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Home Subscriptions Netsurfer Digest E-Zine Netsurfer Education E-Zine Netsurfer Books E-Zine |
| Human Genome in Perspective: A Signpost, Not a Destination |
| Introduction to the Bacteria |
| Ocean World |
| The Mineral and Gemstone Kingdom |
| eNature |
| Studying the Ocean Atmosphere |
| The Cosmic Yarn Unraveled, Part I |
| The Cosmic Yarn Unraveled, Part II |
| If You Want A Space Picture Done Right, Let Someone Else Do It |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| The Plant Kingdom of Yore |
| Deep Sea Geology |
| DNA from the Beginning |
| Perchance to Surf |
| Kinship and Social Organization |
| Dismal Scientist |
| It's Not Rocket Science |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
| Netsurfer Digest |
REVIEWERS' CHOICE
Stuff we really, really liked
Human Genome in Perspective: A Signpost, Not a Destination
We don't want to minimize the importance of progress in the Human Genome Project; at the same time, we think that a lot of general news reports in the past week have overstated its exact nature. Are you aware, for instance, that researchers still don't have a handle on just how many human genes there are - and have a virtual-office pool riding on the answer? In addition, there's been scant attention paid to ethical issues that have haunted the public/private collaboration and the even larger ethical and legal issues that will flow from the results, short- and long-term. And, just what are those results apt to be, so broadly - and imminently - painted for us in the news reports? While we may not be sure just yet what it is that ATCG hath wrought or will work, we think that acknowledging the politics should probably go some way to understanding the science.Background: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~cbbc/courses/bio4/bio4-1997/16-HumanGenome.html
Salon: http://salon.com/health/feature/2000/06/27/gene_future/index.html
Place your bets: http://www.ensembl.org/genesweep.html
Genome Research Institute: http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/HGP/
Biotech info: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
EARTH SYSTEMS
No matter where you go, there you are
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/bacteria/bacteria.html
The Remarkable Ocean World is a quilt of pictures, links to briny stuff (and we don't mean smart Australians), facts, kids stuff, shopping, travel, an oceanography course, a teachers' zone, and Dr. C? Dr. Who? No, Dr. C! Click the jellyfish to find out who the folks behind this site are, including Dr. C. And don't miss Dr. C's fascinating account of his encounter with Jacques Cousteau aboard the Calypso. "My mission is to host the largest collection of online oceanographic information and multimedia content in the world", he (Dr. C not Cousteau) says. Certainly there's a great deal to see, um, look at, including a library with hundreds of digital images, and lots of lecture notes. Note that the online oceanography course is useful really only for students actually taking courses, where the intro to oceanography textbook online is a generally useful and pretty fine account of what oceanography is all about. We love the enthusiasm and a great deal of the content of this place but we're not so keen on the sometimes quirky and self-indulgent it's-here-because-it-interests-me content. And while we're carping, we don't like some of the color combinations either (dark blue on black is hard to see, and that's a crime on a Web site), although they seem limited to a contents page or two. Still the enthusiasm is what counts here and there's nothing too wrong with a little personality.
http://www.oceansonline.com/
The Mineral and Gemstone Kingdom
The Mineral and Gemstone Kingdom is a superb online reference for the geologist, collector, or interested amateur. Both the mineral and gemstone sections feature multiple searching and sorting options (alphabetical, chemical group, color streak, hardness, crystal group, and so on), and each mineral has its own illustrated and nicely laid-out page with dozens of properties, distribution, and commercial attributes. The mineral and gemstone pages have hyperlinks to other features of the site, such as the Image Gallery (which, unfortunately, is without enlargeable photographs, but still pretty good) or the extensive and excellent glossary. Other resources include pages on mineral properties and identification, chemical properties, information and tips for the collector, and a large mineralogy and collecting links list.http://www.minerals.net/
Whether you're a regular outdoors type, a casual hiker, or an armchair naturalist, eNature is your online field guide, a searchable and constantly growing database for identifying and studying over 4000 North American plant and animal species. Based on National Audubon Field Guides, Regional Guides, and Nature Guides (all of which can be ordered at this site), all pages come with enlargeable images as well as text and map information. You can even keep a personalized online record of your wildlife sightings. Bird watchers will appreciate the guides to birding and a special "Bird-Finder" feature for species identification. There are also zip-code based local wildlife guides and an illustrated habitat and life-zone section with descriptions of conditions and plant and animal species of the various sections of the country. Other features include discussion boards, a weekly sky guide, free e-greeting cards, a store (with guide books and CD-ROMs), and an Ask an Expert page.
