Monthly Archives: September 2009

National New Biology Initiative — report from NRC

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Phillip Sharp - co-chair of the committee.

Sep­tem­ber 17, 2009 — Accord­ing to a new report from the National Research Coun­cil, the emer­gence of “New Biol­ogy” — where sci­en­tists and engi­neers from many dis­ci­plines col­lab­o­rate on ways to take advan­tage of dra­matic recent advances in biol­ogy, such as the abil­ity to sequence entire genomes — offers an oppor­tu­nity to solve some of society’s most press­ing prob­lems. The report rec­om­mends a National New Biol­ogy Ini­tia­tive to accel­er­ate such research and apply it to our great­est challenges.

 

Source: National Acad­e­mies News, Sept. 17th.

Elsevier’s journal, Cell, has a beta test site for a new article presentation

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“This new pro­to­type is… designed to make arti­cles eas­ier to read and nav­i­gate in dig­i­tal form.”   The pre­sen­ta­tion has hier­ar­chi­cal  text and graphs, graph­i­cal abstracts and bul­leted main points.

Source: Infor­ma­tion Today ( www.infotoday.com ) Sep­tem­ber 2009, p. 3;  Else­vier

Pro­to­type 1 Pro­to­type 2
erickson hochstim

For more infor­ma­tion go to http://beta.cell.com

Element 112 — how about the name copernicium (Cn)?

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The Inter­na­tional Union of Pure and Applied Chem­istry (IUPAC) has pro­posed a name and sym­bol for the newest ele­ment.  If you’d like to read more about it, make a sug­ges­tion, or com­ment on the choice, here is the URL:

http://old.iupac.org/reports/provisional/abstract09/corish_310110.html

Source:  the CHEMICAL INFORMATION SOURCES DISCUSSION LIST or CHMINF-L

MedlinePlus Now on Twitter

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medlineplus twitter logo
Fol­low us on Twit­ter, medlineplus4you, to get the lat­est health infor­ma­tion from the National Library of Med­i­cine (NLM).

NLM launched medlineplus4you on Twit­ter as a com­pan­ion to NLM’s pop­u­lar and respected con­sumer health Web site, MedlinePlus.gov.

Both medlineplus4you and MedlinePlus.gov pro­vide trust­wor­thy health and well­ness infor­ma­tion from U.S. gov­ern­ment agen­cies and other author­i­ta­tive sources.

From the NLM New files for the week of Aug 31, 2009

NBII — National Biological Information Infrastructure — new look, more functional searching

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“The National Bio­log­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Infra­struc­ture (NBII) has updated its search engine to search mul­ti­ple data­bases at the same time, and now also returns clus­tered results. You can try it at NBII.gov. ”

Source: Research­Buzz, 9/3/09

From “About” NBII :

The NBII Pro­gram is man­aged by the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Survey’s Bio­log­i­cal Infor­mat­ics Office, and “is a broad, col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­gram to pro­vide increased access to data and infor­ma­tion on the nation’s bio­log­i­cal resources. The NBII links diverse, high-quality bio­log­i­cal data­bases, infor­ma­tion prod­ucts, and ana­lyt­i­cal tools main­tained by NBII part­ners and other con­trib­u­tors in gov­ern­ment agen­cies, aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions, non-government orga­ni­za­tions, and pri­vate indus­try. NBII part­ners and col­lab­o­ra­tors also work on new stan­dards, tools, and tech­nolo­gies that make it eas­ier to find, inte­grate, and apply bio­log­i­cal resources infor­ma­tion. Resource man­agers, sci­en­tists, edu­ca­tors, and the gen­eral pub­lic use the NBII to answer a wide range of ques­tions related to the man­age­ment, use, or con­ser­va­tion of this nation’s bio­log­i­cal resources.”