I’ve been waiting all week to share the Periodic Table of Videos with you! While one- to four-minute videos about each of the elements in the periodic table might not sound exciting, the chemists who star in these little clips are so enthusiastic about what they do it’s hard not to get excited right along with them. You might not love Boron quite as much as Deborah Kays but you’ll be hard-pressed not to giggle along with the crew demonstrating the reactive nature of Sodium.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxZBZQaMcoI[/youtube]
Produced by a team at the University of Nottingham, the videos are all available via YouTube. They’ve also provided them on an alternate server for those who might not be able to access YouTube.
I-N-F-OdoodaDs brought to you by the letters Si, In, and many more I’m sure!
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One of our claims to fame at Oregon State University is that Linus Pauling, the only Nobel Prize winner to win two prizes in different fields (chemistry and peace), is both a graduate of and a donor to our institution. One of our other claims to fame is the Maraschino Cherry, but that is an entirely different story. Cliff Mead and his stellar crew in OSU Libraries Special Collections continue to do an outstanding job of showcasing the amazing collection of documents, letters, lab books and objects that the Paulings bestowed on OSU Libraries. From the Linus Pauling Research Notebooks to Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement, digital collections enrich research on Pauling’s scientific and social endeavors. To keep up with the all the new developments, I’ve added to my RSS reader the PaulingBlog, where special collections staff keep me apprised of new projects, products and all things Pauling. Today, for example, the blog highlighted a podcast by a Pauling biographer and a YouTube video produced by the head of the Linus Pauling Institute. Whether you are interested in the history of science, or want to learn more about the fascinating lives of Linus and Ava Pauling, PaulingBlog is a winner.
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SciVee is a site where scientists can upload videos that are 5- 10 minute descriptions of their peer-reviewed research papers. Some of the really good ones synchronize the author’s oral presentation with parts of the paper, for example the charts, graphs and images. SciVee calls these publication podcasts “Pubcasts.” I have to admit, when I first saw “pubcast,” I thought “Oh the biologists are down at the brewpub again, and decided to podcast their conversations.” SciVee’s pubcasts are even better than that would be. Using the pubcasts would be a great way to introduce students to the research papers they describe. SciVee pubcasts also appear to be driving more hits to their corresponding online papers, say in PLOS Biology, so it may be worth it for authors to create pubcasts when publishing new works.
Another aspect of SciVee is the contributed science videos that people can upload to the site. This includes videos of conference presentations and “postercasts” that are not peer-reviewed. If you create an account on SciVee, you can rate add tags, and share the pubcasts and videos. You can also embed SciVee videos on your web site.
The third component of SciVee is community and there are quite a number of communities and discussion groups started on the site. The communities don’t seem widely used - some of those with more than one or two members are the American Society of Plant Biologists (7 members), Global Warming (8) and theWireless Sensor Network Research (also 8 members). It will be interesting to see how this grows over time. PLOS and NSF as well as the San Diego Supercomputer Center are partners in this venture.
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Earlier this week I looked out my office window just in time to see two Bald Eagles fly by. It was pretty awesome, and I knew they were Bald Eagles because their markings are pretty distinctive. Often, though, when we spot an avian creature, the conversation goes something like this: “look, look, look!” “what is it?” “uh…I dunno…an osprey?” “no way, that’s not an osprey!” And so on. We have a few bird books, but I’m pretty excited about WhatBird.com, a free bird search engine.
There are quite a few different ways to search WhatBird.com. If have the name of a particular bird you can do a regular search. If, however, you saw an unfamiliar bird you can search by attributes: where did you see it, what did it look like, and what did it do? The Step-by-Step search allows you to narrow down possible birds one attribute at a time, and it’s smart enough not to give you options that will result in a dead end search. Just want to browse all the birds commonly found in Louisiana or shaped like ducks? That’s an option too. You can even listen to bird calls.
WhatBird.com’s interface isn’t always intuitive. In part that’s because as a totally novice birder, I sometimes had trouble knowing what to choose (was that bird perching-like? Was its bill cone-shaped?) but browsing around in WhatBird.com should help me know what to look for the next time I see an unfamiliar bird. Despite some minor confusion, I’ve found something interesting every time I go back. Happy office-chair birding!
