From Clement C. Maxwell Library...

The Center for Library & Information Innovation in the iSchool at the University of Maryland College Park, in partnership with the Government Information Online initiative and the University of Illinois Chicago, received a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for 20 master’s of library science (MLS) e-government and digital government degree scholarships. This unique program is for students interested in careers in librarianship and other information sciences as specialists in digital government information and e-government services. The program will prepare graduates to take advantage of the evolving range of e-government and digital government information services.

The program is online, and will begin in fall 2010. Applications are currently being accepted. Full scholarships (20 total) are available to highly qualified applicants to the program. Applications are due by February 1, 2010.

The program entails four key components that will educate the next generation of government information and e-government librarians:

• Coursework. The coursework will serve as the intellectual and conceptual basis for the evolving government information environment.

• Practice. Though internships with the GIO program participants, students will develop applied government information skills.

• Professional. By bringing students together annually to attend the Fall Federal Depository Library meeting, students will become integrated into the larger government information community and engage key issues in government information.

• Scholarship. Though inclusion in the review process of Government Information Quarterly, students will publish government resource reviews, contribute to furthering scholarship in government information, and learn the publication process. The project principles will also work with students to publish manuscripts in key areas of government information and e-government.

Vice President Biden today unveiled Recovery Through Retrofit, a report that builds on the foundation laid in the Recovery Act to expand green job opportunities and boost energy savings by making homes more energy efficient. Joining the Vice President today were Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality; Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy; Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor; Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; and Karen Mills, Administrator of the Small Business Administration.

At a Middle Class Task Force meeting earlier this year, the Vice President asked the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to develop a proposal for Federal action to lay the groundwork for a self-sustaining home energy efficiency retrofit industry. In response, CEQ facilitated a broad interagency process with the Office of the Vice President, eleven Departments and Agencies and six White House Offices to develop recommendations for how to use existing authority and funding to accomplish this goal. These recommendations are described in detail in the Recovery Through Retrofit Report.

Full report

Since October 1998, the American Geological Institute has organized this national and international event to help the public gain a better understanding and appreciation for the Earth Sciences and to encourage stewardship of the Earth. This year's Earth Science Week will be held from October 11-17 and will celebrate the theme "Understanding Climate."

Read more.

On October 1, 2009, President Obama signed a proclamation identifying October as National Information Literacy Awareness month.

Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information. A 24-hour news cycle and thousands of global television and radio networks, coupled with an immense array of online resources, have challenged our long-held perceptions of information management. Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation. This new type of literacy also requires competency with communication technologies, including computers and mobile devices that can help in our day-to-day decisionmaking. National Information Literacy Awareness Month highlights the need for all Americans to be adept in the skills necessary to effectively navigate the Information Age.

[snip]

Our Nation's educators and institutions of learning must be aware of -- and adjust to -- these new realities. In addition to the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, it is equally important that our students are given the tools required to take advantage of the information available to them. The ability to seek, find, and decipher information can be applied to countless life decisions, whether financial, medical, educational, or technical.

Full Coverage

The following titles have been added to the library's online catalog, Webster. You can use them on your computer now!

History

• World Politics Since 1945

Philosophy

• Political Philosophy A-Z, Edinburgh University Press

Political Science

• Key Concepts in Political Communication, Sage
• Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought

Social Sciences

• Dictionary of Policing, Willan Publishing
• Dictionary of Prisons and Punishment, Willan Publishing
• Dictionary of Probation and Offender Management, Willan Publishing
• Dictionary of Youth Justice, Willan Publishing
• Encyclopedia of Intelligence & Counterintelligence, M.E. Sharpe
• A Glossary of Political Theory, Edinburgh University Press
• A Glossary of UK Government and Politics, Edinburgh University Press
• Key Concepts in Journalism Studies, Sage

Effective from September 28, 2009, EBSCO Animals database has changed its name to Encyclopedia of Animals. Access to this database has also changed. Now, please use the Primary Search database to find articles available in the Encyclopedia of Animals!

Starting from Setember 1st, 2009, you will see this new interface in action when you search any one of the Gale's InfoTrac Databases including Academic OneFile, General OneFile, Health Reference Center Academic, General Business File ASAP, Gale Virtual Reference Library, Educator's Reference Complete, Student Edition, The New York Times, Expanded Academic ASAP, General Reference Center Gold, and Massachusetts History Online.

What are the key features:

■ Color-coded tabbed results for easy clarification
■ Citation generation in multiple formats including MLA and APA
■ Helpful user-interface and document tools
■ Search Within Results
■ Visual searching
■ Language translator into 8 languages including Spanish, French, simplified Chinese, and more
■ Instantly access content in multiple Gale databases from a single starting point
■ Simplified browsing and allowing for refined browsing by subject and publication type
■ Allowing to create individual account profiles, save searches, and receive search alerts with RSS export
■ Enhanced search results that incorporate context-sensitive multimedia, including
images, video and podcasts
■ Web 2.0 sharing tools, including Del.icio.us, MySpace, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Newsvine and more

If you would like to learn more about these new features, please contact a reference librarian. Navigation Guide and PowerSerach Basic are also available.

Hello!

We invite you to explore Maxwell Library! Need a fast connection to the Internet? Need to write your next research paper? Need to meet a friend? Need to work on a project with your classmates? Need to find peer-reviewed articles? Need a quiet place to read and think? Need a book, DVD, newspaper, image, CD, or sound clip? You can find everything you need here! If not, ask us. We are here to help you be successful. As we like to say: Get smart at the Max! Come on in!

Enter the Library’s raffle on Opening Day only! This is your only chance to win some sweet prizes! Your name may be drawn for a BSC hoodie or a stuffed BSC bear or a BSC day planner and notebook. You have to enter to win! (Only one entry per person. Prize winners will be contacted via their BSC email account.)

Apply Today!
Check out available opportunities on Connect and Serve.

Commonwealth Corps is the first statewide initiative to engage Massachusetts residents of all ages and backgrounds in service to their community. Since the program’s launch in 2008, over 270 Corps members aged 18-82 helped students improve grades, reduced hunger, educated elders about services and answered calls of distress. 33 partner organizations are recruiting to fill their Commonwealth Corps member positions for the upcoming 2009-2010 service year that will begin in September.

Please help us spread the word about Commonwealth Corps opportunities and encourage members of your community to consider this service opportunity! Please share the attached flyer with your library community.

Residents can view Corps opportunities listed by host organizations throughout the Commonwealth from Holyoke to Roxbury, the Cape to Worcester, Revere to New Bedford, and dozens of communities in between by visiting Connect and Serve, the statewide volunteer web portal. Corps members serve up to twelve months in full-time, part –time or flex-time capacities and receive a stipend.

If you would like more information, please contact me or Cynthia Orellana at 617-725-4036 or via email at Commonwealth.Corps@state.ma.us.

We will have a series of five events this fall where local entrepreneurs, business professionals and BSC students, faculty and staff can learn business fundamentals while networking with their peers. Our Launch Event will take place on Tuesday, 9/22 from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. in the Small Conference Room at the Rondileau Campus Center at BSC. Our featured speaker for this networking event will be Jack VercolloneBSC Alumni and founder of Verc Rentals, . This event will provide a stress-free environment for you to network with your peers and the BSC community while hearing about other CES events scheduled for the fall. Come out and network with us, while enjoying a cash bar and appetizers. Cost for this event is $5 if you register in advance; $10 at the door. To register or to find out more, go to www.bridgew.edu/ces or email ces@bridgew.edu.

By JOHN MARKOFF
The New York Times, July 21, 2009

A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages ''self destruct'' after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers. In the term of the moment this is called cloud computing, and the cloud consists of the data -- including e-mail and Web-based documents and calendars -- stored on numerous servers.

The idea of developing technology to make digital data disappear after a specified period of time is not new. A number of services that perform this function exist on the World Wide Web, and some electronic devices like FLASH memory chips have added this capability for protecting stored data by automatically erasing it after a specified period of time.

The full article is available in the library's LexisNexis database.

By Peter Grier and Mark Clayton
Christian Science Monitor, July 3, 2009

John Waters is leaning against a vehicle that looks like a delivery van as imagined by Pixar Animation. The IDEA - that's its name - is blocky, yet curved, with wheel skirts and a little upswoop at the back that adds attitude. You can almost hear it speaking in a chirpy cartoon voice.

Inside IDEA's silver sheet metal is plug-in hybrid technology that will power it an estimated 100 miles on a gallon of gas. If Mr. Waters has his way, thousands of these cuddly vans will soon be double-parked all across America, blocking travel lanes while their drivers wait for someone - anyone! - to sign for these darn packages, please.

Years ago Waters worked on General Motors' legendary EV1 electric car program. Now he's president and CEO of Bright Automotive, an Anderson, Ind., start-up that's recruited many EV1 veterans to help develop a new generation of hybrid trucks and cars.

"It's the wealth of experience of our people that will make this work," he says.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database.

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
The New York Times, July 7, 2009

To truly appreciate how glass can be used structurally, make your way to 233 South Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. More precisely, make your way 1,353 feet aboveSouth Wacker, to the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower.

Once there, take a few steps over to the west wall, where the facade has been cut away. Then take one more step, over the edge.

You'll find yourself on a floor of glass, suspended over the sidewalk a quarter-mile below. If you can't bear looking straight down past your feet, shift your gaze out or up -- the walls are glass, too, as is the ceiling. You've stepped into a transparent box, one of four that jut four and a half feet from the tower, hanging from cantilevered steel beams above your head. The glass walls are connected to the beams, and to the glass floor, with stainless-steel bolts. But what's really saving you from oblivion is the glass itself.

The full article is available in the library's LexisNexis database.

From the New York Times

The oil giant Exxon Mobil, whose chief executive once mocked alternative energy by referring to ethanol as "moonshine," is about to venture into biofuels.

On Tuesday, Exxon announced an investment of $600 million in producing liquid transportation fuels from algae -- organisms in water that range from pond scum to seaweed. The biofuel effort involves a partnership with Synthetic Genomics, a biotechnology company founded by the genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter.

The agreement could plug a major gap in the strategy of Exxon, the world's largest and richest publicly traded oil company, which has been criticized by environmental groups for dismissing concerns about global warming in the past and its reluctance to develop renewable fuels.

Read more ...

from BBC News Online

Scientists say they have discovered a missing link in the way cells protect themselves against cancer. They have uncovered how cells switch a gene called p53, which can block the development of tumours, on and off.

The researchers say the finding has important implications for cancer treatment and diagnosis. The study, published in Genes And Development, was carried out by teams of scientists in Singapore and the University of Dundee.

The p53 gene, first discovered 30 years ago, plays a vital role in keeping the body healthy by ordering damaged cells to commit suicide, or by stopping them dividing while key repair work is carried out. In half of all cancers the gene is either damaged or inactive, giving damaged cells a free rein to keep dividing and form cancer.

http://snipr.com/b7xzw

From Resourceshelf

USA.gov now offers a new page on the presidential election. You’ll find information about President-elect Barack Obama, inauguration day (January 20, 2009), and the 2008 election.

Includes biographies of President- and Vice President-Elect Obama and Biden, and their wives.

Fourteen $24,000 scholarships available for the next academic year, NYC program, LIU & NYU.

Dual Master's Degree Program between New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Science (NYU) and Long Island University's Palmer School of Library and Information Science (LIU). This program is for students who are interested in obtaining a master's degree in Library and Information Science and a master's degree in a subject area. Students who would like to enroll in the program must apply to NYU and LIU separately. After admission to both schools, students meet with the program administrator formally to enroll in the Dual Master's Degree Program.

Applicants may apply for one of the program's Laura Bush 21st Century Grants, $24,000 each.

For more information please visit the program websites or contact Dr. Pauline Rothstein, the program administrator, at Pauline.Rothstein@nyu.edu or 212.998.2516.

LIU website: http://www.cwpost.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/cics/dual_masters.html
NYU website: http://gsas.nyu.edu/object/grad.scholarly.libraryscience

The Maxwell Library Events Planning Committee designed an online contest organized thematically around the book Fahrenheit 451. The contest took place between September 27 and October 11, 2008. It was open to all BSC students. We are now very pleased to annouce the winners:

First prize: Danny Mui

Second prize: Patricia M. Scanlan

Third prize: Michelle Spinney

Congratulations!

