The Royal Society of Chemistry, a European organization for advancing the chemical sciences, investigates the claim that Wikipedia ‘could become the main source of chemical information in 5�10 years’. The claim was made by a professional chemist who contributes to Wikipedia.

The article notes that:

This finding is supported by regular contributor Martin Walker, assistant professor of organic chemistry at the State University of New York at Potsdam, US. Many of the chemistry entries are now reasonably accurate, he said, but you have to know where to look.

According to Walker ‘there are around 10 PhD-qualified chemistry contributors, as well as several knowledgeable graduate and undergraduate chemists’ that contribute to chemistry articles on Wikipedia.

If a free service were to become an often cited and reliable source of chemistry information it would be positive, because costly reference print materials and online databases can strain school and library budgets, or may even be beyond their reach. Cost is a barrier to information. Students attending schools that can’t afford to update their expensive reference collection every year are at a disadvantage. Wikipedia is becoming an avenue to information access that transcends economic boundaries. It may someday even the playing field, and I hope it does. I wish that more chemistry professionals, and experts in other fields, see the promise for equitable education in Wikipedia and contribute.

Found [Via]

Tech.memeoroandum is depository of information and discussions pertaining to technology:

The Web is humming with reports and opinions on technology. tech.memeorandum is page A1 for these discussions. Auto-updated every 5 minutes, it uncovers the most relevant items from thousands of news sites and weblogs.

They have a feed available. Looks like a great science related resource, and many people seem to know about it already: almost 2,000 subscribers to the feed I chose on bloglines!

science, information, research

Postgenomic is a life science web log aggregator, but it does more than that:

Postgenomic collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.

For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of which web sites are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often by bioinformaticians, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently by evolutionary biologists.

Sounds interesting. It has three feeds you can subscribe to: recent top stories, recent reviews, and recent hot papers. I found out about this via The Social Software Weblog. They report that it’s currently limited to 155 blogs, and that it’s been up for less than a week. The creator of postgenomic is an anonymous scientist named ‘Stew’ who’s working on the project anonymously for fear of losing his job!

life, science, research

Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body, is an online museum (with a real world presence) administered by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. The online museum is a beautifully designed collection of exhibitions, galleries, and educational tools and resources related to forensic science and history. The entire site is illustrated with fascinating drawings and photographs. The site’s theme touches on how human anatomy is used to solve crimes. There are historical accounts of forensic science in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the gallery has a presentation of artifacts from this history.

The site is geared at the K-12 student group, but anyone might learn something.

forensic, information, museum, history

San Francisco’s Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception has a remarkable web presence. The site has more than 15,000 web pages with audio and video files, ‘exploring hundreds of different topics’. Included in these many pages is a section that has instructions for more than 500 simple experiments, a mixture of online exhibits using interactive technologies like Flash, and live webcasts from the Museum floor.

Their mission is best stated on their about page:

Our focus is on investigating the science behind the ordinary subjects and experiences of people’s lives. The topics themselves provide “hooks” that get people excited about science. Then, when we investigate these topics, we can also look at the historical and social issues surrounding them, thus providing a context for scientific exploration.

science, information

has collaborated with the National Records Archive to digitize their video. Google Video has for viewing. The account of Orson Wells reading of H.G. Well’s was fascinating. The Apollo 11 moon landing mission is a good watch as well.

, government, video, archives, history