http://www.enature.com/
If predicting the weather were easy, the six o'clock news could do more sports. But, nooo. We still get more satellite pictures and less tennis. Certainly, coastal weather and patterns influenced by large bodies of water make for some of the least predictable weather. The Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) accomplishes just this task, though. Hurricanes comes to mind first, of course, in relation to oceanic weather, but they're just one of the many phenomena and jobs that COAPS faces. There are also little things like, oh, El Nio, air-sea interactions, physical oceanography, and so on --- much of which the Center shares in lots of articles, graphs, and animations. Very interesting, for example, is the article about the impact of El Nio on United States tornado activity. The old maxim's not bad, but we say if you want to know what the weather should be, go to COAPS.
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away
The Cosmic Yarn Unraveled, Part I
CMB. It's not an acronym related to country music, junk mail, or a secretive government project. Instead, it's the term that cosmologists use to describe the Cosmic Microwave Background, eons-old radiation from deep space whose characteristics may help scientists answer questions that humanity has always wondered: How old is the universe? Will it expand forever, or collapse cataclysmically? And, just for curiosity's sake: what is the shape of the universe? When a NASA probe called COBE was launched in 1989, scientists discovered that there were "wrinkles" of heat in the infrared CMB. When the universe was very young, less than 300,000 years after the Big Bang, it was a dense soup of particles so thick that the pressure waves - the sound - from the big bang could travel through space. When things started to cool down, these pressure waves froze, in a manner of speaking, creating the infrared fluctuations, or anisotropies, astronomers see in the CMB. It's hard to explain in just a paragraph, so we'll refer you to Discover Magazine's eloquent May cover story, which focuses not only on the theories behind CMB, but the satellite successor to COBE (named MAP) that is slated to launch later this year.NASA's COBE: http://space.gsfc.nasa.gov/astro/cobe/
Discover: http://www.discover.com/may_00/featmagnificent.html
The Cosmic Yarn Unraveled, Part II
Some scientists, however, just can't wait another six months to start putting together the pieces of the puzzle. Having trekked to Antarctica in late 1998, members of the international BOOMERanG team (which gets our vote for the coolest name for a science project) sent a package of sensors into the stratosphere for a 10.5 day trip tethered to a LDB (long duration balloon). This vantage point, away from the lights and radiation of civilization, and above most of the atmosphere of earth, gave the sensor a fantastic vantage point to conduct scans of CMB anisotropy in small patches of sky. Scientific balloons don't get the publicity that rocket launches do, but for many smaller projects (and even some larger ones) in which an orbiting sensor isn't a requirement, balloons can do just as well, for a much, much smaller budget. NASA is even developing an ULDB (ultra-LDB) that would stay aloft for over 100 days at above 99% of the atmosphere, and use the small-satellite TDRSS communications network to stream data to the ground. We can't resist saying so: things are definitely looking up for scientific balloons.Scientific balloons: http://www.wff.nasa.gov/pages/scientificballoons.html
BOOMERanG: http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~boomerang/
If You Want A Space Picture Done Right, Let Someone Else Do It
Space photography has a timeless allure. Even though we've been looking heavenward for centuries, images from the vast blackness above still manage to captivate our imaginations and saturate our popular culture. (If you doubt this, just go as far as your local record shop to see the mesmerizing nebulae that unfold across the cover of the latest Pearl Jam album.) Even photos of objects closer to home, like the planets and moons of our solar system, can still strike us with a feeling of awe--reminding us of how miniscule we are amongst the teeming life on Earth, and the majestic distances of space. NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab provides just these kinds of pictures, photos taken from satellites and probes over the past decades, and has organized them into a tidy database on the Web. Whether you're browsing or have a particular image in mind, the photojournal lets you search by planet and by which spacecraft or instrument captured the image, and then provides a wealth of information about the images it returns, and includes multiple download formats and sizes. Just what you'd need to spruce up your office desktop wallpaper or to hang on your wall and contemplate.http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the cover or title to order the item at a hefty discount from Amazon.com and Beyond.com and send a few pennies our way as well.
