Developed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), InChI is an abbreviation for International Chemical Identifier. It is a textural identifier for chemical substances, machine and human readable, and provides a means to search for chemical subtances on the Web and in databases. These YouTube videos on the InChI Trust Channel describe InChI and its uses.
There are books in the Science Library reference collection on job opportunities and career guidance. Several of these books are on display on the low shelves in the reference collection; they cover the disciplines of biology, biotechnology, bioengineering, mathematics, computer science, computing, computer programming, engineering, and chemistry. In addition to these, there are 2 books available online: Careers in Chemistry and Careers in Physics. There are also career tools and test preparation practice tests in the Testing & Education Reference Center.
Containing 478 articles, the Encyclopedia of Mathematics and Society focuses on the fundamental science and mathematics of everyday life. It tries to explain the how and why mathematics works. In addition to the online version, there is a print edition in the Science Library reference collection at QA 10.7 E53 2012 (3 volumes).
According Guinness World Records, this is the Smallest Stop-Motion Film, A Boy and His Atom:
For the science and technology behind the movie, check out how it was made.
Chemical Safety Videos:
From the Institute of Physics, MedicalPhysicsWeb contains resources including the latest research, news, and opinion as well as recommended journals, videos, job opportunities, a buyer's guide, white papers, events, and a listing of professional societies.
3ders.org provides up-to-date news and information about 3D printers and printing. The site includes price comparisons for 3D printers, videos, top 3D printing Websites, a Q&A on the basics, and a discussion forum. Below is one of their videos: "What Can You Make with a 3D Printer?"
GitHub is a service to help software developers. It uses Git for revision control and source code management. GitHub offers 2 plans: a paid plan for private projects and a a free plan for open source projects. There are also social networking aspects including feeds and following that allows developers to collaborate.
A few weeks ago I blogged about Altmetrics. Below is a recorded webinar about Altmetrics from CINF, the Chemical Information Division of the American Chemical Society. It features Jason Priem, a Ph.D. candidate in Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. Mr. Priem covers the history of scholarly communications, measuring impact, altmetrics, and ImpactStory, an open source tool for gathering and highlighting altmetrics.
From the American Chemical Society's Chemical & Engineering News, Nano SCENE provides up-to-the-minute news about nanoscience and nanotechnology, including coverage of nanofabrication and assembly, characterization of nanostructures, bionanotechnology, organic and inorganic nanomaterials, and nanodevices.
In the video below, mathematician Paul Lockhart talks about his book Measurement, Harvard University Press, 2012. The Science Library has this book; call number: QA 447 L625 2012.
ACS' news magazine, Chemical & Engeering News, provides up-to-the-minute chemistry news. All news can be viewed or the following subject-specific news can be selected: analytical, biological, environmental, JACS in C&EN, materials, nano, and organic. The news is also available via RSS feed or weekly email.
DDE is a Department of Energy repository for datasets from DOE sponsored research. Its contents include numeric data, computer simulations, figures and plots, interactive maps, multimedia, and scientific images The repository can be searched by keywords or browsed by title, content type, DOE data center, DOE user facilty, host Website, sponsor, or subject category.
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) to launch a data repository in Spring 2014. The open access repository, called Scientific Data, will begin accepting scientific datasets this Fall. Initially, the datasets will be from the life, biological, and environmental sciences, but NPG expects to expand the repository to all scientific fields. Additional information can be found here.
Altmetrics (alternative metrics) are the up and coming way to measure academic research impact. Traditionally, metrics like cited references, journal impact factor, and journal rank have been used. Altmetrics seeks to exploit online activity like article downloads, citations on social media sites and blogs, and bookmarks in online reference managers. For more information about altmetrics see Altmetrics: A Manifesto.
The Art of Problem Solving contains problems from international competitions, undergraduate competitions, and national and regional competitions. There are solutions for about 5% of the problems.
The Interactive Patent Coverage Map displays known patent search systems for countries selected.
In honor of Pi Day, the video below explains the U.S. debt limit using simple math. If you're looking for a video related to Pi, please view this Khan Academy video.
This report from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics describes how mathematical sciences are used in industry. It also examines the skills, training, and curriculum that best prepares students for careers in industry.
From the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, this resource describes career opportunites in applied mathematics and computational science outside of academia.
Thanks to Israel's Technion, the operating room of the future is not too far away. Check out this video:
This page contains images and videos of a meteor burning up over Russia, and the damage it caused.
In honor of Valentine's Day: The Heart Nebula.
DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia. One of their goals is to improve access to European theses. The E-theses Portal provides access to the full text of theses from over 527 institutions in 27 countries. There's a basic search engine as well as the ability to browse by university, collection, country, and year. The earliest theses are from 1597.
In his blog, Tim Glowers describes the Episciences Project for mathematics scholarly communication. It is an initiative to launch a series of free open-access journals that will be arXiv overlay journals. An aim of the project is to organize peer review and publication of the mathematics literature at minimal cost, without involving commercial publishers. More information is at the Glowers blog and at Nature News.
Located at 11 East 26th Street in Manhattan, the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) is the only museum dedicated to mathematics in the United States. Although MoMath is a brick and mortar museum, its Website provides information about programs and exhibits. One its exhibits, the Math Midway, is currently traveling to museums around the U.S. MoMath is open 10 AM to 5 PM, seven days a week.
The IEEE Computer Society has announced that one of its magazines, IEEE Software, will have a multimedia version. The multimedia version will allow readers viewers to access audio, video and other formats to augment the magazine's articles and clarify important concepts. An iPad app is in the works.
