Relaunch of ChemSpider

Announcement of Relaunch of ChemSpider
From announcement: “The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) will be re-launching ChemSpider, its free, online resource for chemical structure searching, at the American Chemical Society’s Fall 2009 National Meeting and Exposition in Washington, DC, August 16-22.”

WolframAlpha and Chemistry

WolframAlpha Chemistry 101
Check out all the chemistry data and computations on WolframAlpha. If you haven’t used WolframAlpha yet, go there now!

Archival Collections of Scripps

Archival Collections at Scripps
Search the finding aids and online collections of photographs, movies and other documents at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. This is an interesting site for anyone interested in Scripps’ history and history of oceanography in general.

Science Journals Migration to Online Formats

Science moves from the Stacks to the Web
An interesting article about the American Chemical Society’s move to publishing almost all of their journals online-only. Also discusses some of the pros and cons of transitioning to online-only publications.

WorldWideScience.org News

WorldWideScience.org
WorldWideScience.org (gateway for science information) made the following announcement that now you can share your findings through social networking sites. There are a few other new features that you may want to check out as well.

CAS Launches Free Web-Based “Common Chemistry”

Common Chemistry Press Release
This is a neat resource for the general public. It allows people to look up CAS Registry numbers and chemical names. It isn’t comprehensive, but does contain information on “7800 chemicals of widespread and general interest.” Direct link to Common Chemistry: www.commonchemistry.org

10 Strange Species Discovered Last Year

Wired’s article on 10 Strange Species Discovered Last Year
This is a great article, with fantastic images, of 10 species discovered last year. It might be a nice article to point students in ecology or biodiversity classes to read.

Lifehacker

Lifehacker
While not strictly a science resource, Lifehacker is a great resource for tips, tricks and “life hacks” to make your life and work easier. If you haven’t checked it out, you don’t know what you are missing. It is a great resource and you can even RSS the posts.

Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar

Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar
An interesting paper looking at the strengths and weaknesses of these four journal article databases. This might be interesting for students to read, especially if they are prone to searching Google Scholar at the expense of these other subject specific databases.

Standards for Online Datasets

“We Need Standards for Online Datasets (PDF)”
White paper about the need to publish standardized datasets online along with proposed guidelines and standards. An interesting idea that would definitely make it easier to use datasets and to preserve them in the online environment.