Category Archives: Environmental sciences

Poisonous Plants Database from Cornell, Animal Science Dept.

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“Best of the Web” column in “Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News” <update@genmail.co>

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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.

The New Geopolitics of Climate Change — Reports from Nations

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GREATER EXPECTATIONS SPECIAL REPORT

Continuing this week, Greater Expectations: The New Geopolitics of Climate Change exposes the on-the-ground reality of developing countries challenged by a world that will require every nation to cut carbon emissions. Go to the special report.

Source: E&E Publishing

ENERGYWIRE — Tue., October 13, 2015
READ FULL EDITION

Directory of Open Access Journals — DOAJ

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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:

  • 10,569 Journals
  • 6,464 searchable at Article level
  • 134 Countries
  • 2,091,552 Articles

Seen in “Outstanding Websites of 2014”, Choice, Sept. 2015, p. 33

ProQuest full text of scholarly journal content soon indexed by Google Scholar

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By Kurt Sanford, CEO

“ProQuest is enabling the full text of its scholarly journal content to be indexed in Google Scholar, improving discovery and research outcomes. Our goal is that by the third quarter of 2015, users starting their research in Google Scholar will be able to access full text via ProQuest.”

http://www.proquest.com/blog/pqblog/2015/Why-ProQuest-is-working-with-Google.html

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Tuesday, 18th August 2015

ProQuest Scholarly Content Now Discoverable in Google Scholar

By Africa S. Hands

From No Shelf Required:

ProQuest has marked another milestone in ease of access to its rich research content. The full text of its scholarly content – including journals and working papers – is now indexed in Google Scholar, enabling Google Scholar users to seamlessly discover and access their library’s ProQuest collections. Efficiency and productivity for both ProQuest and Google Scholar users is improved, while libraries benefit from increased usage for their subscribed collections.

Full story >>

http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/2015/08/12/proquest-scholarly-content-now-discoverable-in-google-scholar/

Source via: ResourceShelf Newsletter – 8th September 2015

[ResourceShelf] Newsletter 643

BioOne — adding 7 titles, but after 12/2015 ceasing to contain Entomological Soc. of Am. & Am. Soc. of Mammalogists publications

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” 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)

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US 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
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The Plant List

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  • http://www.theplantlist.org/

    “As the website rather modestly states, The Plant List is “a working list of all known plant species.” In other words, botanically inspired readers will find on this site basic information about 1,293,685 (and counting) different plants. Readers may like to begin with How to use this site, a comprehensive section that describes how to search The Plant List, when it is useful or not useful to conduct a search, when it is more helpful to browse, and other tips and tidbits. After getting their bearings, readers may then want to delve into the list itself. For instance, the Browse tab allows readers to look into the four major groups (flowering plants, conifers, ferns, and mosses), and then dig down into family, genera, and species. For science teachers looking for new resources to offer their students, or for anyone fascinated by plants, this collaboration between the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and the Missouri Botanical Garden is a truly comprehensive resource. [CNH]”

  • Source: The Scout Report — Volume 21, Number 32 (HTML), Aug. 21, 2015

Environmental and Public Health Indicators — database from EPA

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released updated environmental and public health indicators and made them available in an online database. “This is an online update to EPA’s Report on the Environment. Users can explore 85 individual indicators– on our air, water, land, human exposure, health and ecological condition– using interactive graphs, tables, and maps, and download the data for each indicator.”

Source:  ResearchBuzz by Tara Calishain, July 21, 2015

New York Panel on Climate Change 2015

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  • http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.2015.1336.issue-1/issuetoc“With the bulk of scientific articles and reports placed behind a paywall, it’s always a welcome gift when good research is made available for free. This report on the New York Panel on Climate Change 2015 is loaded with excellent information – and it’s free and available to anyone with an Internet connection. As the introduction to the report notes, “The climate of the New York City metropolitan region is changing – annual temperatures are hotter, heavy downpours are increasingly frequent, and the sea is rising.” The rest of the report includes a knowledgeable forward by Mayor Bill de Blasio, an executive summary on the findings of the panel, an article outlining the panel’s climate observations and projections, and chapters on sea level rise, coastal storms, coastal flooding, public health impacts, and conclusions and recommendations. For inspired readers, there are also appendices to the report that feature infographics and technical details.” [CNH]
  • Source:  Scout Report, Univ. Wisc., July 17, 2015   (Vol. 21 no. 27)

mSphere — New OA journal, American Society for Microbiology

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“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.”

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Source:  Knowledgespeak News, June 10, 2015