From Physics World newsletter, June 20, 2019
Category Archives: Agriculture
United States has 5 National Libraries: Library of Congress, & National Libraries of Medicine, Agriculture, Education and Transportation
“Today, we’re asking “How many national libraries are there in the United States?”
For most countries, the answer is usually one.
But the United States actually has five.
In addition to the National Library of Medicine, the other national libraries are the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Library of Education, and the National Transportation Library.
National libraries or libraries established by the government of a country serve as preeminent repositories of information. Often, they include numerous rare, valuable, or significant works and play an important role in the preservation of their countries’ cultures and intellectual traditions.
National libraries are commonly open to the public for research, and while members of the public may not directly check out items, they may be able to obtain them through interlibrary loan. National libraries are also increasingly making their collections available online, as copyright and digitization projects allow.”
Source: NLM Announcements from the NLM Office of Communications, July 25, 2018.
Poisonous Plants Database from Cornell, Animal Science Dept.
“Best of the Web” column in “Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News” <update@genmail.co>
Oct 15, 2015 (Vol. 35, No. 18)
Poisonous Plants Database
 |
| URL:www.ansci.cornell.edu/plants |
The people in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University want to make sure that you don’t accidentally poison your livestock or pets with toxic plants. Their Poisonous Plants database includes a sizable number of entries such as oak trees (the acorns and young leaves are poisonous to horses and cattle), Daphne (toxic to cats, dogs, and humans), and rhubarb (the leaves are toxic to goats, swine, horses, and even people—who knew?). Each entry is accompanied by images of the plants, as well as answers to questions that the authors have either encountered in the past or anticipate that readers may have. The database is simple to browse—either by scientific name or common name—or users can search the database by scientific name, common name, primary poisons, or species most often affected.
Directory of Open Access Journals — DOAJ
This directory of OA journals is hosted by Lund University Libraries in Sweden. From their homepage: http://www.doaj.org:
“DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.” One can search by keywords or browse through broader and narrower subject headings.
These stats are from their website, accessed Sept. 28, 2015:
Seen in “Outstanding Websites of 2014”, Choice, Sept. 2015, p. 33
BioOne — adding 7 titles, but after 12/2015 ceasing to contain Entomological Soc. of Am. & Am. Soc. of Mammalogists publications
” BioOne adds seven new journals to BioOne Complete – 04 Sep 2015
BioOne, a nonprofit publisher that aims to make scientific research more accessible, has added seven new journals to BioOne Complete, its online aggregation of independently-published, subscribed and open-access titles.
Joining the subscribed aggregation in January 2016 will be: Caribbean Journal of Science, published by the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez; Journal of Entomological Science, published by the Georgia Entomological Society; Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society, published by The Lepidopterists’ Society; and Systematic and Applied Acarology, published by the Systematic and Applied Acarology Society (UK). Joining BioOne Complete as open-access participants will be: Paleontological Contributions, published by The Paleontological Institute at The University of Kansas; and Palaeodiversity and Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Naturkunde A, both published by The Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History, Germany.
These titles represent a wealth of content in biodiversity conservation, entomology, paleontology, and natural history. Their collective backfile encompasses 48 years and over 12,000 new pages for BioOne Complete. In 2016, the aggregation will be home to 191 publications (130 current, 43 backfile-only, and 18 open-access titles), comprising over 1.2 million pages and growing daily. 78% of BioOne Complete’s subscribed titles are ranked in Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports, and 25% are based outside of the US. Furthermore, 73% of current titles are available in full-text XML exclusively through BioOne Complete.
Just as these new additions enhance a subscription to BioOne Complete, BioOne participation represents a key step forward for each of these nonprofit publishers to make their content more accessible to a global audience.
As of December 31, 2015, the publications of the Entomological Society of America and the American Society of Mammalogists will cease adding new content to BioOne Complete. In accordance with BioOne’s commitment to perpetual access, all previously deposited issues from 2000-2015 (sixteen years of content), will remain accessible to BioOne Complete subscribers in perpetuity.”
Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, 9/4/2015
How many chemical substances are there? 100,000,000 (in CAS Registry)
Chemical Abstracts Service registers 100 millionth chemical substance in CAS REGISTRY – 30 Jun 2015
Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the world’s authority for chemical information, has registered the 100 millionth chemical substance in the CAS REGISTRY, in the 50th anniversary year of the world’s largest database of unique chemical substances.
With a steady increase in patenting activity around the globe, it is not surprising the 100 millionth small molecule registration comes from a patent. In this case, the substance was reported in a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) patent from Coferon, Inc. (Coferon) in Stony Brook, NY. The inventors claim the molecule, CAS RN 1786400-23-4, available in both SciFinder® and STN®, is a novel therapeutic designed to treat acute myeloid leukemia.
Started in 1965 as a project to uniquely identify and track chemical substance information, the CAS Registry system is the only complete and accurate source of unique identifiers, known as CAS Registry Numbers for all organic and inorganic substances disclosed in scientific publications and other reputable sources. Today, scientists, intellectual property professionals and compliance specialists around the world rely on CAS Registry Numbers to instantaneously identify and access the exact chemical needed for their research, safety and compliance needs.
