The James Lind Library
http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/
The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh presents the James Lind Library, an online collection launched this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the publication of Lind's Treatise of the Scurvy -- "one of the earliest accounts of a fair comparison of different medical treatments." The James Lind Library serves "to introduce people to the characteristics of fair tests and to illustrate how these tests have evolved." The Web site offers online documents from dozens of books and journal articles, and new records are added regularly. The site also offers a valuable overview of the concepts of systematic review, experimental bias, and the effects of chance. [RS]
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BioMedNet: AACR 2003
http://news.bmn.com/conferences/list/view?fileyear=2003&fileacronyn=AACR&pagefile=content.html
BioMedNet's Conference Reporter presents coverage of the July 2003 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). BioMedNet's Conference Reporter is produced by "a top-notch team of professional science writers" and provides readers with "a quick but authoritative overview of what they missed by not attending a conference -- or, for those who did attend, of what happened at the sessions they missed." The AACR meeting included presentations on the therapeutic value of RNAi, haywire protein synthesis, oncogenes, and much more. Users must first complete a free registration with BioMedNet to access the conference reports. [RS]
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Nature Web Focus: SARS [pdf]
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/sars/
The journal Nature offers this free Web focus on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS), in which "Nature's reporters pose key questions about the outbreak, and assess our preparedness to deal with future viral threats." Reader will find dozens of articles, including editorials, Science Updates, and Brief Communications from the journal. The articles trace the chronology of the SARS epidemic, and the section titled "What Have We Learned?" offers an excellent overview of what we know and what remains to be seen. [RS]
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CDC: West Nile Virus [pdf]
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/westnile/surv&control.htm
This Web site contains the most recent West Nile virus data from the Centers for Disease Control. The main features include a 2003 Human Case Count and updated maps representing the spread of the virus. A downloadable document outlines the CDC's West Nile virus surveillance and control program, which involves weekly data collection for wild birds, sentinel chicken flocks, human cases, veterinary cases, and mosquito surveillance. The site also provides links to general information about the virus, from the ecology and virology of West Nile to epidemiological and laboratory issues. [RS]
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DinoData
http://www.dinodata.net/
Created by Fred Bervoets, DinoData is a mind-boggling online catalog of dinosaur information. Whatever dinosaur-related question you may have, chances are DinoData has an answer. Content includes classification, skeletal diagrams, a list of fossil sites, an index of dinosaur paleontologists, type species, and much, much more. Researchers and amateur dinosaur enthusiasts alike should find DinoData a valuable resource, and there's even a section for kids that includes fantastic dinosaur illustrations. Bervoets cautions users not to rely solely on the information in DinoData for research purposes, as with any other Web site. [RS]
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Missouri Botanical Garden: Madidi National Park Interactive Map [ArcIMS]
http://mobot1.mobot.org/website/madidi/viewer.htm
The Missouri Botanical Garden has recently added a new interactive vegetation map for Madidi National Park in Bolivia. The map allows users to "assemble different layers to produce a map of the park" and "identify features on the map, including specimen collections and collection sites." Users may also follow a link to the main Madidi project page to access the Flora of Madidi National Park database as well as various papers and field reports. [RS]
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Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation [pdf]
http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/
The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation is a research division of Carnegie Mellon University. The Hunt Institute "specializes in the history of botany and all aspects of plant science and serves the international scientific community through research and documentation." Visitors to the Web site may use a number of Institute databases, including a catalog of botanical art, an index to scientific names of organisms cited in the Linnaean dissertations, and a catalog of the Hunt Institute's library records. These and other resources are made available to meet "the reference needs of biologists, historians, conservationists, librarians, bibliographers and the public at large, especially those concerned with any aspect of the North American flora." [RS]
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The CABI Bioscience and CBS Database of Fungal Names [Microsoft Word, pdf, rtf]
http://www.indexfungorum.org/Names/Names.asp
This database of fungal names -- IndexFungorum -- is just one of many biological databases from CABI Bioscience, a branch of CAB International: a development agency formed from 40 member countries to "support the generation, access to and use of knowledge for sustainable agriculture, environment management, and human development." The fungal names database is a joint project of CABI Bioscience and the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures (CBS) - an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Users may easily search the database by fungal name, and then click on an entry to access more data. The Web site offers a free downloadable supplement to the Authors of Fungal Names (originally published in 1992).
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