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The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction
Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species UpdatedMATHEMATICS, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY
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Stephen Hawking's Universe: Strange Stuff Explored
If you haven't the inclination to re-read Stephen W. Hawking's classic A Brief History of Time, this Web site will refresh your memory with concise and illustrated single-page explanations of concepts and structures of quantum mechanics, particle physics, and cosmology, which are hyperlinked to further explanatory pages. The well-designed site includes wormholes, the Big Bang, quarks, quasars, black holes and superstrings; like Hawking's book, the site itself avoids mathematics and formulae (except for E=MC2) and uses everyday language for the inquisitive nonphysicist.Explanation: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/strange/html/stuff.html
Brief History: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553109537/netsurferdigest
With over 210,000 models, WebMolecules offers full 3D visualization of molecules for the chemist or the curious. Upon making sure that you have the right plug-in and system requirements (you'll need to install a 3D viewer and make sure you have a modern browser and plenty of RAM freed up), you can search for the model you want by category, by formula (based on the number of carbon atoms), by valence, by fragment category, or by orbital. The models themselves, which are strangely beautiful, are displayed in a well-equipped viewer with a toolbar that allows complete manipulation of the image, changing the size of the viewer, and even controling the background color. Services include model construction on request, an e-mail newsletter, or, if you feel the urge, the ability to build a model yourself and upload it to their collection. Not so long ago, this would have been considered the realm of science fiction. Online chemistry at its best.
http://www.webmolecules.com/index.shtml
Sounds Like A Physicist, Looks Like A Physicist, Tastes Like A ...
To call PhysLINK a Yahoo! for Physicists would be a disservice to the physics resource. Yes, it's laid out in a similar portal/community format as the Yahoo! empire; yes, it started in the mid-90s as well (as a page on GeoCities, no less). PhysLINK, however, still feels true to both its roots and its original intentions - to be the ultimate physics resource and community for physicists on the Web. Like most physicists we've met, it's crammed with useful, practical knowledge (everything from the latest science news to grad school advice), bedecked with scientific tools (easy references to constants and equations and a pop-up scientific calculator), and yet still willing not to take itself completely seriously (physics "fun" to include three styles of Einstein e-cards you can send your friends). And with a more aesthetic, better organized design than previous iterations, it's even a classy dresser - which is more than we can say about most physicists.http://www.physlink.com/
The American Physical Society - A Century Of Physics
This way-cool, interactive timeline tells the story of 20th-century physics from 1896. Browse by decade; use the alphabetical index to find specific events, concepts, or individuals; go from event to event; or, simply run the slider along the timeline to get to where you want to go. Richly illustrated, many of the events are enlivened with animated applets, and a color coding system helps order the various aspects of discoveries in physics by breaking them down into the cosmic scale, the human scale, the atomic scale, the living world (the relationship of physics to biology and medicine), and technology. Another nice touch are the references to art and culture on the decade pages to remind us that science is only one of several perspectives.http://timeline.aps.org/APS/home_HighRes.html
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Mathematician?