From ResourceShelf

Listening to personal music players at a high volume over a sustained period can lead to permanent hearing damage, according to an opinion of the EU Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) released today. The scientific opinion shows that 5-10% of personal music player listeners risk permanent hearing loss, if they listen to a personal music player for more than one hour per day each week at high volume settings for at least 5 years. The European Commission had asked the independent scientific committee to examine this issue, given the widespread use of personal music players and the surge in the number of young people exposed to such noise. Scientists confirm that there is cause for concern and the European Commission will now examine with Member States and stakeholders, possible measures that could be taken to better protect children and adolescents from exposure to noise from personal music players and other similar devices.

Full Report: http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_risk/committees/04_scenihr/docs/scenihr_o_018.pdf
Lay Version (for general public): http://ec.europa.eu/health/opinions/en/hearing-loss-personal-music-player-mp3/

September 26, 2008
From National Institute of Health (NIH)

Thyroid problems affect as many as 27 million Americans. Among the most common problems are hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism. To help people learn more about thyroid disorders, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has produced four new fact sheets for consumers and health care providers.

The thyroid, a two-inch-long, butterfly-shaped gland located in the front of the neck, produces two hormones that affect critical body functions, including metabolism, brain development, breathing, heart and nervous system functions, body temperature, muscle strength, skin dryness, menstrual cycles, weight, and cholesterol levels. When the thyroid gland makes more thyroid hormone than the body needs, a condition known as hyperthyroidism develops. Conversely, hypothyroidism occurs when the thyroid gland produces inadequate amounts of hormone.

Read more: http://www.nih.gov/news/health/sep2008/niddk-26.htm

Banned Books Week
Book Giveaway!

September 28 - October 4, 2008

Congratulations!

Winners

September 28, 2008 at the Circulation Desk
Ryan Ribeiro   Cujo by Stephen King

September 29, 2008 at the Educational Resource Center Service Desk
Isabelle Campanini   Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

September 30, 2008 at the Reference Desk
Tara Cowan   Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

October 1, 2008 at the Circulation Desk
Amanda B. Correia   The Handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood

October 2, 2008 at the InterLibrary Loan/Document Delivery Office
The clan of a cave bear by Jean M. Auel

October 3, 2008 at the Reference Desk
Gerald Kibbey   Scary Stories by Alvin Schwartz

October 4, 2008 at the Educational Resource Center Service Desk
David P. Howes   The color purple by Alice Walker

September 15, 2008
BY Fred Guterl, William Underhill, and Sarah Garland
Newsweek

Land Of Big Science; The Large Hadron Collider is a symptom of America's decline in particle physics and, some fear, in science overall.

The eyes of the world are on Geneva, where scientists are expected to throw the switch this week on what may be the biggest experiment ever conducted. It's certainly the most expensive. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has spent roughly $8 billion digging a 27-kilometer tunnel on the outskirts of the city and filling it with equipment that pushes the limits of technology--superconducting magnets that operate at close to absolute zero, the temperature at which atoms cease all movement, and can accelerate particles to energies not seen for 14 billion years, and instruments that can detect faint whispers of particles far smaller than atoms.

Probing more deeply than ever before into the stuff of the universe requires some big hardware. It also requires the political will to lavish money on a project that has no predictable practical return, other than prestige and leadership in the branch of science that delivered just about every major technology of the past hundred years.

Those advances came, in large measure, from the United States. The coming decades may be different. The Large Hadron Collider, as the Geneva machine is called, is a symptom of America's decline in particle physics and Europe's rise. Many scientists and educators fear that it also signals a broader decline in scientific leadership on the part of the United States.

The full article is available in the library's LexisNexis database.

August 31, 2008
By Robin McKie
The Observer (England)

The Incredible Journey Taken by Our Genes: Project maps humanity's voyage out of Africa to new continents and domination of the world

SIXTY THOUSAND years ago, a small group of African men and women took to the Red Sea in tiny boats and crossed the Mandab Strait to Asia. Their journey - of less than 20 miles -marked the moment Homo sapiens left its home continent.

The motive for our ancestors' African exodus is not known, though scientists suspect food shortages, triggered by climate change, were involved. However, its impact cannot be overestimated. Two thousand generations later, descendants of these African emigres have settled our entire planet, wiped out all other hominids including the Neanderthals and have reached a population of 6.5 billion.

Now scientists are completing a massive study of DNA samples from a quarter of a million volunteers in different continents in order to create the most precise map yet of mankind's great diaspora. Last week, in Tallinn, Estonia, they outlined their most recent results. 'As the ultimate ancestor begat son, who begat son and so on, they picked up mutations in their DNA that we can now pinpoint by gene analysis,' said project leader Dr Spencer Wells. 'When we look at these markers' distributions we can see how our ancestors moved about.

The full article is available in the library's LexisNexis database.

InfoTrac OneFile, one of the Library's research databases, has changed its name to General OneFile!

General OneFile contains periodical and news content as well as indexing from a variety of general and specialized journals - from the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor to refereed academic journals. Its dates of coverage are from 1980 to the present.

Gale, one of the Library's research database providers, is extremely pleased to announce that its partnership with Consumers Union of the United States, Inc. has been revised to continue to offer Consumer Reports titles in full-text - but now with no embargo.

Through this newly revised license agreement, users will no longer have to wait 90 days to read current issues of Consumer Reports titles through InfoTrac, our renowned periodical program.

Consumers Union (CU) is an expert, independent, nonprofit organization, whose mission is to work for a fair, just, and safe marketplace for all consumers. Consumers Union publishes Consumer Reports, Consumer Reports on Health, Consumer Reports Money Adviser, ShopSmart Magazine, and Consumer Reports Annual Buying Guide.

Consumer Reports titles can be found in the following acclaimed Gale
resources: General OneFile, Academic OneFile, Popular Magazines, Health Reference Center Academic, Business & Company Resource Center and the Student Resource Center products, among others. Full-text for current issues is available without embargo for current InfoTrac subscribers beginning from August 8, 2008.

Counsumer Reports can also be accessed from the Library's A to Z Journal and Newspaper list at http://atoz.ebsco.com/titles.asp?KW=Consumer%20Reports&id=3490&SF=Titles&ST=Contains&WW=0&sid=149320205&TabID=2.

Education Full Text database from WilsonWeb publisher now can be combined with ERIC (Education Resources Information Center ) database for one-stop education research!

Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) contains:

- More than 1.1 Million Citations
- More than 100,000 full text articles
- More than 600 journals

The carefully vetted and peer-reviewed coverage of Education Full Text now expands with data from ERIC. ERIC and Education Full Text: the single source for education research! The combined database features:

- Cross-references to Wilson's education subject thesaurus. The Wilson Education subject thesaurus is integrated into the ERIC thesaurus on WilsonWeb.

- WilsonWeb's "All Smart" search applied to the vast ERIC data: relevancy ranking that accounts for the importance of the field in which your search term is found (e.g. subject, title, abstract, author or full text).

- Saved searches and search histories. "My WilsonWeb" profiles allow users to create and manage saved searches, search histories and more.

- "Content Discovery Keys" in search results. Convenient links launch related searches, allow users to narrow results by author, subject, publication year, document type, and database (for multiple-database searches), or select previous searches from the Recent Searches listing.

To effect a combined search, click on the Open Database Selection Area and check ERIC database when you are in the WilsonWeb Education Full Text database.

Additional link to WilsonWeb ERIC database is also available on the library's alphabetical database list and the database description list. If you have any questions, please consult with a reference librarian or e-mail Ask a Librarian.

Grove Music Online is available in the Oxford Music Online database. It was just updated recently. With this update the searching and browsing have been improved. Grove’s subject classification now includes a category for ‘operas’. In the advanced search, you can search terms in only the articles on operas. In subject entry browse and type in opera in the search box, you will get a list of all the articles on individual operas in Grove. You are encouraged to read the Tips for Experienced Grove Music Users for further guidance on getting the most out of the new site.

The Library’s year of free access to the online Oxford African American Studies Center database expired on Sept. 1. We received temporary access to this resource when we purchased the 8 volume print set African American National Biography (Ref E185.96 .A4466 2008). This resource and some of the other titles covered in the online product, such as Black Women in America (Ref E185.86 .B542 2005) are available in the Library’s print reference collection.

August 10, 2008By Elizabeth Royte
From The New York Times

Before I left New York for California, where I planned to visit a water-recycling plant, I mopped my kitchen floor. Afterward, I emptied the bucket of dirty water into the toilet and watched as the foamy mess swirled away. This was one of life's more mundane moments, to be sure. But with water infrastructure on my mind, I took an extra moment to contemplate my water's journey through city pipes to the wastewater-treatment plant, which separates solids and dumps the disinfected liquids into the ocean.

A day after mopping, I gazed balefully at my hotel toilet in Santa Ana, Calif., and contemplated an entirely new cycle. When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The ''new'' water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

Opened in January, the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment System is the largest of its type in the world. It cost $480 million to build, will cost $29 million a year to run and took more than a decade to get off the ground. The stumbling block was psychological, not architectural. An aversion to feces is nearly universal, and as critics of the process are keen to point out, getting sewage out of drinking water was one of the most important public health advances of the last 150 years.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

August 8, 2008
By Linda McKee
From Belfast Telegraph

NORTHERN Ireland is leading the nations in a ground-breaking project aimed at uncovering the bones of the earth.

Striking images of the earth stripped bare of plants, soils, water and man-made structures have gone on display at the launch of OneGeology, the world's biggest ever geological mapping project.

Earth and computer scientists from 70 nations joined forces to produce the UNESCO-supported global project to design the first ever digital geological map of the world.

The organisers say it will do the same for the rocks beneath our feet that Google Earth has done of maps of the earth's surface.

Internet users can visit the OneGeology website and delve into maps of the nations, uncovering the rocks that lie beneath their surface and a new web language has been written for geology, allowing nations to share data across international boundaries and with the public.

And the country at the head of the race to map its geological structures is Northern Ireland - which earlier this year launched the initial results of its ground-breaking Tellus project to map the geological bones of the Province, revealing intriguing structures that may yield gold and platinum.

Garth Earls, director of the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, said the province is ahead of the rest of the countries with the geological detail it has gathered.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

August 1, 2008
By Nicholas Wade
From The International Herald Tribune

Can you enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion? The answer may one day be yes - just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.

Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego report that they have found two drugs that do wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice.

One drug, Aicar, increased the mice's endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment. The second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance, but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

''It's a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,'' said Dr. Ronald Evans, leader of the Salk group.

The results, Evans said, seem reasonably likely to apply to people, who control muscle tone with the same underlying genes as do mice. And if the drugs work and prove to be safe, they could be useful in a wide range of settings.

They should help people who are too frail to exercise and those with health problems like diabetes that are improved with exercise, he said.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

July 24, 2008
By Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times

After years of false starts, a new industry selling motor fuel made from waste is getting a big push in the United States, with the first commercial sales possible within months.

Many companies have announced plans to build plants that would take in material like wood chips, garbage or crop waste and turn out motor fuels. About 28 small plants are in advanced planning, under construction or, in a handful of cases, already up and running in test mode.

For decades scientists have known it was possible to convert waste to fuel, but in an era of cheap oil, it made little sense. With oil now trading around $125 a barrel and gasoline above $4 a gallon, the potential economics of a waste-to-fuel industry have shifted radically, setting off a frenzy to be first to market.

''I think American innovation is going to come up with the solution,'' said Prabhakar Nair, research chief for UOP, a company working on the problem.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

July 24, 2008
Robert C. Cowen, The Christian Science Monitor

It's only a humble hum or an undistinguished grunt or growl. But to a midshipman fish, it's effective social communication. Hums help the boys get the girls. Grunts and growls warn off would be trespassers.

Scientists have studied animal communication for decades. Now, for the first time, a research team has traced the underlying neurobiology that makes the fish talk possible.

It's an early step in an emerging research field that seeks insight into the evolution of behavior from the perspective of neurobiology. In recent years, visiting scientists have pursued this quest at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass. Last week, MBL reported the results of work by Andrew Bass of Cornell University, Edwin Gilland of Howard University, and Robert Baker of New York University.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

August 1, 2008
By Michael Rogers, Library Journal

-- The Tales of Beedle the Bard being released December 4
-- Proceeds will be donated to the Children's High Level Group

Reuters reports that J.K. Rowling is releasing a book of wizard fairy tales December 4 with all profits going to charity. The title, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, is briefly mentioned in The Half-Blood Prince as having been left to Hermione Granger by Professor Dumbledore, Reuters said. Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK and Scholastic domestically are publishing the book, which includes an intro by Rowling, for $12.99, while Amazon reportedly will produce up to 100,000 leather-bound collector’s editions for $100.

“The new edition will include the Tales themselves, translated from the original runes by Hermione Granger, and with illustrations by me, but also notes by Professor Albus Dumbledore, which appear by generous permission of the Hogwarts Headmasters’ Archive,” Rowling said. Proceeds from the book will be donated to the Children’s High Level Group, a charity she founded in 2005.

