­way: Mak­ing sense of large data

With a new look and improved func­tion­al­ity, the Omics Gate­way just made it eas­ier to keep up with the lat­est devel­op­ments in large-scale and high-throughput stud­ies. The Omics Gate­way gives you access and updates to the most impor­tant papers in data-driven bio­log­i­cal research, as well as free access to high­light arti­cles — all in one com­pre­hen­sive site. We’ve com­piled all the infor­ma­tion and made it eas­ier for you to browse by sub­ject or by organ­isms with our vir­tual “Tree of life”.

Visit the Omics Gate­way today!”

Source: the August Life Sci­ence Update from Nature Pub­lish­ing Group