Seven "unsolvable" mathematical mysteries, each prized at $1million (USD). Are you game? The Clay Mathematics Institute from Cambridge, Massachusetts, is reviving a challenge begun by famous mathematician David Hilbert in 1890, by offering a hefty reward for the solution of seven mathematical stumpers that hold the key to breakthroughs in aeronautics, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. It seems straightforward enough, but as usual, reading the fine print reveals a catch. Your solution must have been published for two years before judges will even look at it. On top of that, the problem descriptions for some of the questions are poorly worded and extremely vague. Never expect an easy million from a group of mathematicians.http://www.ams.org/claymath/
T-4? No, not another form for the rapacious Canadian tax man! This is another of the Los Alamos National Laboratory's labs, the Atomic & Optical Theory group to be precise, whose members, postdocs, and visiting scientists study such topics as atomic structure, scattering cross sections, and quantum and nonlinear optics with applications ranging from nuclear weapons design to fusion and industrial situations. There's a generous amount of information here, with links to numerous professional articles about work conducted in the T-4 group, including simulations of dense plasmas, plasma modeling, frequency conversion, adaptive optics (winner of Links2Go Web page award), and quantum computing. There's also a list of student and postdoc opportunities and the inevitable and interesting links section. There's a listing of staff and visitors, too.
http://www.t4.lanl.gov/
ARCHEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY
What is past is prologue
http://scitec.uwichill.edu.bb/bcs/bl14apl/bl14apl.htm
Consider this: about 70% of Earth's surface is covered by oceans; so, a lot of information about our farthest history is covered by a fair amount of water. This realization is the starting point for paleoceanography, a complex term describing the study of ocean sediments deposited over tens and hundreds of millions of years. Their analysis offers data about the history of global climate, for example, with enough detail that scientists can understand the causes of climate change. This site offers an overview of the discipline and ongoing research, and points us to related links.
http://www.geo.su.se/geologi/forskning/deepsea/about.html
MEDICINE, BIOLOGY AND ZOOLOGY
It's alive! It's alive!
http://vector.cshl.org/dnaftb/index.html
Goodness knows that between career and leisure, commutes and getaways, family and friends, none of us gets enough sleep to start with. But, there are those of us who can't even sleep - or be entirely awake - when we want, the result of problems ranging from occasional insomnia through narcolepsy and other chronic debilitating disorders. These two sites tuck into sleep and wake disorders, offering resources and advice, discussion and support groups, and informational and commercial links. Sleep/Wake Disorders Canada provides an excellent virtual resource library and an international list of clinics (without implying endorsement) for treatment of sleep disorders. Sleepnet's aim is to "link all the sleep information located on the internet". The goal's an honorable one, 'though not achieved yet. Nevertheless, Sleepnet houses a great deal of information on these disorders. It also offers well organized and categorized discussion fora. There's a direct link with the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to improving health and safety by encouraging understanding of sleep and sleep disorders, and by supporting public education, sleep-related research, and advocacy.
Sleep/wake disorders: http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/1837/
Sleepnet: http://www.sleepnet.com/
ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND GEOGRAPHY
All that we see or seem
Kinship and Social Organization
Analyzing this most basic and widespread form of human organization, this online tutorial from the University of Manitoba describes the varying ways kinship is defined in different cultures for anthropological analysis. Aided by the liberal use of kinship diagrams, illustrations, and animations, the study compares different classifications of kinship, i.e. systems of descent, terminologies, marriage systems, and residence rules (or who gets to live with the in-laws). Case studies present ethnographic examples of social organizations and genealogies among Turkish peasants, the ancient Hebrews, and tribes of the Amazon forest, West Africa, and New Guinea. A thorough introduction to this aspect of cultural anthropology.http://www.umanitoba.ca/anthropology/tutor/kinmenu.html
The tongue-in-cheek title and slogan ("The Best Free Lunch on the Web") notwithstanding, Dismal Scientist is a huge and excellent online resource for economic data and trends. Fully archived articles present figures backed up by analysis on prices, labor, real estate, macrotrends, Fed policy and much more. Economic and demographic information on the States and metropolitan regions of the US is available, along with economic reports from other countries. There are resources for students and professors, including customization for easy access to desired information, and a list of over 900 links for further online research. Other features include a calendar of releases of worldwide economic indices and reports, economic calculators (CPI, PIP, and financial), a dictionary, and a discussion forum. There's a tremendous amount of information here that's not readily apparent on the homepage, so we strongly suggest that newcomers consult the site map.
http://www.dismal.com/
CORRECTIONS AND UPDATES
Make it so