July 30, 2008
Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office

The FBI and its partner, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), have received reports of recent spam e-mails spreading the Storm Worm malicious software, known as malware. These e-mails, which contain the phrase “F.B.I. vs. facebook,” direct e-mail recipients to click on a link to view an article about the FBI and Facebook, a popular social networking website. The Storm Worm virus has also been spread in the past in e-mails advertising a holiday e-card link. Clicking on the link downloads malware onto the Internet connected device, causing it to become infected with the virus and part of the Storm Worm botnet.

A botnet is a collection of compromised computers under the remote command and control of a criminal “botherder.” Most owners of the compromised computers are unsuspecting victims. They have unintentionally allowed unauthorized access and use of their computers as a vehicle to facilitate other crimes, such as identity theft, denial of service attacks, phishing, click fraud, and the mass distribution of spam and spyware. Because of their widely distributed capabilities, botnets are a growing threat to national security, the national information infrastructure, and the economy.

Read more: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel08/stormworm073008.htm

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) unveiled Monday what it calls “a dramatically improved website with new interactive games, flash animation, videos of highlights and other features that make it a one-step source for information on the Olympic Games”.

The site, www.olympic.org, will provide continually updated results from China, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at activities in Beijing. There is also the “Olympic Express” e-journal that provides information for the pre-teen audience.

From WhoFish.org

Highlights for this weekend include:

. Andover, Merrimack Valley Restaurant Week

. Salem, Salem CultureFest 2008

. Lowell, Lowell Folk Festival

. Woods Hole, Woods Hole Film Festival

. Nantucket, 1st Nantucket Comedy Festival

More...

The Wired Campus
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Jeffrey R. Young

Vanishing laptops can cause huge headaches for colleges. Sure, there’s the financial cost of losing a shiny computer, but that’s not the big worry: Since official data such as student records are often loaded onto laptop hard drives, a lost or stolen computer can mean a serious security breach.

A free, open-source program developed by researchers can help find a lost or stolen laptop computer, and its creators say it does so more safely than commercial alternatives.

The program, Adeona, is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns. Many commercial laptop tracking programs require users to give their information to the company selling the software, and some users have worried that the information could be used to track them without their knowledge. Adeona’s creators say their free software is “privacy-preserving,” meaning that only the user has the ability to track the laptop.

The software was built by a group of professors and graduate students from the University of Washington and the University of California’s campuses at San Diego and at Davis.

July 11 - U.S. policymakers, universities, and employers should work together to speed the development of professionally oriented master's degree programs in the natural sciences, says a new report from the National Research Council. Graduates of these programs -- which build both scientific knowledge and practical workplace skills -- can contribute significantly to the nation's competitiveness, the report says.

Project Web Site
Briefing Powerpoint Presentation
News Release
Listen to the Public Briefing
Full Report

From WhoFish.org

Highlights for this weekend include:

-- Statewide, July 4th Celebrations

-- Esplanade, Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular

-- Marblehead, Marblehead Festival of Arts

-- Brockton, Brockton Fair

-- Boston, Boston Harborfest

More...

June 23, 2008
By By Robert A. Weinberg and Anthony L. Komaroff
Newsweek

New research explores the complex interactions that cause our most dreaded disease. A look into some of the steps you can take to reduce your risk.

We've known for a long time that a high-fat diet, obesity and lack of exercise can increase the risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes, two conditions that affect millions of Americans. What we are finding out now is that those same lifestyle factors also play an important role in cancer. That's the bad news. The good news is that you can do something about your lifestyle. If we grew thinner, exercised regularly, avoided diets rich in red meat (substituting poultry, fish or vegetable sources of protein) and ate diets rich in fruits and vegetables, and stopped using tobacco, we would prevent 70 percent of all cancers.

The strongest evidence of the importance of lifestyle in cancer is that most common cancers arise at dramatically different rates in different parts of the globe. Several cancers that are extremely common in the United States--colon, prostate and breast cancer--are relatively rare in other parts of the world, occurring only 1/10th or 1/20th as often. Equally striking, when people migrate from other parts of the world to the United States, within a generation their cancer rates approach those of us whose families have lived in this country for a long time. Even if people in other parts of the world stay put, but adopt a U.S. lifestyle, their risk of cancer rises; as Japanese have embraced Western habits, their rates of colon, breast and prostate cancer have skyrocketed.

What is it about our lifestyle that raises the risk of many types of cancer? The main culprits seem to be the Western diet, obesity and physical inactivity. While we've known about the importance of tobacco and cancer for more than 50 years, we are just beginning to understand how diet, a healthy body weight and regular exercise can protect us against cancer.

A striking example of the profound influence of diet was reported last summer in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Doctors determined the eating habits of patients with colon cancer in the years following surgical removal of the cancer. Over the next five years, those who ate a traditional Western diet had a threefold greater likelihood of developing a recurrence of the disease than did those who ate a "prudent" diet rich in fruits and vegetables and including only small amounts of red meat. How had diet affected these patients? The surgery clearly had not removed all their colon-cancer cells: prior to the surgery, some cells had already spread from the primary tumor. The Western diet had somehow stimulated the growth of these small deposits of residual cancer cells.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

The Library will switch to the EBSCOHost version of Mental Measurements Yearbook on July 1, 2008 when our Ovid/Silverplatter Mental Measurements Yearbook database subscription expires.

From WhoFish.org - Local Events/Activities

Highlights for this weekend include:

-- Marshfield, New England Wild West Fest

-- Salisbury, Sand and Sea Festival

-- Wayland, BubbleMania!

-- Norton, Winslow Shire Faire

-- Mansfield, Air Race Classic & Family Festival

More...

June 6, 2008
By Ben Arnoldy, The Christian Science Monitor

Quartz, the raw material for solar panels, is one of the most abundant minerals on earth. But for years, the solar industry has faced a bottleneck in processing quartz into polysilicon, a principal material used in most solar panels. The problem stalled a steady decline in prices for solar panels.

Now the silicon shortage may be coming to an end, predict some solar analysts, thanks to new factories coming online.

If true, the price for solar panel modules could start falling by as much as a third by 2010, says Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development in Cambridge, Mass. That's good news for an industry that remains one of the most expensive power sources.

Global demand for solar panels is growing at about 50 percent per annum, says Mr. Bradford, but the polysilicon supply for solar will grow by 80 percent for each of the next couple of years.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

June 6, 2008
By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)

They like the cold, they don't need much oxygen, and you can fit 62 trillion of them into a teaspoon.

They're also 120,000 years old.

Those are the salient characteristics of a new species of ultrasmall bacteria discovered deep inside a glacier by researchers at Penn State University.

The Chryseobacterium greenlandensis were isolated from an ice core from 1.8 miles beneath the surface of a glacier in Greenland.

Jennifer Loveland-Curtze, the lead researcher on the Penn State team, said the new species adds one more sliver of enlightenment to the vast and mostly unexplored universe of microorganisms.

Microbes make up a third of all living material on Earth, Dr. Loveland-Curtze said, "yet fewer than 8,000 microbes have been described out of the approximately 3 million that are presumed to exist."

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

From WhoFish.org Local Events and Activities

Highlights for this weekend include:

. Boston, Chinatown Main Street Festival

. Woburn, 2nd Annual WorldFest!

. Beverly, 7th Annual Arts Fest

. Lowell, African Festival

. Concord, Strawberry Festival

More ...

May 12, 2008
By Dan Falk
The Boston Globe

Ronald Mallett lost his father to heart disease at the age of 10, an event that left him in utter despair. His depression lasted until he read "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells and, a few years later, the theories of Albert Einstein - and he became determined to see his father again.

For years, Mallett, a physicist at the University of Connecticut, stayed in the "time-travel closet," as he put it, keeping his desire to build a time machine under wraps for fear of ridicule.

Today, with other established physicists speaking openly about time travel, Mallett is finally able to talk unabashed about his research. Not only that, he and other like-minded physicists are publishing their findings in peer-reviewed journals - something hardly imaginable just a decade ago.

Time travel, of course, has been a favorite topic for science-fiction writers for more than a century, from Wells's pioneering novel to the campy "Back to the Future" movie trilogy. But the scientific urge to investigate time travel is about more than sci-fi fantasies. Contemplating time travel is forcing scientists to confront some of the most profound issues in physics, from the nature of the universe's ultimate laws to fundamental questions about the nature of space and time.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

May 15, 2008
By Edward C. Baig
USA Today

Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope program is a heavenly tool for anyone who finds the stars and planets intoxicating. Consumers who download the first public test version, which Microsoft made available this week, can blast off to Mars, Venus and beyond, right from their PCs.

The program stitches together data and images from NASA's Hubble, Spitzer and other world-class telescopes. But it's not just a collection of stellar images. Microsoft has surveyed the entire sky. As you zoom in with your mouse on celestial objects, you'll feel like Captain Kirk exploring the final frontier.

You can examine the universe in visible light (what we can normally see) or switch to X-ray and other views. That's important. Most of the action in the universe can be seen only in these other wavelengths of light, including black holes, says researcher Roy Gould at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Having "the world's greatest telescopes at your disposal has been the holy grail of astronomers," says Gould, who helped Microsoft demo WorldWide Telescope at the prestigious TED conference in February. "There's been talk for years of a national virtual observatory, and this is an example of what that would be like."

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

The Wired Campus
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Long a standard reference source for scholarship, largely because of its tightly controlled editing, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced this week it was throwing open its elegantly-bound covers to the masses. It will allow the “user community” (in the words of the encyclopedia’s blog) to contribute their own articles, which will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference pieces.

This seems to be a response to the runaway success of the user-edited online reference tool Wikipedia. (See for yourself. Do a Web search on a topic and note whether Wikipedia or Britannica shows up first.) Scholars have been adamantly opposed to Wikipedia citations in academic papers because the authors and sources are always changing. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, agrees with this, but in next week’s issue of The Chronicle (click back to our home page on Monday for more) he also points to some changes in the reference tool that may make it more palatable to scholars.

At Britannica, “readers and users will also be invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site under their own names,” the encyclopedia’s blog explains.

But it’s not a complete free-for-all. The voice of Britannica adds that the core encyclopedia itself “will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur ‘Britannica Checked’ to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible.”—Josh Fischman.

If you happen to be in Washington D. C. this summer, you might want to inlcude the following programs in your schedule. These programs are part of a concert series presented by the American Folklife Center and the Music Division at the Library of Congress in cooperation with the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. All concerts are in the Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building. More details about the programs are available at http://www.loc.gov/rr/perform/concert/0708-folklife.html#may28.

June 19, 2008 at 12:00 noon
MERITA HALILI and the RAIF HYSENI ORCHESTRA—Albanian Music from New York, celebrating 40 years of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance

“Merita Halili raised her radiant soprano in buoyant wedding songs, punctuated by speed-demon accordion from her husband and bandleader, Raif Hyseni.” – The New York Times

July 24, 2008 at 12:00 noon
THE ZIONAIRES—Gospel Music from Maryland and Delaware

"The Zionaires gospel group, who hail from the Delmarva Peninsula, celebrated their 54th singing anniversary on February 17, 2008. For over half a century, they have spread the word of God through music to church and radio audiences on the lower shore of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware."

August 20, 2008 at 12:00 noon
GARY HALEAMAU–Traditional Hawaiian Music from Las Vegas (The Ninth Island)

"Hawaiian aunties and uncles inspired his mastery of leo ki’eki’e, an unmistakably Hawaiian falsetto style of singing, ..."

May 7, 2008

In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

"The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world," said Dean Elena Kagan '86. "Our decision to embrace 'open access' means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School."

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

To read more: http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/05/07_openaccess.php

May 2, 2008
By Siri Carpenter
From Scientific American

"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life," Jesse Jackson once told an audience, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery - then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."

Jackson's remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse ... can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.

Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin.

The full article is available in the library's Academic Search Premier database. Off-campus users need to log in first. The print issues of the Scientific American journal are also available in the Library.

May 13, 2008
The Wired Campus
The Chronicle of Higher Education

If Monday’s earthquake in China has sparked an interest in seismology, and you happen to own a Mac laptop, you can transform your computer into your own personal seismic station. A free program from SeisMac takes advantage of the acceleration sensor inside you computer to register when it gets the shakes. The program was developed with support from the National Science Foundation and from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a consortium of nearly 100 universities.