The invention of CAS REGISTRY revolutionized the chemical information field and transformed research since the mid 60’s, and CAS Registry Numbers are ubiquitous in mainstream society today. Global regulatory organisations, including the United States Environmental Protection Agency and The ACT on the Registration and Evaluation of Chemicals regulatory body in Korea, require all new chemical substances manufactured or imported to be identified by a CAS Registry Number. These are also used on Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) around the world as a reliable resource for safe handling and transport of chemicals. CAS Registry Numbers are found on consumer products we use, e.g., paint cans and shampoo labels, and are relied upon in numerous web information sources, including chemical suppliers sites, Wikipedia, PubChem, and ChemSpider, to provide the one unique key that can open the world of information about that substance.
The substantial growth in worldwide chemical discoveries over the past 10 years is reflected in CAS REGISTRY. A view of all substances added since 1965 shows that the pace of research has significantly accelerated in the past ten years. Of the 100 million substances in CAS REGISTRY, approximately 75 million were added over the past 10 years. On average, CAS has registered 1 substance every 2.5 minutes over the past 50 years.
Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter 6/30/2015
mSphere — New OA journal, American Society for Microbiology
“American Society for Microbiology announces 2016 launch of new OA journal – mSphere – 10 Jun 2015
The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has announced plans to launch mSphereTM, a new pan-microbiology open-access journal, in early 2016. mSphere will create new opportunities for researchers in microbial sciences to share findings that are transforming our understanding of human health and disease, ecosystems, neuroscience, agriculture, energy production, climate change, evolution, biogeochemical cycling, and food and drug production.
mSphere will build on the success of mBio®, ASM’s first open access journal. Its scope will reflect the immense range of fields within the microbial sciences. An emphasis will be placed on bringing together these diverse fields to feature their common threads through the data, methods, and conceptual frameworks of original peer-reviewed research.
Dr. Michael Imperiale, Founding Editor in Chief of mSphere is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School and a member of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Author of more than 135 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Imperiale has served as an editor of ASM’s Journal of Virology® and mBio® and associate editor of Virology and PLoS Pathogens.
ASM journals have long been recognized as important venues for dissemination of significant, high-quality microbiological research. The launch of mSphere will complement the excellence of ASM’s 10 specialised primary research journals. mSphere™ will welcome submissions from authors around the world and will provide rapid decisions on publication, while carrying on ASM’s tradition for rigorous peer review. Like the rest of the ASM journals program, the new journals will be hosted on the HighWire platform at journals.asm.org.
A formal ‘Call for Papers’ will be issued in September 2015, and the journal launch is planned for early 2016.”
Source: Knowledgespeak News, June 10, 2015
Climate change myths — addressed by John Cook, Climate Communication Fellow, Australia
Skeptical Science: Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism
- http://www.skepticalscience.com
“This website gets serious about addressing climate change skepticism. Using only peer-reviewed research, John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia, takes the time to seriously consider the doubts that people might have about the state of the earth’s climate. Readers might like to start with the sidebar that addresses the ten most common climate myths, including the idea that the climate has changed before, that warming is due to the sun, that climate change isn’t bad, that there is no scientific consensus, that the earth is actually cooling, and five others. The site also offers a variety of interesting tabs to explore, including an excellent Resources page. [CNH]“
- Source: The Scout Report, University of Wisconsin, Vol. 21(7), Feb. 20th
Table of Contents Alerts to > 25,000 Scholarly Journals
- http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/
“Current Awareness Services have been published by libraries for a long time. They usually include new books, table of contents alerts, blogs, citation alerts, and other information. JournalTOCs builds on the idea by offering tables of contents (TOCs) for the newest issues of thousands of academic journals via this free website. Readers may type in the name of any journal in the search function on the homepage to access that journal’s latest table of contents. They may also browse by publishers and subjects. For librarians, students, and scholars who want to keep up to date on the breaking research in their field, this is a valuable resource. [CNH]“
- Source: The Scout Report, Vol. 21(4), University of Wisconsin, Jan. 30, 2015
Planet Earth’s Stability is significantly affected
Summary:
“Almost half of the processes that are crucial to maintaining the stability of the planet have become dangerously compromised by human activity. That is the view of an international team of 18 researchers who provide new evidence of significant changes in four of the nine systems which regulate the resilience of the Earth.”
Nine planetary boundaries (the crucial processes)
- Climate change
- Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)
- Stratospheric ozone depletion
- Ocean acidification
- Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
- Land-system change (for example deforestation)
- Freshwater use
- Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
- Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics). Journal Reference:
- Will Steffen, Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström, Sarah E. Cornell, Ingo Fetzer, Elena M. Bennett, R. Biggs, Stephen R. Carpenter, Wim de Vries, Cynthia A. de Wit, Carl Folke, Dieter Gerten, Jens Heinke, Georgina M. Mace, Linn M. Persson, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, B. Reyers, and Sverker Sörlin. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 15 January 2015 DOI: 10.1126/science.1259855
Source: McGill University. “Nearly half the systems crucial to stability of planet compromised.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 January 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150115163533.htm>.
You must be logged in to post a comment.