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.

Launched by NCBI, Rapid Research Notes (RRN) “allows users to access and cite research that is provided through participating publisher programs designed for immediate communication.”

The RRN archive was prompted in part by the spring 2009 worldwide outbreak of H1N1 influenza and the call for a means to quickly share research information about this critical and emergent public health threat. To address the influenza information sharing need, the Public Library of Science developed PLoS Currents: Influenza, the first collection being archived in RRN.

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/