http://www.coml.org/coml.htm

Three years into the most extensive biological inventory ever attempted, scientists working on the Census of Marine Life (CoML) have already found over 200,000 marine species -- just a fraction of what they expect to find at the end of this 10-year project. The CoML Web site "is designed to provide quick and easy access the all elements of the CoML and basic information about each element;" including field project overviews and reports, timely news articles, and other resources. Readers will also find the recently released "Baseline Report of the Census of Marine Life 2003" and a draft plan outlining the next 7 years. The site also includes fantastic photos of newly described species, QuickTime movies from the field, and other cool features. [RS]

http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/gm/

As this Nature Web focus explains, "just four countries account for 99% of the world's commercially grown transgenic crops," and other countries "have been stalling over whether to embrace transgenic agriculture, but won't be able to put off the decision for much longer." Readers can get an in-depth look at this issue with free features from Nature, including recent news articles, an interactive map of the world, and a link to Nature Reviews Genetics (also free of charge). [RS]

http://plants.usda.gov/cgi_bin/topics.cgi?earl=pm_publications.html

Plants Materials Publications (PM Pubs) allows bibliographic searches of journal articles, brochures, fact sheets, technical reports, and other documents produced by the Plant Materials Program of USDA's Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS). As part of NRCS's online PLANTS Database, PM Pubs "deals with the selection, establishment, growth, management, and uses of the hundreds of plants -- especially NRCS Improved Conservation Releases -- that NRCS uses for land conservation activities." Users may quickly and easily search the database by publication type, geographical area, and the usual bibliographic search options. [RS]

http://chembank.med.harvard.edu/bioactives/

ChemBank is a work in progress from the informatics group at the Institute for Chemistry and Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. ChemBank is intended "to assist biologists who wish to identify small molecules that can be used to perturb a particular biological system and chemists designing novel compounds or libraries, and serve as a source of data for cheminformatic analyses." ChemBank's Small Molecules Bioactives Database is up and running, providing chemical structures and biological activity data for over 2,000 compounds, and more useful resources are in the works. [RS]

http://vivisimo.com/demos/PubMed@NIH.html

The Pittsburgh-based company Vivísimo offers a few free demos to showcase its document clustering software that "automatically categorizes textual information into crisp, meaningful, hierarchically sorted category folders." Happily, one of the demos gives a crisp, meaningful hierarchy to PubMed publications, automatically grouping search results by topic-specific nested folders, and thus cutting down on the amount of time spent searching for articles of interest. [RS]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Education/index.html

This Web site from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) offers a set of detailed tutorials to help users make full use of NCBI's bioinformatics tools. The tutorials, which target both new and veteran users, cover NCBI's BLAST and PSI-BLAST, Entrez data retrieval system, Cn3D molecular structure software, and more. Additionally, the Science Primer tutorial offers a "basic introduction to the science underlying NCBI resources" geared more toward the general reader. [RS]

http://www.inbio.ac.cr/papers/babosasmarinas/ingles/index.html

This Web site from INBio -- Costa Rica's Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad -- documents the first inventory of opisthobranch mollusks of the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. Started in 1995, the project represents "the first grand-scale inventory in Costa Rica," and is one of the most comprehensive inventories in all of Latin America. Readers will find a detailed introduction to opisthobranch natural history, a project overview, maps of the collection areas, and a species list organized taxonomically. Photographs are available for most of the species listed; this de facto image gallery of bizarrely beautiful sea slugs is certainly worth a look. The site also provides references, Web links, and information about project participants. [RS]