May

6

FluTracker: Tracking the Progress of H1N1 Swine Flu

May 6, 2009 | 1 Comment

FluTracker: Tracking the Progress of H1N1 Swine Flu. The map and the data behind it were compiled by Dr. Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, using technology provided by Rhiza Labs and Google. The map was compiled using data from official sources, news reports and user-contributions.

flutracker_maps

May

5

Is the Climate Warming or Cooling?

May 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Climate Experts Warn that Short-Term Snapshots of Temperature Data Can Be Misleading: Focus Instead on the Bigger Picture. In the hotly debated arena of global climate change, using short-term trends that show little temperature change or even slight cooling to refute global warming is misleading, write two climate experts in a paper recently published by the American Geophysical Union — especially as the long-term pattern clearly shows human activities are causing the earth’s climate to heat up.

In their paper Is the climate warming or cooling? David R. Easterling of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center and Michael Wehner of the Computational Research Division at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory note that a number of publications, websites and blogs often cite decade-long climate trends, such as that from 1998-2008, in which the earth’s average temperature actually dropped slightly, as evidence that the global climate is actually cooling.

However, Easterling and Wehner write, the reality of the climate system is that, due to natural climate variability, it is entirely possible, even likely, to have a period as long as a decade or two of “cooling” superimposed on the longer-term warming trend. The problem with citing such short-term cooling trends is that it can mislead decision-makers into thinking that climate change does not warrant immediate action. The article was published April 25 in Geophysical Research Letters.

May

4

ScienceWatch: The Hottest Research of 2007-08

May 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment

ScienceWatch: The Hottest Research of 2007-08. ‘It’s time again for Science Watch from Thomson Reuters to take its annual look back at the hottest of recent research. The first table below lists the researchers who, during 2008, accounted for the the highest numbers of Hot Papers published over the preceding two years. The second table features the papers published during 2008 (aside from reviews) that were most cited by year’s end.

Among the scientists, none fielded more Hot Papers during 2008 than Kuo-Chen Chou of the Gordon Life Sciences Institute and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His 17 Hot Papers published since 2007 cover a variety of sequencing tools for predicting protein location (e.g., “Euk-mPloc: a fusion classifier for large-scale eukaryotic protein subcellular location prediction by incorporating multiple sites,” J. Proteome Res., 6[5]: 1728-34, 2007). Thirteen of these reports were coauthored with another of the featured scientists, Hong-Bin Shen.’

Scientists with Multiple Hot Papers.

The Red-Hot Research Papers of 2008.

May

4

All H1N1 Related Articles Published in PNAS Freely Available Online

May 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Seen on Liblicense – All H1N1 (swine flu) related articles published in PNAS are now freely available online: In light of the current alert about H1N1 (swine flu) issued by the World Health Organization and the public health emergency declared by the United States government, PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) has made related research articles free online at www.pnas.org to assist with research on this topic.

Twelve research articles published within the past 6 months are now freely available online. All PNAS articles are accessible at no charge after 6 months.

Read also: Free access to assist H1N1 (swine flu) effort.

Apr

27

HealthMap – Global Disease Alert Map

April 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Healthmap: Global Disease Alert Map

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. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Also from HealthMap: Swine flu alerts on Twitter.