From now, I plan to write a report every week about the news, announcements, important essays and interesting stories of the project. I would like to give you a clear overview of Wikipedia. I hope you’re going to enjoy the first edition.

What to start with if not this brand new wonderful project: Planet Wikimedia. It’s a blog agregator which collects all the Wikipedia related posts and blogs to make it easier to follow the changes. You can request for inclusion here. This process leads to a peer-reviewed list of feeds. (They’ve added my blog’s wikipedia tag to the list, so this post is also going to show up there.)

The way people search for and find chemistry information is always in flux.

Right now, Open Access is a hot topic (e.g. Open Source Archivangelism post) and it is interesting to see how those seeking OA sources are connecting with those who choose to share information in that way.

THE PUZZLE OF ENRICHMENT 

The mice were up late last night, as they should be. I could hear the squeaky, cheaply made Chinese running wheel going on and on and on and on.

The running wheel is, along with the equally ubiquitous mouse house and paper tube, among the most common of the modern lab's attempts to "enrich" the mouse environment. The purpose of such is to draw the mouse's attention away from the bars of the cage and into the the center of the cage.

In theory, if you could define all the factors that go into making a decision and could define exactly how important is each of these factors, and could define how these factors interact, you could make an equation that precisely solves any decision. Of course, to be perfect, this equation would have to be tweaked and amended to include the variables that are relevant to each person making the decision, and the framework of the equation would have to reflect their personal value systems, etc.

What a pain in the neck!

It's much easier (and funnier!) just to wink at the problem and shoot to mimic common sense as closely as possible with a minimum of variables. So that's what I try to do with these equations: match common sense, and hopefully provide a laugh.

On the latest episode of my podcast, Books and Ideas , I talk with Lee M Silver about his recent book,Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life. We discuss the confrontation of Faith and Biotechnology. His book is an in depth anaylsis of some of the key issues such as embryonic stem cell research and genetic engineering (including the genetic modification of crops).

As interest in the rising number of newly characterized microbial genomes mounts, powerful computational tools become critical for the management and analysis of these data to enable strategies for such challenges as harvesting the potential of carbon-neutral bioenergy sources and coping with global climate change.

The Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) data management system developed by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) addresses this challenge with the release of version 2.1. Released on the two-year anniversary of its launch, the content of IMG 2.1 is updated with new microbial genomes from National Center for Biotechnology Information’s (NCBI) Reference Sequence collection (RefSeq) latest release, Version 21.

A new light source based on fiber-optic technology promises to improve the inspection of food, produce, paper, currency, recyclables and other products. New research revealing this technology will be presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC), being held March 25-29 in Anaheim, Calif.

Currently, industrial processes for inspecting foodstuffs and other items often use "line-scan" cameras, which record images of objects one line at a time, just as fax machines scan documents on a line-by-line basis. Rapid electronic processors then detect whether there are any problems with the items and instruct mechanical actuators (such as air jets) to separate out unsatisfactory items.

Scientists have identified four Antarctic glaciers that pose a threat to future sea levels using satellite observations, according to a study published in the journal Science.

Experts from the University of Edinburgh and University College London determined the effect that Antarctica and Greenland were having on global sea level in a comprehensive evaluation of the Earth’s ice sheets. They found that together these two ice-sheets were responsible for a sea level rise of 0.35 millimetres per year over the past decade – representing about 12 per cent of the current global trend.

However, despite recent attention that has focused on the importance of the Greenland ice sheet, the research shows that its glaciers are changing too erratically to establish a trend with confidence.

The cause of one notorious childhood disease, poliovirus, could be used to treat the ongoing threat of another childhood disease, neuroblastoma. In the March 15 issue of Cancer Research, researchers from Stony Brook University report that an attenuated -- or non-virulent -- form of poliovirus is effective in obliterating neuroblastoma tumors in mice, even when the mice had been previously vaccinated against the virus.

By its nature, poliovirus destroys the cells it infects in an attempt to replicate copies of itself. When released from the cells it kills, the replicated particles then attack surrounding cells.

According to a new study from the University of Rochester, playing action video games sharpens vision. In tests of visual acuity that assess the ability to see objects accurately in a cluttered space, game players scored higher than their non-playing peers.

"Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.