Here is the list of Amazon Editors’ Picks for 2009.

• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
• Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species by Sean B. Carroll
• Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
• Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions by Susan R. Barry
• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo
• Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders
• The Mathematical Mechanic: Using Physical Reasoning to Solve Problems by Mark Levi
• Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster by Allan J McDonald
• Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 by John Harley Warner
• The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math’s Most Contentious Brain Teaser by Jason Rosenhouse

Nature is 140 years old with the publication of the 5 November issue! Nature first appeared on 4 Nov 1869. To mark the anniversary, it has published a two page miscellany from the very first issue and from other issues in 1889, 1909, 1929, 1949, 1969 and 1989.

Singapore has secured one million doses of the H1N1 vaccine. So far, 250,000 doses were received and another 750,000 are expected to arrive before the year-end.

If you are unsure if you need one, the two websites below should help.

Ministry of Health, Singapore

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

From early October, the PubMed homepage has been streamlined with the aim to make it easier for users to find resources. The new homepage includes an NCBI Header, Search Bar, and Footer that are common to all PubMed pages. Click here to read more about the changes made.

To read more about the feedback to the new interface of PubMed, refer to the posts by Martin Fenner and Jacqueline Limpens.

Tips on downloading citation from PubMed to EndNote X3:
1) Search PubMed and copy journal article title that you want to download to EndNote.
2) At EndNote X3, select “Online Search Mode” which is represented by a globe icon.
3) Select “PubMed (NLM)” under Online Search.
4) Paste journal article title on search interface.
5) When item is retrieved, click “ok” when prompted for citation to be downloaded.

Listed below is a selection of notable journals in Biological Sciences subscribed by NTU Library:

1. Cell
2. PLoS Biology
3. Nature Reviews. Drug Discovery
4. Nature Reviews. Molecular Cell Biology
5. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry
6. Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology
7. Nature Genetics
8. Annual Review of Immunology
9. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews
10. Annual Review of Neuroscience
11. Annual Review of Plant Biology
12. Journal of Virology

All the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize have been announced. To see the list of winners for the various prizes, visit the Nobel Foundation official website. Of special interest to the Science community are the awards for Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry and Physics.

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.

The list of books written/edited by the Nobel laureates or related to the prize, and available in NTU Library, are listed below:

De Lange, T., V. Lundblad, and E.H. Blackburn, eds. Telomeres  2006, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press: Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

Brady, C., Elizabeth Blackburn and the story of telomeres : deciphering the ends of DNA 2007, MIT Press.

Jörnvall, H., ed. Physiology or medicine, 2001-2005 Nobel lectures, including presentation speeches and laureates’ biographies 2008, World Scientific: Singapore.

Jornvall, H., ed. Physiology or medicine, 1996-2000 Nobel lectures, including presentation speeches and laureates’ biographies. 2003, World Scientific: Singapore.

Oct 19 to 24 is Open Access Week. Open Access is a movement within the global research community to make published work freely available, immediately after publication. The Budapest Open Access Initiative, introduced in 2002, articulated the philosophy behind it. Open access quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers.

You may also take part in the initiative by depositing your published work with DR-NTU. DR-NTU comprises two Digital Repositories: DR-NTU (Open Access) and DR-NTU (Restricted Access). DR-NTU (Open access) focuses primarily on collecting conference papers and journal articles by NTU faculty & researchers for which publishers permit self archiving in open access repositories. DR-NTU (Restricted access) comprise student submissions such as theses, work attachment reports and final year project reports that require user authentication to access the full text.

The trial of GeoRef, GeoRef in Process and GeoBase on different platforms have been set up. This will allow users an opportunity to compare the platforms in areas such as search results, search interface, how results are displayed, ease of exporting citations, etc.

If you are keen to try it out, please go to “Databases” at Library homepage (www.ntu.edu.sg/library) and select via alphabetical order the name of the platform. Please click here to access GSW.

Users may provide feedback at http://webx.ntu.edu.sg/survey/se.ashx?s=725689BC7A6B8D1B

NTU Library has set up a trial of the database GeoScienceWorld (GSW). GeoScienceWorld provides online access to publications in the geosciences; it is built around a core database of peer-reviewed journals such as Clays and Clay Minerals, Geological Society of America Bulletin, Journal of Environmental & Engineering Geophysics, Journal of Sedimentary Research, Journal of the Geological Society, Seismological Research Letters, etc. GSW can be accessed from the library’s database page under the ‘Announcements’ section.