(HT: eMusings)
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I learned about this great site over on academhack, a blog geared toward computers and technology in academia. Echo stands for Exploring and Collecting History Online, a “portal to over 5,000 websites concerning the history of science, technology, and industry” produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University , the same group who put out one of my favorite tools, Zotero, reviewed nearly a year ago by Hannah.
The organization of echo is really simple and makes a lot of sense. There is a standard search box which works well. Three general ways of browsing are set up: by category, by historic period, or by content type. Content type popped out as the most interesting one to me. If you want to find sites with just videos, you can hit the videos link and see only historical websites that have video resources. Neat!
Each web resource has its own record that is tagged so you can quickly see what kind of content it contains, the historic period(s) encompassed, and the general category or categories it falls under. You can see these tags in the image to the right. As you can see, some records even contain excerpts and annotations. An advanced search option lets you create your own combination of all of these things in a custom search.
This is one of those sites where I could just get lost browsing through all of the really cool web destinations that include museums, archives, universities, just about every organization type you can think of.
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Remember paging through the World Book Encyclopedia’s human anatomy section where each turn of the plastic pages adds a layer of the human system: circulatory, musculoskeletal, endocrine?
Visible Body offers that same experience virtually. You do have to sign up, you can only use Internet Explorer 7, and, the different body systems do have to download the first time you use it. Note that the download does take some time, but after that you’re ready to go.
The content is presented at an undergraduate level and billed as the most comprehensive, anatomically accurate, 3D model. The providers, Argosy Publishing, plan a g-rated version.
It’s a great way to learn terminology, location of parts and components of systems. When I searched on stomach, it was added to the body and I was shown a close up. It takes a few tries to learn the difference between the options to show, hide, hide others and transparent, but adding systems and even adding individual components is quite easy.
One of the features is a button that lets you turn the model 360 degrees-you can also do this with a click of the mouse. You can almost make it flip, too! That was fun. Now if I could just get the arms and legs to move. Good thing I wasn’t a bio or anatomy major-I’d just want to make fake scary sounds with the models.
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Remember the good ole days of seventh grade science? Dissecting frogs, learning about mitosis, and watching grainy videos of cells swimming around in a test tube? Well, I don’t know what’s happening on the frog front, but the grainy video-watching days have the opportunity to be revolutionized by a couple of new science video sites. My personal favorite is JoVE (the Journal of Visualized Experience). Admittedly, this goes significantly beyond the seventh grade biology student’s experience level, and instead shoots for an audience of researchers. The basic idea behind JoVE is that scientists have typically learned new protocols either by reading about them (and then trying to figure out what the heck the author meant) or by actually observing someone in their own lab carry out the procedure. JoVE uses peer-reviewed videos to demonstrate scientific techniques so that protocols can be learned by a broad community of scientists. This method has the potential to greatly standardize the way techniques are executed (not to mention minimize frustration levels when you realize the protocol author missed a step in their description).
Another option for science videos - more to the seventh grader’s liking - is ScienceHack. ScienceHack indexes any science videos from YouTube and anywhere else they can find them and packages them fairly cleanly in one spot. There is a greater audience range for ScienceHack, for example, the Chemistry section has videos with Jay Leno messing around with chemicals, a video explaining a basic weighing procedure, and some in depth chemical reactions. The tagline of ScienceHack says that “every science video on ScienceHack is screened by a scientist to verify its accuracy and quality.” This seems improbable (unless they have a different definition of “scientist” than I do) since the only references provided for the videos are from Wikipedia (no scientific journal articles), and the line between science and entertainment can be rather thin at times. In spite of this complaint, ScienceHack does have some quality videos included and would be well worth the time of the budding seventh-grade scientist or even the thirty-something armchair scientist.
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We all know about Angelina Jolie and her philanthropic globe-trotting ways. I recently read that she stays up late reading about world issues online and so I recommend that Angie bookmark this website: HealthMap. It’s sure to keep her up an extra hour or two.