In the near future, you may be able to participate in earthquake science through a new project called the Quake-Catcher Network. Researchers from several California universities have created the network to use the distributed power of people’s laptops to provide quick data about the strength of shaking during earthquakes. The program works with many kinds of laptops. Because wireless networks send signals faster than vibrations can spread through the Earth, data from laptops in theory can speed ahead of the shaking and provide advance warning before harmful seismic waves strike regions that are more distant from a quake’s epicenter.—Richard Monastersky

NewsNow, a UK-based news portal, has put up a page with a real-time feed (updated every 5 minutes) with news from over 30,000 sources with news reports about the quake(s).

See: http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/Breaking+News/China+Earthquake.

From ResourceShelf

April 23, 2008
bY Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post

The Department of Transportation yesterday proposed a timetable for auto manufacturers to meet landmark new fuel economy standards, calling the schedule "historically ambitious yet achievable."

Under the regulations, the overall fleet of new vehicles, including cars and light trucks, would be required to average 25.3 miles per gallon in 2010 and reach 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015, an increase of 4.5 percent each year. Such standards would save about 55 billion gallons of fuel over the life of the vehicles affected and slash $100 billion in gas costs for consumers, according to figures from the department.

"What we were looking for was a balance between affordability and achieving the right levels of fuel economy," Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said yesterday at a news conference. "I think we got an aggressive but achievable standard."

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

New Visual Design Releasing April 26, 2008

Display Changes:

• Top navigation tabs will look slightly different


• Navigation elements will move from the right side to the left side of the page


• Sub-tab such as the "Easy" and "Power" tabs under the "General" tab are being replaced with navigation options on the left side of the page


• The beige background will be removed from the search forms


• The Terms and Conditions notice will move from the right side of the page to the center (see the Easy Search screenshot)


• On the results page, the results classification options have been changed from a dropdown box to an expandable list (see Results screenshot)


• The spacing and layout of elements on the page will change


• A new "Selected Sources" tray is being added to the Source Selection page (see Source Selection screenshot)

The Functionality Is Not Changing

• Procedures for searching, choosing sources, and working with results are not changing


• No search forms are being added or removed


• No search form elements (text boxes, dropdown, options, buttons, etc) are being added or removed


• Apart from the new Selected Sources tray, there are no changes to the sources or the procedures for selecting sources (see Source Selection screenshot)

Maxwell Library celebrated National Library Week with a book giveaway!

John Adams by David McCullough Was awarded from Maxwell Library’s Circulation Dept. on Sunday, April 13th to Johnathan Matson.	Nothing’s Sacred by Lewis Black Was awarded from Maxwell Library’s Document Delivery Service on Monday, April 14th to a student that asked to remain anonymous.
Red Sox Rule by Michael Holley Was awarded from Maxwell Library’s Reference Dept. on Tuesday, April 15th to Erin Ferriera.	On the Road by Jack Kerouac Was awarded from Maxwell Library’s Educational Resource Center on Wednesday, April 16th to Richard Humiston.
A Guide to Skywatching by David H. Levy Was awarded from Maxwell Library’s Special Collections Dept. on Thursday, April 17th to Lauren Perry.	Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill Was awarded from Maxwell Library’s Reference Dept. on Friday, April 18th to Malcolm Shanks.
Destination America by Chuck Wills Was awarded from Maxwell Library’s Circulation Dept. on Saturday, April 19th to Amanda Goff.

March 25, 2008
From The Washington Post

In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, movers and shakers lined up to spit into test tubes -- the first step to having snippets of their DNA analyzed by 23andMe, a personalized gene-testing company that for $999 promises to help people "search and explore their genomes."

Those wanting an even more complete analysis of their biological inheritance can turn to Knome, a Cambridge, Mass., company that, for $350,000, will spell out all 3 billion letters of their DNA code -- an unparalleled opportunity, the company says, to "Know thyself."

For singles on tighter budgets and with narrower interests, there is ScientificMatch.com, which says that its $995 genetic test will help clients find DNA-compatible mates who will smell sexier to them, have more orgasms and produce healthier children.

This is the world of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, a peculiar mix of modern science, old-fashioned narcissism and innovative entrepreneurialism, all made possible by the government-sponsored Human Genome Project.

More than 20 companies today offer "personalized genomics" tests that promise to help clients discern from their DNA what diseases they are likely to get, whether they are shy or adventurous, even their propensity to become addicted to drugs. A growing number bypass doctors and deal directly with consumers.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

March 26, 2008
From Christian Science Monitor

Phillip Cunio celebrated his wife's birthday from Mars. He held a card up to his habitat webcam so she could see it online, and fellow crew members baked a cake.

Granted, this "Mars" was the Utah desert, but spending two weeks on a simulated mission to the Red Planet gave him a taste of what it would be like to fulfill his dream. And the freeze-dried flavor didn't dampen his enthusiasm.

Mr. Cunio moved into the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), just outside Hanksville, Utah, to test equipment being developed by the Space Logistics Project and other partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. (http://spacelogistics.mit.edu).

He was part of an eight-person international crew including engineers, a biologist, and a GPS expert all doing their own research. For two weeks, they traded earthly conveniences for scientific progress. They imposed a delay of roughly 20 minutes on e-mails. When they ventured outside their cylindrical two-level habitat, they had to wait in an airlock and don bulky simulated spacesuits - complete with boots, ski gloves, and bulbous helmets.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

March 26, 2008
From the Los Angeles Times

Adapting is cheaper than fighting, some scientists say. Critics of that theory warn of too many unknowns.

The disastrous hurricanes of recent years have become the poster children of global warming. But Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wondered whether the billions of dollars of damage was caused by more intense storms or more coastal development.

After analyzing decades of hurricane data, Pielke concluded that rising levels of carbon dioxide had little to do with hurricane damage. Rather, it boiled down to a simple equation: Build more, lose more.

"Everything has been put on the back of carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide cannot carry that weight," he said. Pielke's analysis, published last month in the journal Natural Hazards Review, is part of a controversial movement that argues global warming over the rest of this century will play a much smaller role in unleashing planetary havoc than most scientists think.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users Need to log in first.

Beginning on March 17, 2008, JSTOR database will migrate to a new platform with a new user interface. Preview is available at http://preview.jstor.org/.

New features include:

* A new look and feel
* A single, improved format of PDF files, to simplify printing and expand accessibility
* Personalized account functionality, called "MyJSTOR"
* You can store your user information and your saved citations
* You can select one-time acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions for PDF access
* More efficient navigation throughout the site
* The ability to search within result sets
* Thumbnail views of article pages: see full articles at a glance

And more.

The Library has added EBSCO’s GreenFILE database with content focusing on the relationship between human beings and the environment. Among the topics included are global warming, recycling, environmental ethics, and alternate fuel sources. Comprised of scholarly and general interest titles as well as government documents and reports, GreenFILE offers a unique perspective on the positive and negative ways humans affect the environment. GreenFILE’s initial release will include abstracting and indexing for more than 600 titles. The total number of records is approximately 295,000. Full text is provided for more than 4,600 records from open access titles. Access to the database is provided from the “Find Articles in Journals/Magazines Using Databases” link on the Library’s home page.

From The Boston Globe

CAMBRIDGE - Not feeling quite yourself? No wonder. In a sense, you aren't really you.

Scientists estimate that 90 percent of the cells contained in the human body belong to nonhuman organisms - mostly bacteria, but also a smattering of fungi and other eensy entities. Some 100 trillion microbes nestle in niches from our teeth to our toes.

But what's setting science on its heels these days is not the boggling numbers of bugs so much as the budding recognition that they are much more than casual hitchhikers capable of causing disease. They may be so essential to well-being that humans couldn't live without them.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to access this database. Articles published in Boston Globe are also available in the Newspaper Source and Proquest Newspapers databases.

EBSCO has acquired the databases America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts from ABC-CLIO. Effective immediately the Library’s access to these databases will change from ABC-CLIO’s search platform to EBSCOHost. America: History and Life is the definitive index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present, with indexing for 1,700 journals from 1964 to present. Historical Abstracts covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present. This authoritative database provides indexing of more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955.

by Jim Holt
The New Yorker

According to Stanislas Dehaene, humans have an inbuilt “number sense” capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems start when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.

One morning in September, 1989, a former sales representative in his mid-forties entered an examination room with Stanislas Dehaene, a young neuroscientist based in Paris. Three years earlier, the man, whom researchers came to refer to as Mr. N, had sustained a brain hemorrhage that left him with an enormous lesion in the rear half of his left hemisphere. He suffered from severe handicaps: his right arm was in a sling; he couldn’t read; and his speech was painfully slow. He had once been married, with two daughters, but was now incapable of leading an independent life and lived with his elderly parents. Dehaene had been invited to see him because his impairments included severe acalculia, a general term for any one of several deficits in number processing. When asked to add 2 and 2, he answered “three.” He could still count and recite a sequence like 2, 4, 6, 8, but he was incapable of counting downward from 9, differentiating odd and even numbers, or recognizing the numeral 5 when it was flashed in front of him.

To read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/03/080303fa_fact_holt

The Library has a print subscription to The New Yorker. Articles published in this magazine are also available in Academic Search Premier, LexisNexis, and several other databases. Off-campus users need to log in first to access these databases.

By Randolph E. Schmid
Assoicated Press Science Writer

WASHINGTON — Those beautiful snowflakes drifting out of the sky may have a surprise inside — bacteria. Most snow and rain forms in chilly conditions high in the sky and atmospheric scientists have long known that, under most conditions, the moisture needs something to cling to in order to condense.

Now, a new study shows a surprisingly large share of those so-called nucleators turn out to be bacteria that can affect plants.

"Bacteria are by far the most active ice nuclei in nature," said Brent C. Christner, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Louisiana State University.

Christner and colleagues sampled snow from Antarctica, France, Montana and the Yukon and they report their findings in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

In some samples as much as 85 percent of the nuclei were bacteria, Christner said in a telephone interview. The bacteria were most common in France, followed by Montana and the Yukon, and was even present to a lesser degree in Antarctica.

The most common bacteria found was Pseudomonas syringae, which can cause disease in several types of plants including tomatoes and beans.

The study found it in 20 samples of snow from around the world and subsequent research has also found it in summer rainfall in Louisiana.

To read more: http://www.ajc.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/Science/Snow_Bugs.html

The trial of two EBSCO databases, Mental Measurements Yearbook and Tests in Print (TIP) have been extended to March 15, 2008. Please send your comments to Kendra St. Aubin at staubin@bridgew.edu by then.

Mental Measurements Yearbook provides users with a comprehensive guide to over 2,000 contemporary testing instruments. This series contains information for evaluation of test products within such areas as psychology, education, business, and leadership. The Library currently has a subscription to this product through SilverPlatter, but is considering a switch to EBSCO’s version.

Tests in Print (TIP) serves as a comprehensive bibliography to all known commercially available tests that are currently in print in the English language. TIP provides vital information to users including test purpose, test publisher, in-print status, price, test acronym, intended test population, administration times, publication date(s), and test author(s). It also guides readers to reviews published in Mental Measurements Yearbook.

Off-campus users need to log in first via the Use the Library from Home link on the left navigation menu of the Library's Home page. After successfully logging in, please go back to the library home page again to try these databases.

February 20, 2008
By Jane Roy Brown
The Christian Science Monitor

Conservatories, once the glass-walled playgrounds of wealthy plant collectors, now serve a more urgent function. The changing global climate has spotlighted the role these specialized greenhouses play in preserving plant diversity.

Like zoos for endangered animals, climate-controlled conservatories may well be the only places some plants can survive, allowing scientists to educate the public, including gardeners, about the environmental threats to many species.

Glasshouses, as they are also known, are often the first stop on visitors' tours of public botanic gardens. These structures hint at the research going on behind the scenes, such as the development of seed banks and collections of endangered plants. Conservatories also cost a good deal to operate, and so they stand at the forefront of efforts to use fuel more efficiently.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to access this database.

February 19, 2008
By Dennis Overbye
The New York Times

It's been called the whitest place on Earth, and at 90 degrees below zero, it could be the coolest place on the planet for astronomy.

And so 17 Chinese astronomers, engineers and technicians boarded an old icebreaker last November, crunched into a harbor in East Antarctica and then set off on a 20-day, 1,000-mile trip across the snows to establish a new observatory at the bottom of the world. The observatory is called Plato, for the Plateau Observatory.

For now it consists of a collection of boxes and towers holding seven small telescopes and cameras on a bump known as Dome Argus, which is 13,000 feet high and about 700 miles east of the South Pole. For the next year they will hold vigil alone, reporting by satellite radio through the long Antarctic night, but these instruments are the vanguard of great hopes.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to access this database.