TRAIL is a collaborative project to identify, digitize, archive, and provide access to federal technical reports issued prior to 1975. It also contains reports issued after 1975. TRAIL has basic and advanced search functions.
Kremlin: Cryptographic Algorithms provides an overview and description of secret key cryptographic algorithms. It is organized into block ciphers, stream ciphers, and hash algorithms. The descriptions include links to additional information.
Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) registers its 70 millionth substance (RN 1411769-41-9). The substance is from a patent application submitted to the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), and is a potential T-type calcium channel blocker. More information is available here.
Selected sessions and lectures from the Fall Meeting of American Geophysical Union (AGU) will be streamed live and are freely available to the public. The meeting begins on Monday, December 3, 2012. The virtual sessions can be viewed here. The schedule of streamed sessions and lectures are also available towards the bottom of the same page.
In this 2011 TEDx talk, Michael Nielsen covers some of that same open science topics that are in his book: Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Generally, I do not post entries about print resources, but this came my way via the SLA PAMNET listserv and it falls in the category of underutilized. The resource is A Source Book in Physics by William Francis Magie, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. It contains important contributions in physics for the years 1600 to 1900 from scientists like Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Torricelli, Boyle, Coulomb, Cavendish, Ampere, Helmholtz, Davy, Joule, Bernoulli, Kelvin, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Faraday, Franklin, Volta, Ohm, Henry, Gauss, P. Curie, M. S. Curie, Hertz, Roentgen, Becquerel, and others. Many of the papers are difficult find; all are in English. A list of all contributions is available here.
From the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin, this resource "describes three systems of documentation: the citation-sequence system, the name-year system, and the citation-name system" for CSE (Council of Science Editors) Style. It is based on Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers. The print version is available in the Science Library at REF LB 2369 C68x 2006.
Created by Henry Reich (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics), Minute Physics is a YouTube channel. It contains a growing collection of short videos that explain and distill important concepts in physics.
One more in honor of Open Access Week 2012: Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen at phdcomics.com explain the issues surrounding open access publishing.
In honor of Open Access Week 2012, here are a few OA resources:
In honor of Open Access Week 2012, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) have joined forces to produce a guide to openness in publishing: HowOpenIsIt? It provides a sliding scale from open access to closed access for 6 categories: reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability.
This version of the Encyclopedia of Mathematics is jointly published by Springer and the European Mathematical Society. It is based on the Soviet "Mathematical Encyclopedia" and its English translation. It is open access in wiki format, and contains over 8,000 entries. The encyclopedia can be searched or browsed.
From the ACS Green Chemistry Institute, Green Chemistry Resources lists organizations involved with green chemistry, a set of education aids, including videos, and employment resources.
Earlier this week, on October 2, I wrote about science documentaries as a subject. That post linked to a blog that lists Websites that includes STEM documentaries. It appears directly below this entry. This post describes the Science Documentaries Website which specializes in science and technology documentaries. It contains documentaries and lectures in the fields of physics, math, biology, IT, technology, astronomy, and a few other subjects. It also includes several short films.
Looking for a documentary? Free Technology for Teachers blog lists "7 Places to Find and Watch Documentaries Online." Although none of the sites concentrates on science and technology, nearly all of of them has some documentaries in categories like science, technology, nature, math, environment, health, and medicine
Laser Focus World provides news, trends, and in-depth coverage of optoelectronic and photonic technologies and applications. There are also educational webcasts.
Published by Mathematical Sciences Publishers, Celebratio Mathematica is a scholary open access collection that celebrates mathematics and mathematicians. The growing collection contains information about important scientists and includes biographies, bibliographies, and images.
Sometime within the next 4 or 5 months, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) will register the 70,000,000th substance in its Registry database. Registry is one of several databases that is a part of SciFinder. It contains substance information including chemical structures, chemical names, properties, commercial availability, and regulatory information. CAS is holding a contest to guess the date and time when the 70,000,000th substance will be registered. The winner will receive an iPad. The contest entry form is available here. See the Registry "substance counter" here.
University of California Television (UCTV) features prorgramming from throughout the University, its three national labs, and affiliated institutions. Its goal is to "transport knowledge far beyond the campus borders and into the homes and lives of inquisitive viewers around the globe." The Science and Technology section covers atmospheric and climate science, biosciences, chemistry, computer science, ecology, materials science, mathematics and statistics, nanoscience, physics, and many other subjects.
Codeacademy is an interactive, online learning environment to learn coding. Its current offering include JavaScript, Python, Web fundamentals, JQuery, Web technologies (code year), and other "non-track" courses.
According to Inside Higher Ed, P2PU (with partners) has launched the first mechanical MOOC: A Gentle Introduction to Python. A MOOC is a massive open online course. A mechanical MOOC is a MOOC and an experiment in how to offer these type of courses. This experiment will use existing content from MIT OpenCourseWare and existing exercises from Codecademy. What makes it mechanical you ask? It's mechanical because "instead of a professor or university organizing the class, an e-mail scheduler will do it."
From Concordia University Libraries, this guide provides a basic indroduction to ACS style. Containing numerous examples, the guide is based on The ACS Style Guide: Effective Communication of Scientific Information (Science Library / Reference: QD 8.5 A25 2006).
Beilstein Journals is offering an app for iOS and android smartphones and tablets. The free app allows users to read all articles from the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry and the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology. Both journals are international, peer-reviewed, open access publications, and have no author publication charges. More information and the app are available here.
