From the Province – http://www.theprovince.com/sports/soccer+robot+competes+World/3150084/story.html

After more than six years of existence, Google Scholar (GS) finally adds email alert feature, thank you very much…

If you are using GS, it is a very useful feature, allowing you to keep up to date with any new research that you searched for. The vast majority of our databases allow you to do so too, except maybe Current Index to Statistics and MathSciNet (which has RSS alerts feature)…

86 incidents are listed. Data from NOAA Office of Response and Restoration.

Access the Database

“Each year, oil and fuel spills are caused by accidents involving tankers, barges, pipelines, trucks and storage facilities. When oil leaks into water, it spreads out rapidly forming a thin layer called a sheen. It can be harmful to birds, mammals, fish and plant life, and it can foul beaches and coastal areas. Search here to see some of the cases handled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Emergency Response Division, which provides technical and scientific help when oil spills into waterways.”

More specific information would be available in some of our databases, e.g. Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management, GREENR or GreenFile

** photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/

UBC Computer Science Professor Uri Ascher was recently elected as SIAM Fellow. You can see many of his publications on his CS homepage.

Our congrats to Prof. Ascher!

Newsmaker Interview:
Imponderables Complicate Hunt For Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Dr. Paul Davies a professor at Arizona State University, Tempe discusses his role in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth.

Read the full interview here.

Other articles published by Dr. Davies include Are ALIENS among Us? Davies, Paul, Scientific American, Dec2007, Vol. 297, Issue 6, p62-69.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia

According to its press release, the LHC started smashing particles today. See also the story in NYT – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/science/31collider.html?bl

Relief was the order of the day for Canadian scientists on Thursday as the federal government brought down its fiscal blueprint for 2010-11.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty moved to partially offset scheduled cuts in the budgets of the nation’s three granting councils, though they’ll still take a blow and there’ll be tighter competition for research operating grants.

Read the ScienceInsider news article here.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom science and engineering liaison librarian

With the Winter 2010 Olympics less than 30 days away, the analytic chemists and their rivals are hard at work.

The journal Drug Testing and Analysis has a wide variety of articles looking at performance enhancing drugs and therapies.

Have a look at the article The hunt for gene dopers authored by Mansour, Mai M. H. and Azzazy, Hassan M. E.

Here’s the abstract of the article.
Gene doping, the abuse of gene therapy for illicit athletic enhancement, is perceived as a coming threat and is a prime concern to the anti-doping community. This doping technique represents a significant ethical challenge and there are concerns regarding its safety for athletes. This article presents the basics of gene doping, potential strategies for its detection and the role of promising new technologies in aiding detection efforts. These include the use of lab-on-a-chip techniques as well as nanoparticles to enhance the performance of current analytical methods and to develop new doping detection strategies. Copyright 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Medline and Web of Science and two excellent databases to monitor this spy vs spy battle between the IOC, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the performance enhancers.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Chemistry at the University of British Columbia

There are currently two very useful journal rankings SCImago and JCR. These rankings allow you to display amongst other things the h-index for a specific journal or a grouping of journals based on subject

“The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).” Scopus contains more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 open access journals. There are also over 500 conference proceedings in the database.

For more information, go to SCImago

“Journal Citation Reports® is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 7,500 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries.”
JCR Science Edition contains data from over 5,900 journals in science and technology.
JCR Social Sciences Edition contains data from over 1,700 journals in the social sciences.

For more information, go to JCR (Journal Citation Reports)

It is important to be aware of the size of the body of literature (the number of journals and conference proceedings) being indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Journals listed in JCR are indexed in the Web of Science The larger the database, the greater the possibility that articles will be discovered, read, and hopefully cited. This is especially important for open access journals, some of which have not yet been indexed in the Web of Science.

Eigenfactor ranking is based on Web of Science data.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Science and Engineering

Ron Simmer Patent and IP Expert has once agained issued his Patex Bizarre Patents Calendar.

This calendar documents the creative spirt of the human race reflected in patents.

Check out Ron’s excellent site of patent and intellectual property links at the Patex website.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Science and Engineering Liaison Librarian