Academic Newswire
Library Journal

In what librarians are calling "a turning point in scholarly publishing" the Indiana University (IU) library this week published the university’s first "faculty-generated" open access electronic journal, the Museum Anthropology Review. The journal, edited by Jason Baird Jackson, associate professor in IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, was chartered last February as part of a pilot project within the library’s larger scholarly communication initiative, IUScholarWorks, designed to offer faculty "a low-cost solution to the administrative and publishing functions."

In an editorial on the journal’s web site, Jackson detailed—and praised—the library’s contributions. "Almost as soon as we began publishing last February, we started partnering with remarkable, visionary librarians," Jackson wrote. "Our first step together was to establish a system by which contributions to Museum Anthropology Review could be archived, preserved and made available digitally via our campus digital repository. This allowed me to assure authors that, whatever else might happen to this site or the journal generally, their hard work would remain available into the future."

As a community, Jackson added, IU librarians took a special interest in learning open access publishing. "I presented two library seminars on the project and on the wider state of journal publishing in anthropology and folklore," Jackson wrote. "These were among the most exciting discussions that I have experienced in a campus context."

IU’s Ruth Lilly Dean of Libraries Patricia Steele told the LJ Academic Newswire that from its inception in 2006, the IUScholarWorks program was designed support endeavors like Jackson’s open access e-journal, and said future endeavors may extend to a partnership with the IU Press and a repository for the Indiana University Archives relating to the history and culture of IU. "Our goal," Steele said, "was to be in the position to lead the change when faculty members were ready."

With other recent developments, such as the NIH public access mandate and last week’s historic open access mandate at Harvard University, more faculty members, at IU and nationwide, appear ready for change. Steele said last week’s announcement by Harvard was "exciting" and that she would like to think a similar initiative was indeed possible at IU. "Certainly Harvard’s action may help generate conversations that would have taken much longer to establish," she told the Newswire.

Meanwhile, by offering faculty at IU a range of scholarly publishing options—including journal publishing tools—IU offers yet another glimpse of a future in which libraries play a more active, upstream role in scholarly communication. "If we think broadly about the future of library collections and how we go about building them," she said, "partnering with faculty at all stages of their research, writing, and, publication becomes logical."

Academic Newswire
Library Journal

Librarians and faculty members at other institutions are reacting positively to Harvard University's historic faculty motion last week to mandate open access (OA). A scan of the blogosphere suggests that Harvard's vote is poised to serve as an effective motivator for other institutions to push forward their own open access/institutional repository policies. This is, after all, Harvard. "When Harvard does something, all the others follow," blogged one scientist at Blog Around the Clock. "Perhaps this is the tipping point for Open Access as a whole?"

On Caveat Lector, George Mason University library's Dorothea Salo mused on the "sly cleverness" of Harvard's strategy—and notably pointed out the potential de-fanging of publishers' well-worn argument that open access undermines peer review. "They can't seriously spin this as 'a vote against peer review,' because really, is Harvard going to do anything that damages peer review?" Salo asks.

Villanova law professor and copyright expert Michael Carroll suggested the motion increases Harvard's competitive edge, arguing the "impact and citation of Harvard scholarship will increase because it is freely accessible." In addition, "Harvard librarians will get greater expertise than exists at competing institutions at developing, managing, and adding value to the university's digital library," he wrote, because they will simply have more scholarship to manage. "Faculty at competing institutions should take note," Carroll wrote. "There's an early mover advantage to be had here."

To read more: http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6533543.html?nid=2673#news1

For more reactions, see Peter Suber's Open Access News blog.

CongressNow, launched by GalleryWatch and Roll Call in March 2007, is an online publication that covers policy and legislation on Capitol Hill. CongressNow is published five afternoons a week, with updates posted and e-mailed to subscribers whenever news breaks. The Web site provides extensive links to original documents, legislative texts and hearing schedules in GalleryWatch.

You can search CongressNow in LexisNexis now by following this link:
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/api/version1/sf?shr=t&sfi=AC00NBGenSrch&csi=323090. Off-campus users need to log in first.

From The Wired Campus
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Valentine’s Day may be just another greeting-card holiday, but we’ll bet a box of chocolates that your sweetheart still expects to hear from you. Thanks to the University of British Columbia Library Vault, it’s not too late.

Using images from its special collections, the library has created Valentine’s Day greeting cards that you can send as electronic love letters. Ten different designs are available, with four that are specific to today’s holiday:

• Love Conquers All — Amor vincit omnia
• The Herald
• Labour of Love
• Claire de Lune

1,198
Number of locations producing chocolate and cocoa products in 2005. These establishments employed 38,718 people. California led the nation in the number of such establishments with 128, followed by Pennsylvania with 121.

26 pounds
Per capita consumption of candy by Americans in 2006.

$411 million
The combined wholesale value of domestically produced cut flowers in 2006 for all flower-producing operations with $100,000 or more in sales. Among states, California was the leading producer, alone accounting for about three-quarters of this amount ($316 million).

6%
The percentage of currently married women who have been married for at least 50 years. Just more than half of currently married women have been married for at least 15 years.

Romantic-sounding places to spend Valentine’s Day:
Roseville, Calif.
Rose City, Mich.
South Heart, N.D.
Loveland, Colo.
Darling township, Minn.
Loveland, Ohio
Romeo, Colo

More ... from U. S. Census Bureau

Library Lovers Day - 14th February 2008

For centuries February 14 has been known as Valentine's Day, a time beloved of romantics. Now a new era has begun with Library Lovers everywhere claiming the day for the objects of their special affection - Australia's libraries.

People are devoted to their library and not just on one day of the year. Millions of library lovers across Australia must be right!

To read more: http://www.librarylovers.org.au/

From the Washington Post

A kiss, it turns out, is definitely not always just a kiss. As Valentine's Day approaches, research has begun shedding light on that most basic of all human expressions of love -- the smooch -- which has received surprisingly little scientific scrutiny.

"You'd think there would be a lot of research on kissing behavior. It's so common," said Susan M. Hughes, an assistant professor of psychology at Albright College in Pennsylvania, whose recent study is one of the first to probe snogging in depth. "But there isn't. It's really been ignored."

In fact, much about love and attraction remains mysterious. "This is a seminal paper," said Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist who studies love. "It's remarkable that we don't know more about these things. But love has not really been well studied until recently."

To read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/10/AR2008021001197.html

The Library does have access to the articles published in Washington Post through the LexisNexis database. Due to the publisher's delay, this article is currently not available. We apologize for any inconvenience. If the link above doesn't work, please check back at a later time.

From the Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - Seasonal influenza is spreading widely throughout the United States, with nearly half the cases caused by strains of the virus that aren't directly covered by this year's flu vaccine.

Whether the winter will end up being worse than usual remains to be seen. Flu mortality in adults has been higher than in the last two years, but deaths in children -- an important marker of severity -- have been rare.

Nevertheless, this winter is likely to be one of the few times that public health experts lose the bet they make each year when they devise the formula for the flu vaccine -- eight months before the virus starts circulating in the fall. Experts must decide on the formulation then because of the time it takes to produce mass quantities of the vaccine.

To read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-wp-02-10-08-flu,1,2788188.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

The Library does have access to the articles published in Chicago Tribune through the LexisNexis database. Due to the publisher's delay, this article is currently not available. We apologize for any inconvenience. If the link above doesn't work, please check back at a later time.

The Library just added a new journal subscription. Its title is Social Issues And Policy Review. This journal covers the state of the art and timely theoretical and empirical reviews of topics and programs of psychological research that are directly relevant to understanding and addressing social issues and public policy. More information about this journal is available in the library's online catalog, Webster. An electronic version of this journal is also available to our users. To access it online, use the library's A to Z Journal and Newspaper List or Webster. Off-campus users need to log in first.

From New Scientist

Biofuels, once seen as a useful way of combating climate change, could actually increase greenhouse gas emissions, say two major new studies.

And it may take tens or hundreds of years to pay back the "carbon debt"
accrued by growing biofuels in the first place, say researchers. The calculations join a growing list of studies questioning whether switching to biofuels really will help combat climate change.

Biofuel production has accelerated over the last 5 years, spurred in part by a US drive to produce corn-derived ethanol as an alternative to petrol.

To read more: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13289-biofuels-emissions-may-be-worse-than-petrol.html

By Hurley Goodall
From The Chronicle of Higher Education

At Northwestern U., an exhibit explores the creative impact of technology on artistic visions

Fine arts and technology come together this winter at a new exhibit at Northwestern University. The show illustrates the many ways in which artists are influenced by scientific tools they can use.

"Imaging by Numbers: A Historical View of the Computer Print," went on display at the university's Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art in January and will continue through April 6. Works in the exhibit, which features art created with the aid of machines, including computers, span the 1950s to the present.

The historical journey starts with early art created from oscilloscope images and goes up to modern-day works made with computer software.

"Particularly in the middle period of development — the 70s, 80s, and early 90s — you had so many artists going over to the computer-science department using this equipment to create art," said Debora D. Wood, senior curator at the museum. The new technology they found fed different artistic visions. Those visions, in turn, led to new uses of the equipment.

"It really challenges what the technology is capable of producing," Ms. Wood said.

Come to the Library to read the full article. The Chronicle of Higher Education is shelved on the newspaper shelves on the first floor.

When: Tuesday, February 12, 2008, 12 pm.
Where: Snell Library, Northeastern University, Boston

Book lovers unite for People of the Book, so March to Snell Library!

In her latest novel, People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist, focuses on the mythical and historical trajectory of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a rare illuminated religious text. Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer for fiction with her novel March. Brooks is the author of another novel, Year of Wonders, along with two non-fiction works: Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, and Foreign Correspondence: A Penpal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over. Brooks also worked as an international correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

In People of the Book, Brooks is able to intertwine the past and present into a great historical adventure. The book follows the novel’s main character, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare book expert, as she decodes the Haggadah’s secrets. This novel weaves together Hanna’s adventures in 1996 with the exciting histories of the tome’s past owners—charting a course that reveals the Haggadah’s mysterious origins. Four objects—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, and a white hair—nestled within the Haggadah’s pages trace the history of those who have tried to preserve or destroy the book over the course of the past 500 years.

The Washington Post praises People of the Book as “intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original.”

Meet Geraldine Brooks on Tuesday, February 12, 2008 @ Noon, in 90 Snell Library.

An international luncheon will be served!

This Meet the Author event is brought to you by the Northeastern University Libraries, the Northeastern University International Student & Scholar Institute (ISSI), and the Northeastern University Bookstore. It is free and open to the public. Please contact Maria Carpenter at (617) 373-2821 or m.carpenter@neu.edu for more information or special needs assistance.

February 1, 2008
Marc Kaufman, Washington Post Staff Writer

The persistent and dramatic decline in the snowpack of many mountains in the West is caused primarily by human-induced global warming and is not the result of natural variability in weather patterns, researchers reported yesterday.

Using data collected over the past 50 years, the scientists confirmed that the mountains are getting more rain and less snow, that the snowpack is breaking up faster and that more rivers are running dry by summer.

The study, published online yesterday by the journal Science, looked at possible causes of the changes -- including natural variability in temperatures and precipitation, volcanic activity around the globe and climate change driven by the release of greenhouse gases. The researchers' computer models showed that climate change is clearly the explanation that best fits the data.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to access this database.

From New Scientist

Strands of DNA can be programmed to assemble nanoparticles into 3D structures, pointing towards a new way to engineer materials from the bottom up.

Two research groups have demonstrated the technique, using squid-like gold nanoparticles with "arms" made of DNA. After that the nanoparticles just need to be mixed together. The DNA strands start linking to one another, corralling the particles into sponge-like crystals.

"These are fundamentally new structures of matter," says Chad Mirkin of Northwestern University in Evanston, US, who led one of the groups. Mirkin and colleagues hope this new approach to building materials could find a host of uses, from assembling crystals for optical communications to building structures inside the body to attack disease.

To read more: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13254-dna-construction-kit-selfassembles-3d-crystals.html

The Library has trials of two EBSCO databases from now until the end of February. Mental Measurements Yearbook provides users with a comprehensive guide to over 2,000 contemporary testing instruments. This series contains information for evaluation of test products within such areas as psychology, education, business, and leadership. The Library currently has a subscription to this product through SilverPlatter, but is considering a switch to EBSCO’s version. Tests in Print (TIP) serves as a comprehensive bibliography to all known commercially available tests that are currently in print in the English language. TIP provides vital information to users including test purpose, test publisher, in-print status, price, test acronym, intended test population, administration times, publication date(s), and test author(s). It also guides readers to reviews published in Mental Measurements Yearbook.

