ChemMobi is a free application which allows iPhone / iPod Touch users to search across 30 million chemical structures via webservices.

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

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.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for their studies on the structure and function of the ribosome. Their work focused on atom-by-atom mapping of the protein-making factories within cells.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences credited the laureates in helping researchers with the scientific understanding of life and the development of antibiotics. In their work, they generated three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes.

Notably, Dr Yonath, an Israeli, is only the fourth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

For more information regarding the scientific background of the prize-winning research, please click here.

In addition, much of the three scientists’ research is represented in the CAS databases, with more than 200 references to their journal articles since 1980. To learn more, read the latest CAS – Science Connections article at: www.cas.org/newsevents/connections/ribosome.html

Three physicists shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Half of the prize goes to

Charles K. Kao
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong

“for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication”

and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

“for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor”.

You can read more at 2009 Physics Nobel Prize Resources (by American Institute of Physics).

Literature review is a crucial starting point for the research process and one that is well executed will greatly benefit the researcher.

‘Research Methods for Comprehensive Science Literature Reviews’ by Barry N. Brown provides guidelines on how you can go about doing comprehensive science literature reviews.  He has also included tips on improving database search results. 

This article is recommended for those who are doing literature reviews for the first time as it provides a systematic approach to accomplish the tasks. Let me know if you do agree.

While scientists continue to work hard on discoveries in basic science such as the sequencing of the human genome, we are not likely, in the near future, to know all about genetics to prevent congenital abnormality from occurring in newborns.

Posted here is the story of Aimee Mullins: which shows how human will power could overcome what nature has taken away.

Click here for the inspiring, beautiful and courageous story of Aimee Mullins at TEDTalks.

PS: TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. To find out more, go to http://www.ted.com/

Elsevier’s “Article of the Future” project  allows “readers individualized entry points and routes through content, while exploiting the latest advances in visualization techniques”. You can explore the features of this new format through the prototype at http://beta.cell.com. Not everyone thinks that this is anything new or innovative, you can read about what  people think of this project .