According to their website, “HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.”
If you’re a health professional or traveling anytime soon, you’re sure to find HealthMap a useful website. When I first visited HealthMap I was mesmerized for several minutes by the marker alerts. Right now it looks like Iceland is the place for a healthy vacation with 0 alerts. My area, Oregon, is apparently experiencing a tuberculosis outbreak. However, according to one of the news clips that pops up when I select the marker, it’s “no risk to the public”. Phew. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of a hypochondriac.
HealthMap is a mashup created by two entrepreneurial types at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard Medical School.
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I remember looking through my university’s course catalog, imagining all of the cool courses I would take once I got to university. There were so many intriguing options: sociology, anthropology, linguistics, geology, history and astronomy come to mind. I wanted to learn it all, and thought I could, until I saw the requirements. Physics, calculus, chemistry. No way! I knew I was no whiz in these areas. That and the realities of how many courses one person can take meant shelving most of these aspirations.
Now with, GalaxyZoo, we can all get a sense of what it is like to be an astronomer. GalaxyZoo has opened up classifying galaxies to the public. Apparently, the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than computers. This skill is necessary for categorizing galaxies and helps scientists learn about millions of galaxies.
Before classifying, everyone takes a short tutorial and trial. You will learn how to identify sprial, elliptical and merging galaxies, stars and satellite trails. Then, pass a trial and you’re ready to contribute to Galaxy Zoo. (If you don’t pass the trial, you can try again.) Even if you don’t take the trial, it’s worth perusing the tutorial to view all of the amazing images. Fun! I love being able to play at astronomy without learning physics or calc!
p.s. Thanks to L.K. for the suggestion.
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For those of you who grew up in Kansas (sorry hubby), the deal with evolution is that it often needs long periods of time to take place. Luckily for those of us with an interest in the biological sciences, the scientific journal Nature is evolving fast enough for lowly web observers like myself to actually see change happen. Nature has gone Web 2.0 with their new Nature Precedings. Nature Precedings marks the evolution from the peer-review, high cost subscription, travel to far-away conferences to discuss the latest findings with your peers model to a site that accepts work that is not peer-reviewed (but of high scientific quality), where papers can be submitted and accepted on the same day, where readers can view the papers and poster presentations for free and where discussion forums allow conversations about bioscience topics to take place any time, anywhere. Heck, they’re even using tagging and a voting system to indicate popularity of the papers submitted. While physicists and mathematicians already had a free pre-print service in arXiv.org, arXiv does not have the level of interactivity that Nature Precedings does.
It will be really interesting to see how biology-oriented scientists react to a non-peer reviewed, but high quality system of communicating their work. I hope it catches on and that people submit some really cool stuff and discuss the nitty-gritty of their fields. Of course, I’m sure the cost burden of this site still falls on those who subscribe to the regular version of Nature, but if a little change can happen at one publisher - maybe others will follow?
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WARNING: You should never use the internet to diagnose or treat yourself. Consult your doctor NOT the internet.
I admit it, I’m a total hypochondriac. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, you can only imagine what it’s been like to be my husband for the past 10 years. The poor guy has to listen to my weekly updates on all sorts of potential ailments, “I have a headache, I’m worried it might be brain cancer…my toes are tingly, it’s probably a sign of the onset of MS.” I have no idea how I got to be this way, nor do my parents. It’s highly annoying– even to me!
The only thing that sometimes soothes my worries is the internet. Once I decide I’ve got a life threatening illness I consult numerous websites to determine the symptoms and signs. Usually this calms me down until my headache subsides or my toes stop tingling. Now, I will no longer have to visit multiple sites, because MEDgle is a great source of medical information (not to mention, kinda fun!). I really like the graphic interface – touch the arm, and get a host of potential problems! Select the problem that most closely matches your symptoms and the symptom gets added to the search engine.
Although I know I’ll be using MEDgle quite a bit, I also know that many people are becoming too reliant on the internet as a source for medical information rather than consulting their doctors. So, again, MEDgle is for information purposes only, and should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment.
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