Off-campus users need to log in first via the Use the Library from Home link on the left navigation menu of the Library's Home page. After successfully logging in, please go back to the library home page again to try these databases.

Please try these resources and send your comments to Kendra St. Aubin at staubin@bridgew.edu by March 1.

From Nature News

Are rising temperatures favouring more and stronger hurricanes? A study published in Nature this week attempts to quantify the relationship between Atlantic hurricane activity and ocean temperature to help answer this question. Nature News examines where we are in the debate and what it means for us.

Have hurricanes become more frequent and fierce? Yes. The number of major - category 4 or 5 - hurricanes (or cyclones, as hurricanes are called in the Pacific region) has increased worldwide by around 75 percent since 1970.

The largest increases were in the North Pacific, Indian and Southwest Pacific Oceans. There is also a global trend since the mid-1970s towards longer storm duration.

To read more: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080130/full/news.2008.544.html

Amitabh Avasthi
National Geographic News
January 28, 2008

Scientists have discovered a means to extend the life span of yeast cells tenfold - and they say further research on unusual communities in Ecuador might offer hope for humans too.

The researchers achieved the feat by deleting two genes - SCH9 and RAS2 - from baker's yeast and then subjecting the yeast cells to extreme starvation by restricting their calorie intake.

"Both these genes control cellular function and normally promote cell division and cell growth," said study leader Valter Longo, a biogerontologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "They are very similar to two of the main cancer-causing genes in humans."

To read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080128-longer-life.html

The Library has added a subscription to the Naxos Music Library, with more than 258,000 tracks, including classical music, jazz, world, folk, and Chinese music. While listening you can read notes on the works being played as well as biographical information on composers and artists. Access is limited to a maximum of 5 simultaneous users.

The link to the Naxos Music Library is on the Research Tools page under the Music section. Off campus users need to log in first by using the Use the Library from Home link. If you have any questions, please call 508-531-1394 or e-mail refdept@bridgew.edu.

January 25, 2008

Northeastern University Libraries is pleased to announce the acquisition of the historical records of ACT/UP Boston, donated by founding members Raymond Schmidt and Stephen Skuce. ACT UP / Boston (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was a diverse, nonpartisan group of people united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.

Founded in December 1987 by activists Raymond Schmidt, Stephen Skuce, Donald Smith, and Paul Wychules, ACT UP/Boston was formed to focus local efforts to speed up the development of AIDS treatments, educational programs, and prevention strategies. The organization negotiated with government officials, public health policymakers, medical personnel, researchers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and others to bring about changes to meet the demands of the AIDS crisis. When negotiations failed, they held dramatic demonstrations, sometimes employing civil disobedience, to effect changes to save lives. In January 1988, the group held its first protest at the Boston offices of the Department of Health and Human Services, regarding delays and red tape surrounding approval of AIDS treatment drugs. ACT UP/Boston’s agenda included demands for a compassionate and comprehensive national policy on AIDS; a national emergency AIDS project; intensified drug testing, research, and treatment efforts; and a full-scale national educational program within reach of all. The organization held die-ins and sleep-ins, provided “freshman orientation” for Harvard Medical School students, negotiated successfully with a major pharmaceutical corporation, affected state and national AIDS polices, pressured health care insurers to provide coverage for people with AIDS, influenced the thinking of some of the nation’s most influential researchers, served on the Commonwealth committee that created the nation’s first online registry of clinical trials for AIDS treatments, distributed information and condoms to the congregation at Cardinal Law’s Confirmation Sunday services at Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston, and made aerosolized pentamidine an accessible treatment in New England. The organization’s motto was “Silence = Death.”

The material, dating from 1987-1996, documents the organization’s founding, the work of the Treatment Issues Committee, fund-raising activities, demonstrations, and treatment related as well as other campaigns. The records include board and committee minutes, correspondence, grant proposals, ACT UP publications, press clippings, flyers, clinical trial reviews, and realia.

This rich collection contributes to the University Archives and Special Collection Department's collecting focus on the records of private, non-profit, community-based organizations that are concerned with social justice issues. For a list of all collections available for research in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections Department, please see: http://www.library.neu.edu/archives/collections/overview/.

Time: Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 7 pm
Place: The Raytheon Amphitheater, Egan Center, Northeastern University

Jonathan Schell is a best-selling political writer and journalist whose seminal work on the peril of living in a nuclear age, The Fate of the Earth, prompted the Chicago Sun-Times to write, “It may well be one of those rare books that has the power to transform men’s minds.” In his most recent book, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger Schell warns that since the 1982 publication of The Fate of the Earth, the global trafficking of nuclear weapons has only increased. Schell posits that we are facing a dangerous cycle of escalating conflict that could end in nuclear war.

Despite the end of the Cold War, critical hazards persist in this seventh decade of the nuclear age. Schell sees that the ‘standard’ nuclear powers, particularly the United States under the Bush administration, are abandoning a forty-year history of nuclear disarmament in favor of pre-emptive military action, including the use of nuclear force. Against this backdrop, new nations eager for power and security are racing to develop their own nuclear weapons. In The Seventh Decade, Schell has crafted a response to these threats that The New York Times Book Review calls “a passionate and cogently argued case for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.”

This Meet the Author event is brought to you by the Northeastern University Libraries, the Northeastern University Philosophy and Religion Department, and the Northeastern University Bookstore. Please contact Maria Carpenter at (617) 373-2821 or m.carpenter@neu.edu for more information or special needs assistance.

From the Los Angeles Times

When Cyagra Inc. holds an office potluck, no one's stomach churns when the lasagna, meatloaf or tacos are made with cloned beef. The cutting-edge ingredient was produced on the company's Pennsylvania farm for the Food and Drug Administration, which spent seven years evaluating the safety of meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring.

... Cyagra is one of three privately held biotech start-ups making clones of genetically superior livestock for thousands of dollars apiece. In the coming years, they hope the rest of the U.S. -- and the world -- will join them in dining on steaks, pork chops and ice cream derived from animals conceived in their laboratories.

After reviewing hundreds of scientific studies, the FDA concluded last week that food produced from clones and their progeny is as safe to eat as conventional fare.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this database.

January 21, 2008
By Kenneth Chang
From The New York Times

Here is another factor that might be contributing to the thinning of some of the Antarctica's glaciers: volcanoes.

In an article published Sunday on the Web site of the journal Nature Geoscience, Hugh F. J. Corr and David G. Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey report the identification of a layer of volcanic ash and glass shards frozen within an ice sheet in western Antarctica.

For Antarctica, ''This is the first time we have seen a volcano beneath the ice sheet punch a hole through the ice sheet,'' Dr. Vaughan said.

Heat from a volcano could still be melting ice and contributing to the thinning and speeding up of the Pine Island Glacier, which passes nearby, but Dr. Vaughan doubted that it could be affecting other glaciers in West Antarctica, which have also thinned in recent years. Most glaciologists, including Dr. Vaughan, say that warmer ocean water is the primary cause.

Volcanically, Antarctica is a fairly quiet place. But sometime around 325 B.C., the researchers said, a hidden and still active volcano erupted, puncturing several hundred yards of ice above it. Ash and shards from the volcano carried through the air and settled onto the surrounding landscape. That layer is now out of sight, hidden beneath the snows that fell over the subsequent 23 centuries.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this database.

January 16, 2008
From the Philadelphia Inquirer

ATLANTA (Associated Press) - Bucking the trend in many other wealthy industrialized nations, the United States seems to be experiencing a baby boomlet, reporting the largest number of children born in 45 years.

The nearly 4.3 million births in 2006 were mostly due to a bigger population, especially a growing number of Hispanics. That group accounted for nearly one-quarter of all U.S. births.

But non-Hispanic white women and other racial and ethnic groups were having more babies, too. A review of birth numbers dating to 1909 found the 2006 total was the highest since 1961, near the end of the baby boom. And the United States has a higher fertility rate than every country in continental Europe, as well as Australia, Canada and Japan.

To read more: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20080116_Boom_or_blip__U_S__births_at_a_45-year_high.html

Emory University (Atlanta, GA) announced that it has landed the personal archive of Georgia-born Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Alice Walker. "I can imagine in years to come that my papers, my journals and letters will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do," Walker said in a statement, announcing Emory as her choice. The archive includes everything from drafts of early works of fiction to correspondence and editorial notes—more than 120 boxes of journals, photos, and other materials, now being processed by librarians.

Walker's papers will join those from an array of literary luminaries in Emory's formidable special collections, which includes the recently acquired archive of Salman Rushdie, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's papers, British poet laureate Ted Hughes' papers, and the 75,000-volume Danowski Poetry Library. In 1983 Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for her novel The Color Purple.

Through a partnership with IMLS and St John’s University, 20 scholarships are available to study for MLS degrees. They include free tuition, use of a laptop, much more. Applications are due by 3/15. More information: http://www.stjohns.edu/academics/graduate/liberalarts/departments/library/IMLS or email creels@stjohns.edu

St. John’s University, in partnership with the Queens Public Library, the Office of School Library Services of the New York City Department of Education and the New York Hall of Science in Flushing, Queens will improve literacy and academic performance of youth in underserved metropolitan areas by recruiting and educating 40 very committed students for future employment in public libraries, school library media centers and museums in the New York City metropolitan area. This exciting degree program that focuses on families, literacy and education has many benefits.

Tuition Benefit
Full tuition for 40 students; first cohort of 20 starts Spring 2008 and second cohort of 20 starts Summer 2008.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

If it’s not the coolest place on earth, it’s certainly in that neighborhood. The South Pole has long been the hangout of choice for a select brand of researchers who don’t mind freezing their nasal hairs and who relish the crystal-clear views of the sky. Now those scientists have a new home at the bottom of the world. The National Science Foundation last Saturday dedicated the recently completed Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

This is the third version of an American station at the spot. The first one, built in the 1950s, has long since disappeared under 30 feet of snow. The second one, housed inside a giant geodesic dome, was showing signs of age and getting buried by snow every winter, requiring heroic efforts to keep it functioning. The new station is built on stilts, so the relentless winds will help keep the station from getting buried. And the stilts can be jacked up to raise the whole station. Pictures and diagrams of the new facility are available here. But if you want to know what’s going on at the South Pole right now, check out the Webcam. —Richard Monastersky

From Library of Congress Blog
Posted on January 16th, 2008

If you’re reading this, then chances are you already know about Web 2.0. Even if you don’t know the term itself, you’re one of millions worldwide who are actively creating, sharing or benefiting from user-generated content that characterizes Web 2.0 phenomena.

As a communicator, I want to expand the reach of the Library and access to our magnificent collections as far and wide as possible. Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, so many staff in Library offices and so many dollars in the budget. Priorities have to be chosen that will most effectively advance our mission.

That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).

To read more: http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233

January 8, 2008
From the Washington Post

When strangers ask her for directions, Karen Kostyal responds quickly. She has lived around Washington about 30 years and has a well-rooted sense of the area. Nonetheless, the Alexandria resident says, "my husband usually cuts in," supporting the stereotype that men feel their sense of orientation and direction is superior.

... That assertion may be contestable, but there are well-documented differences in how men and women get from Point A to Point B -- perhaps giving a scientific root to timeworn jokes about women being batty drivers and men never admitting (though committing) error.

Studies over the past decade have shown that women are likelier to rely on landmarks and visual cues, and men on maps, cardinal directions (such as north and south) and gauges of distance.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

January 8, 2008
From the New York Times

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Superconductivity, the flow of electricity without resistance, was once as confounding to physicists as it is to everyone else. For almost 50 years, the heavyweights of physics brooded over the puzzle.

... Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by a Dutch physicist, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. He observed that when mercury was cooled to below minus-
452 degrees Fahrenheit, about 7 degrees above absolute zero, electrical resistance suddenly disappeared, and mercury was a superconductor.

For physicists, that was astounding, almost like happening upon a real- world perpetual motion machine. Indeed, an electrical current running around a ring of mercury at 7 degrees above absolute zero would, in principle, run forever.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

From New Scientist

Atom-thick sheets of a carbon compound called graphene should smash the record for room-temperature conductivity, say UK researchers.

The fact that the near-2D layers let electrons travel so freely means the sheets could allow a new generation of super-fast microelectronics, they say. Prototype devices like transistors have already been made from graphene, but its basic properties are still being explored.

Graphene is the name given to a sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagon pattern. Stacks of such sheets make the pencil-core ingredient graphite, but until recently it had been extremely difficult to isolate single layers. The new research was carried out by scientists at the University of Manchester - where graphene was first isolated in 2004 - and colleagues from Russia, the Netherlands, and the US.

