Thursday, November 27, 2008

Drosophila resources

Here are some web resources relating to the genetics of Drosophila, the fruit fly:

Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project

Drosophila Heterochromatin Genome Project

Ensembl

Flybase

Homophila (thanks to Max Casu for drawing this to my attention) - compares human and fly genomes. Care with spelling if typing in the URL!

Interactive Fly - this has an A-Z index of genes

NCBI Entrez , perhaps in particular: Gene; Nucleotide; SNP; Taxonomy. Gene searches Flybase (see above) and provides links to PubMed

NCBI Map Viewer, graphical view of the D. melanogaster genome

WWW Virtual Library: Drosophila

The state of mycology

Radio 3 news (I had changed channels by now) reported concern over the state of mycology in the UK, with many mycologists coming up to retirement. There is concern that the UK will not be able to take advantage of the prospects for the field.

Today obviously reported this as well, as there is an audio clip here.

The state of school science

Interesting discussion on BBC R4 Today programme between Richard Pike of the Royal Society of Chemistry and John Holman of the National Science Learning Centre. RSC have done an experiment in which they gave questions from science exams from the last 30 years to present day school students and saw how they did. They think the results show that it is possible to get a good GCSE grade now with superficial knowledge of maths. NSLC was surprised that the experiment did not have a control (although it would be difficult, as they said, to go back in time to test past students).

An RSC press release, with link to their report and a petition to 10 Downing St about reversing the decline in school science, is here.

And the Guardian reports it here, with the chance to try some of the questions. Now, let's see...

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

More about PubMed

The NLM Technical Bulletin also describes some other changes - in the summary format, article title will appear first and be the link to a more detailed format, and the icons that denote full text or abstract available are going to disappear. There is a screenshot in the NLM Technical Bulletin article.

Changes to PubMed - advanced search

This, from the NLM Technical Bulletin, confirms that the tabs in PubMed are moving to the advanced search screen, and outlines some of the other changes that are afoot.

Advanced search (which I have to say I have not used a lot) is moving off beta and becoming... whatever things become after beta! Not gamma, I imagine.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Changes to PubMed - advance information

A long gap since the last posting - apologies. I was in Mull for some of the time, but mostly it is just idleness and bad planning that has led to the silence.

PubMed now displays "clipboard" next to the search box, if you have added items to the Clipboard, and this is preparation for the retiral of the tabs. The possible implication, reading the NLM information, is that these features will go to the advanced search screen?

The "recent activity" box - cause of some debate on medical library discussion lists - can now be closed.