web resources

Some time ago, the National Library of Medicine opened a new exhibition called ‘Against the Odds: Making a Difference in Global Health’ in the library foyer on NIH campus, Bethesda. Featured stories include the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the US, the Chinese barefoot doctor movement, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and the WHO smallpox eradication program. I haven’t […]

A group of people from geography and STS departments at University College London, Cambridge and Southampton (Gail Davies, Kezia Barker, Brian Balmer, Richard Milne, and Rob Doubleday) have put together an online reader on the geographies of contemporary technoscience. “Part of a more general ‘spatial turn’” (i.e., yet another turn!), the explicit aim of the project is to draw attention to […]

In yesterday’s issue of Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) bioscientists Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith have an interesting article titled “Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy”. The authors notice that scientific institutions have been pretty slow to adopt the blog medium, in spite of the fact that […]

Back in 2006 we wrote enthusiastically about the first issue of the online Journal of Visualized Experiments — the aim of which is to publish video films of experimental work to help apply laboratory protocols. A “YouTube for test tubes”, as it was then called. Since then JoVE has published more than 200 videos of laboratory procedures. Now (says Nature, 4 Sept, p […]

There are many ways of finding biomedical images on the web for exhibition use, and some are better the others. Getty Images, which is otherwise a fantastic online repository of professional high-quality images, is practically useless for a small museum like ours. Search ‘protein’, for example, and you get over a thousand images of eggs, tofu and pork meat […]

Sorry, there was no posting yesterday. Some of my co-contributors are on vacation, some are busy-busy writing chapters for our forthcoming book, and one is on parental care leave. And I didn’t post because I spent my spare-time yesterday reading a blog that I’ve never heard about before — Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0. I found it because I had a chat with my colleague Bodil […]

More results of playing with Wordle: here are the 221 members of the History of Biomedical Research Interest Group (BRHIG) gathered for a ‘group picture’: A nice touch is that Wordle incidentally uses its one and only institutional member (because it has such a long name) as a ‘rope’ from which the rest of the group hangs. And […]

Here’s the audience gathering for the session on ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0’ organised by Gustav Holmberg for the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference (PCST-10) held in Malmö a month ago (read more on our joint session blog). And here’s my own paper for the event (responses are welcome, it needs a lot of improvement and re-writing […]

A couple of days ago I tried to make a cloud of eDrugSearch‘s latest list of health and medicine blogs. But since I couldn’t make Wordle process all 883 blog names on the list into one single display, I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names (see the result here). Wordle doesn’t explictly say there is a size limit, however. […]

A couple of years ago there were only a few biomedical animation movies. Now they seem to be all over YouTube. I have commented on the biomedanimation phenomenon before (e.g., here, here and here), but always feel an urge to come back to it, because I believe these movies (and there are many more in the pipeline because of the pull from […]

A profile is (says OED) “a short biographical sketch or character study, esp. of a public figure.” But the National Library of Medicine’s Profiles in Science site is more than a series of profiles—it’s also a potentially useful and searchable online collection of documents and iconographic material relating to “several prominent twentieth-century American biomedical scientists.” Unfortunately, the […]

“Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins” is the catchy title of an article in Genome Biology two months ago (vol. 9, issue 5, 2008; see online version here). The paper has received some attention in the blogosphere—not least because Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is one of the 23 co-authors of the paper. Celebrity aside, both the project […]