To read more: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13158-carbon-nanosheets-promise-superfast-chips.html

Articles published in New Scientist are also available in the library's LexisNexis and Academic Search Premier databases.

January 3, 2008
From Copyright Clearance Center

New Law Gives Open Access to Research

Open access advocates have much to celebrate in the New Year after President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007. The new law requires public access to research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It replaces a voluntary system put into place in 2005.

Despite sometimes controversial publisher opposition to the legislation, the provision comes as no surprise. For several years, various proponents of open access, led by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access have argued that patients, healthcare professionals and scientists should have free, timely access to taxpayer-funded research.

In 2006 Congress proposed, but never voted on a bill that would have required open access to peer-reviewed manuscripts within six months of publication. The new law is slightly more favorable to publishers, mandating that researchers add their material to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database no later than 12 months after publication.

Visit OnCopyright for more copyright news and commentary.

From Scientific American

The past year has been both tempestuous and exciting - from pet food, E.
coli and toy poisoning scares to political fireworks over embryonic stem cell research to forest fires ravaging California.

A controversial Nobel scientist (James Watson) went down in a blaze of infamy, tumbling from grace after putting his foot in his mouth one time too many, whereas a former vice president and defeated presidential candidate (Al Gore) rose from the ashes to become a Nobel Peace prize (and Oscar) winner for raising awareness on the urgency of global warming.

The honor came on the heels of official worldwide recognition that climate change is not only a pressing problem, but one that was almost completely caused by humans - and one, too, that humans must fix. On a related note, we discovered that the North Pole is melting, beloved freshwater dolphins are practically extinct and nuclear power ... has become the clean-energy alternative du jour that even has the backing of some enviros.

To read more: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=top-25-science-stories-of

WilsonWeb is the platform of the Art Full Text and the Education Full Text databases. As of January 2, 2008, WilsonWeb will have an entirely new interface that is expected to enhance your searching experience, helping you to find relevant information quickly and easily. You will find much that is familiar, and yet, many new enhancements to WilsonWeb, including:

* A "Frameless" Interface--for faster loading, and better integration with the frames of your institution's website.

* Enhanced Layout & Graphics: Clearer screens and more accessible tools, for quicker, more intuitive searching.

* Navigational Improvements: New Full Text, Page Image, and Peer Reviewed tabs in results let you isolate those records at a click. In Full Display mode, you c! an now also choose between scrolling through results or clicking from record to record--navigating the way you find most comfortable.

* Simplified Print, Email & Save functions: New buttons--Save This, Email This, and Print This--capture not just the citation, but also any available full text, saving a step. You can also use the Print Email Save button in the banner for simplified and complete functionality as well.

* Simplified Search History screen allows you to more handily review, update, combine and organize saved searches, and receive new information on any search in ema! il alerts.

* Full text translations: Electronic conversion of articles into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean. Other languages to come!

Sample screens are available at www.hwwilson.com/Documentation/WilsonWeb/frameless.htm.

December 19, 2007
From Friends:Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services

1. w00t (interjection)
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

2. facebook
[http://www.m-w.com/info/07words.htm]

facebook

(verb) : To upload a photograph to Facebook so that it may be viewed by others.
Have you facebooked those photos from the party last weekend?
Submitted by: Don Brady from Louisiana on Dec. 12, 2007 11:34

(verb) : To create an event entry on facebook
I am going to facebook the party on Friday so everyone knows about it.
Submitted by: Anonymous on Dec. 12, 2007 10:13

(verb) : To get on a facebook website.
Did you facebook today?
Submitted by: Anonymous on Dec. 04, 2007 14:04

(verb) : to look up someone's profile on the popular Internet social network Facebook.
I facebooked Sarah the other day and posted a comment on her wall, but she has yet to reply to my comment.
Submitted by: Anonymous on Dec. 14, 2006 17:09

(verb) : 1.to search for another person through the online directory know as facebook
2. to send a message through the online directory know as facebook
I facebooked Lauren yesterday to see where she goes to college.
Submitted by: Anonymous on Dec. 11, 2005 23:24

(verb) : To add someone to your list of friends on the "facebook.com" website.
Hey, I saw you facebooked me. (also a noun, as in "Look him up on facebook.")
Submitted by: Selena from North Carolina on Dec. 11, 2005 12:03

Facebooking

(verb) : To communicate with others through facebook.com, like "chatting" is to instant messaging.
Submitted by: Melissa Lester from Canada on Oct. 08, 2007 13:03

(verb) : It means checking out your Facebook.com profile or your friends' Facebook.com profile.
I was facebooking my friends profiles.
Submitted by: Joshua Wilson from Florida on Jan. 29, 2006 20:21

[http://www3.merriam-webster.com/opendictionary06/newword_search.php?word=facebook]

December 18, 2007
By Dennis Overbye
The New York Times

''Gravity,'' goes the slogan on posters and bumper stickers. ''It isn't just a good idea. It's the law.''

And what a law. Unlike, say, traffic or drug laws, you don't have a choice about obeying gravity or any of the other laws of physics. Jump and you will come back down. Faith or good intentions have nothing to do with it.

Existence didn't have to be that way, as Einstein reminded us when he said, ''The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.'' Against all the odds, we can send e-mail to Sri Lanka, thread spacecraft through the rings of Saturn, take a pill to chase the inky tendrils of depression, bake a turkey or a souffle and bury a jump shot from the corner.

Yes, it's a lawful universe. But what kind of laws are these, anyway, that might be inscribed on a T-shirt but apparently not on any stone tablet that we have ever been able to find?

Are they merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from?

Apparently it does matter, judging from the reaction to a recent article by Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and author of popular science books, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

Two important Gallup Poll publications were added to LexisNexis Academic to help offset the loss of the Roper Polls reported last week. In addition to the Gallup Management Journal, which was already in available, subscribers will now be able to access the following two titles:

Gallup Poll News Service

Description: The Gallup Poll News Service is the internet's leading polling-based news source. It contains news centered on public opinion. Published each business day, articles from the Gallup Poll News Service analyze findings and trends in politics, business, social issues, and Americans' lifestyles.

Full source description: http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?263351

Direct search link: http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/api/version1/sf?shr=t&sfi=AC00NBGenSrch&csi=263351

*Note: Updating of this source is temporarily suspended during a data format conversion; current coverage will be reinstated shortly.

Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing

Description: The Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing is Gallup's premier weekly online news publication. Each Tuesday, the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing publishes in-depth articles on the opinions and issues Gallup is investigating in government, in the workplace, in schools, in hospitals, and in faith communities.

Full source description: http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?263354

Direct search link: http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/api/version1/sf?shr=t&sfi=AC00NBGenSrch&csi=263354

Those needing opinion poll data should also try using the Polls & Surveys SmartIndexing term in combination with news searches run from the Power Search form or the News search form. This will retrieve news stories that report on the contents of public opinion polls.

December 17, 2007

Last night’s Pizza Night event was a success despite the weather. About 60 large pizzas were ordered and distributed from 11:00 until midnight. Also there were about 300 bottles of water and cans of soda distributed. The first to arrive for fresh pizza were the students studying and working in the building; they in turn called their roommates and friends, who polished off the rest of the food. Everyone I talked to enjoyed the food, were grateful for the break, and left refreshed.

It was really a very nice event. Kudos to the students from the BSC chapter of the American Marketing Association and their advisor, Bob Wolk! The AMA students requested the funds and marketed the event; they set up the tables and had plenty of paper plates and napkins available; they picked up the pizzas and cleaned up afterwards. It was well organized and fun.

December 14, 2007
From Publishers Weekly

Turns out that the final buyer for J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard was Amazon. The book, one of only seven copies in existence, was acquired in a heated auction Wednesday night for £1.9 million by London fine art dealer Hazlitt Gooden & Fox. Yesterday, Amazon announced it was the owner of the title, and has established a Web site, where it is posting images from the extensively illustrated work. In addition, there will be reviews of the five fairy tales that comprise the book and discussion forums. Amazon has sold 12 million copies of Rowling's Harry Potter titles worldwide.

December 11, 2007
By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer

Infectious-disease expert David N. Gilbert was making rounds at the Providence Portland Medical Center in Oregon in April when he realized that an unusual number of patients, including young, vigorous adults, were being hit by a frightening pneumonia.

"What was so striking was to see patients who were otherwise healthy be just devastated," Gilbert said. Within a day or two of developing a cough and high fever, some were so sick they would arrive at the emergency room gasping for air.

"They couldn't breathe," Gilbert said. "They were going to die if we didn't get more oxygen into them."

Gilbert alerted state health officials, a decision that led investigators to realize that a new, apparently more virulent form of a virus that usually causes nothing worse than a nasty cold was circulating around the United States. At least 1,035 Americans in four states have been infected so far this year by the virus, known as an adenovirus. Dozens have been hospitalized, many requiring intensive care, and at least 10 have died.

Health officials say the virus does not seem to be causing life-threatening illness on a wide scale, and most people who develop colds or flulike symptoms are at little or no risk. Likewise, most people infected by the suspect adenovirus do not appear to become seriously ill. But the germ appears to be spreading, and investigators are unsure how much of a threat it poses.

"This virus has the capability of causing severe respiratory illness in people of all ages, regardless of their medical condition," said John Su, a disease investigator for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based in Texas, where the largest outbreak is tapering off at an Air Force base after 10 months. Other outbreaks have been reported in Washington state and South Carolina, along with a single case in an infant in New York City.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

The content of this publication will not be available in LexisNexis soon. The publisher has decided to opt out of the agreement that made it possible for LexisNexis to bring this content to academic researchers. The Licensing team of LexisNexis has made a very determined effort to retain academic rights, and they will continue discussions with the publisher in hopes of reinstating this content in the future. The publisher has made it clear that no reinstatement will happen in 2008, and has directed LexisNexis to remove Roper's materials from LexisNexis Academic prior to the end of 2007. However, Roper's materials will remain available until approximately December 21.

Public Opinion Location Library or Public Opinion Online covers the full spectrum of public interest including politics and government, public institutions, international relations, business, social affairs and consumer behavior and preferences. The file includes actual data from a wide variety of sources in opinion polling such as Gallup, Harris, Roper; ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC; Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal. The file is maintained by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, a non-profit education and research organization in the field of public opinion and public policy.

December 10, 2007
From The Chronicle of Higher Education

Washington — So a professor wants to show Monty Python and the Holy Grail to her class on British humor, and she wants to check with the film studio to get permission. How would she do that? As it stands, the semester could be over by the time the professor even finds the right person to ask.

A nonprofit group called the Copyright Alliance, whose members include associations for the motion-picture and recording industries, announced today that it would like to help broker such requests. The idea, described briefly at an academic symposium held by the group on Monday in Washington, is to create a Web site where professors could post questions like the the one above and get answers from an industry official. The online resource would take the form of a wiki, a communal Web site that allows visitors to easily post new comments and track the changes that have been made.

Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, said in an interview after the symposium that he had been talking with alliance members from the content industry who were ready to proceed, assuming that colleges want such a system.

To read more: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2599/copyright-alliance-proposes-wiki-to-help-professors-get-copyright-permissions?at

Articles published in The Chronicle of Higher Education can be found in the following library databases:

Academic OneFile 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
Academic Search Premier 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
Education Full Text Only 2000 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
Educator's Reference Complete 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
Expanded Academic ASAP 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
General OneFile 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
General Reference Center Gold 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
LexisNexis Academic 1997 to present
MasterFILE Premier 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
Professional Development Collection 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)
Religion & Philosophy Collection 1999 to present (Embargo: 1 month)

December 6, 2007
By Gina Kolata, The New York Times

Researchers believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months?

The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.

''Influenza virus is more likely to be transmitted during winter on the way to the subway than in a warm room,'' said Dr. Peter Palese, a flu researcher who is the chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai Medical College in New York and the lead author of the flu study.

Palese published details of his findings in the Oct. 19 issue of PLoS Pathogens. The crucial hint that allowed him to do his study came from a paper published in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, when doctors were puzzling over why and how the virus had spread so quickly and been so deadly.

As long as flu has been recognized, people have asked, ''Why winter?'' The very name ''influenza'' is an Italian word that, some historians proposed, originated in the mid-18th century as ''influenza di freddo,'' or ''influence of the cold.''

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

December 5, 2007
From the New York Times

For Claude Monet, 1912-22 was a watershed decade. He was perhaps the most successful artist of his time, and his genius had already assured him a place in history. But as he aged, his painting noticeably lost subtlety.

... His days as an avant-garde rebel had long passed, but some critics would later wonder whether the Impressionist was suddenly trying to become an abstract expressionist.

What has long been known about Monet's later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. ... Now, thanks to modern digital techniques, scientists and critics can have a better idea how cataracts changed what Monet saw.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

The University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS) is now recruiting for its next cohort of Knowledge River students. Students must have an undergraduate degree in any field. These students focus on library and information issues for and about Hispanics and Native Americans. Knowledge River participants will graduate with an ALA-accredited MA in Information Resources and Library Science leading to careers as a librarian or information professional with a specific focus on Hispanic and Native American communities. Deadline for applications is Feb. 1, 2008. For more information about the program, go to: http://knowledgeriver.arizona.edu/

From Oxford University Press USA

The 2007 Word of the Year is (drum-roll please) locavore.

“Locavore” was coined two years ago by a group of four women in San Francisco who proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius. Other regional movements have emerged since then, though some groups refer to themselves as “localvores” rather than “locavores.” However it’s spelled, it’s a word to watch.

Runners-Up:

aging in place: the process of growing older while living in one’s own residence, instead of having to move to a new home or community

bacn: email notifications, such as news alerts and social networking updates, that are considered more desirable than unwanted “spam” (coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh in Aug. 2007 and popularized in the blogging community)

cloudware: online applications, such as webmail, powered by massive data storage facilities, also called “cloud servers”

colony collapse disorder: a still-unexplained phenomenon resulting in the widespread disappearance of honeybees from beehives, first observed in late 2006

cougar: an older woman who romantically pursues younger men

MRAP vehicle: Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, designed to protect troops from improvised explosive devices (IEDs)

mumblecore: an independent film movement featuring low-budget production, non-professional actors, and largely improvised dialogue

previvor: a person who has not been diagnosed with a form of cancer but has survived a genetic predisposition for cancer

social graph: the network of one’s friends and connections on social websites such as Facebook and Myspace

tase (or taze): to stun with a Taser (popularized by a Sep. 2007 incident in which a University of Florida student was filmed being stunned by a Taser at a public forum)

upcycling: the transformation of waste materials into something more useful or valuable

To read more: http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore/

November 28, 2007
Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer

The formula that doctors use to calculate a woman's risk of breast cancer underestimates the danger for black women most of the time and especially for those age 50 and older -- the age when they are most likely to benefit from screening tests and protective drugs, according to the first major reassessment of the widely used tool.

"We've been concerned about the assumptions we had to make for African American women and other racial and ethnic groups for some time," said Mitchell H. Gail, a biostatistician at the National Cancer Institute who led the reevaluation of the formula he himself developed. "It turns out that we have been underestimating the risk for African American women."

The advance could have broad implications for many black women, prompting them to reconsider the danger they face from a disease that is women's leading type of cancer and second-leading cancer killer. That could translate into more women undergoing mammograms and other examinations to detect the disease in its earliest, most treatable stages; taking drugs such as tamoxifen to reduce their risk; and signing up for studies to identify better warning signs or risk-reducing medicines.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

November 14, 2007
By Gary Rotstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For now, a robotic wheelchair viewed as a future all-purpose assistant for disabled and elderly individuals is in pieces in different rooms of the University of Pittsburgh's Human Engineering Research Laboratories: a motorized chair here, aluminum arms with end-claws over there, computer sensors elsewhere.

By March, its developers hope to put the components together to have it open a door for a wheelchair user. In 10 years, they want it to prepare an omelet for that person.

That kind of dramatic leap ... represents just one aspect of a wide range of advanced technology research taking place jointly at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University to help people stay independent. The universities received a $15 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation a year ago to develop their new Quality of Life Technology Center ...

To read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07318/833537-115.stm

November 14, 2007
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — A dark novel about the calamities of the Vietnam War and a highly critical, heavily researched history of the CIA won the top awards Wednesday at the National Book Awards:

• Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke won the fiction award. "Reading it feels like a careening journey into our national subconscious," the judges said.

• Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, based largely on the spy agency's own files, won the award for non-fiction. It was praised for being "a sobering reminder of how American national security has suffered from the ineptitude of individuals and the failures of the broader institution."

The other winners at the publishing world's version of the Academy Awards were:

• Young people's literature: Sherman Alexie's semi-autobiographical novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, about a young Spokane Indian who abandons his impoverished reservation. The judges called it "disturbing, uplifting, tragic, and laugh-out funny."

November 2, 2007
From BBC News Online

Almost 20 years after it was first conceived, what will become the world's most powerful optical telescope is about to open its eyes. Lying beneath the clear skies of Arizona, the $120m Large Binocular Telescope will allow astronomers to probe the Universe further back in time and in more detail than ever before.

"The LBT is a very exciting step forward for astronomy," said Professor Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK. "Not only is it big, but it is proving the practical implementation of some of the new technologies which will be critical for all next-generation large telescopes."

Unlike most telescopes today, which consist of one light collecting mirror, the binocular telescope will consist of two 8.4m (27.5ft) discs used in tandem. ... Using two mirrors will give LBT the equivalent light-gathering capacity of a single 11.8m (39ft) instrument and the resolution of an even bigger telescope.

To read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7070942.stm

November 1, 2007
From the Washington Post

A long-simmering debate over whether the results of government-funded research should be made freely available to the public could take a big step toward resolution as members of a House and Senate conference committee meet today to finalize the 2008 Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill.

At issue is whether scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health should be required to publish the results of their research solely in journals that promise to make the articles available free within a year after publication.

The idea is that consumers should not have to buy expensive scientific journal subscriptions -- or be subject to pricey per-page charges for nonsubscribers -- to see the results of research they have already paid for with their taxes.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to access this article.

October 30, 2007
From Nature News

Autumn leaves turn fiery-red in an attempt to store up as much goodness as possible from leaves and soil before a tree settles down for the winter.
The worse the quality of soil, the more effort a tree will put in to recovering nutrients from its leaves, and the redder they get.

That's the conclusion that Emily Habinck from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, came to after looking at trees in a flood plain and in an adjacent upland area. The soil in the upland area was low in nutrients, and the leaves there were bright red. In the floodplain, where the soil was packed full of goodness, the autumn leaves remained yellow.

"In a nutshell: the redder a leaf is, the more nutrients it is going to recycle," explains Habinck, who presents her findings at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, today.

The full article is available at http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071029/full/news.2007.202.html.

**All World Scientific and Imperical College Press Journals to Offer Open Access Option**

Authors now have the option to pay $2,500 for their articles to be Open Access. Open access choice will apply to ALL of World Scientific and Imperial College Press journals with electronic version.

World Scientific and Imperial College Press is aware of the scientifc community's desire for more open access publications so that scientific information can be shared by all. Thus, We have decided to offer authors the choice to do so. Nearly 6,000 Research articles every year will now have the potential to be open access.

More infomration may be found here:
http://www.worldscinet.com/authors/openaccess.shtml

**New Open Access Journal- Optics and Photonics Letters**

World Scientific is also happy to announce that we will be launching our first fully open access journal, Optics and Photonics Letters in 2008. Optics and Photonics Letters (OPL) is an open access journal which offers rapid dissemination of original and timely results in various fields of optics and photonics, with emphasis on peer-reviewed short communications.

Articles submitted for publication before January 2008 will enjoy a 50% waiver on publication charges. Please visit http://www.worldscinet.com/opl to find out!

October 29, 2007
From American Scientist

As children, we played in the dirt, ate fruit without washing it, licked the juice from our grubby fingers and never fell sick, if memory serves.
This last detail probably isn't quite true, but it's also possible that something has changed since we were kids - something in the food itself, or in society, that makes us more vulnerable than before.

... It is indeed true that, for fresh produce, the number of outbreaks of food poisoning caused by microorganisms has risen in recent years. There are many potential explanations for this trend. Perhaps most significantly, people are eating more fresh fruits, vegetables and salads than ever before, and more meals are eaten outside the home at restaurants or public gatherings ...

... [The] most effective strategy is to keep produce free from harmful pathogens in the first place. If pre- and postharvest practices are stringent enough, we should be able to eat any produce with confidence.

The Library does carry the American Scientist journal. You can also read this article in the following databases:

Academic Search Premier
MAS Ultra: School Edition
MasterFILE Premier

Off-campus users need to log in first.

October 25, 2007
From the Washington Post

If you need satellite images to put the news of the day in perspective, the news is probably not good. Satellite photography is the preferred method for announcing the arrival of hurricanes and it has become indispensable to showing the scale of the fires that are ravaging Southern California this week. It is also a popular visual accompaniment to stories about global warming and disappearing ice caps.

Since the first pictures of the Earth taken from outside its atmosphere (by a camera on a V-2 rocket launched in 1946), there has been something uncanny about pictures of the planet. They confirm, of course, that the Earth is round. But they also capture a frailty in the planet, its loneliness in space.

In Milton's "Paradise Lost," just before the Devil takes up residence in the Garden of Eden and tempts its original residents into sin, he arrives on Earth out of the realm of chaos, and sees our planet rather the way the first astronauts may have seen it. Milton calls our planet "this pendent world." As if it were just hanging there, unprotected, innocent, waiting to be despoiled.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

October 25, 2007

BioMed Central today announced the launch of Biology Image Library, an online resource that provides access to over 11,000 carefully selected biology-related images. This is the latest service from BioMed Central, part of the Science Navigation Group of companies which was also responsible for the creation of images.MD, a popular medical image resource.

The Library is a new subscription-based service offering access to an annotated selection of high-quality biological images, movies, illustrations and animations. Subscribers may make royalty-free use of images in the collection for research and educational purposes, while commercial usage rights will be available for an additional fee.

"Biology Image Library will be an invaluable resource for biological researchers and educators" said Matthew Cockerill, Publisher, BioMed Central. "Researchers often maintain their own collections of useful images, but until now there has been no easy way for others to find them. By annotating the best images, making them searchable and accessible, and licensing them to allow convenient reuse, Biology Image Library will help academics and other biologists to illustrate their work and to create eye-catching presentations and course material."

Biology Image Library gives researchers, teachers and students an easy way to find and download high-quality visual material. All content comes from sources that are peer-reviewed by academic editors prior to publication online, so researchers can be sure that the images are scientifically reliable. Subjects covered include developmental biology, histology & pathology, immunology, microbiology & parasitology, molecular & cellular biology, neuroscience and plant biology.

The Biology Image Library is continuously working to expand its collection of images. Potential contributors should email:
info@biologyimagelibrary.com or see http://www.biologyimagelibrary.com/contribute for more information.

To view Biology Image Library and register for a free trial, visit www.biologyimagelibrary.com.

October 23, 2007
From the Washington Post

George H.W. Bush: Call your dermatologist. New research suggests that broccoli, the vegetable that the former president famously demonized as inedible, can prevent the damage from ultraviolet light that often leads to skin cancer. And as Bush would surely appreciate, he would not even have to eat it.

In tests on people and hairless mice, a green smear of broccoli-sprout extract blocked the potentially cancer-causing damage usually inflicted by sunlight and showed potential advantages over sunscreens. The product is still in the early stages of development.

... But scientists said the research represents a significant advance because the extract works not by screening out the sun's rays -- which has the downside of blocking sun-induced Vitamin D production -- but by turning on the body's natural cancer-fighting machinery. Once stimulated, those mechanisms work for days, long after the extract is washed away.

The full article is availabe in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to access this article.

From Center for American Progress

The Senate continues the budget battle this week with the consideration of the Labor, Health, and Human Services Appropriations bill, which sets levels for education spending, as well as other key domestic programs. President Bush has already stated he plans to veto the bill because it provides $64.9 billion for the Education Department. Bush’s proposed budget appropriates only $61 billion—$3.9 billion less than Congress’ budget and $1.3 billion less than the Education Department received last year. The Bush administration, in the same year that it is spending $50 billion each month on operations in Iraq, plans on vetoing a bill because it increases funding for American schools by $2.6 billion, among other domestic budget increases. What’s even more surprising is that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings actually announced back in February that Bush’s newly proposed budget would increase education funding by 41 percent relative to 2001. A look at the president’s budget tells a different story. As this new interactive map shows, 44 out of 50 states would see reductions in federal funding for elementary and secondary education for fiscal year 2008 if the Bush administration got its way. Rather than bold increases, states on average will see a -1.4 percent decrease in elementary and secondary school funding.

The Harry Potter Contest proved to be Maxwell Library’s most popular contest yet. The contest ended on October 6, 2007 and three lucky winners have been chosen from the entries that had all the correct responses. Maxwell Library would like to congratulate the following winners.

The answers to the Harry Potter Contest are now available.

October 8, 2007
Mark Henderson, Science Editor
The Times (London)

The papers of one of Britain's greatest scientists, which were lost for centuries and saved for the nation in a 1-million-pound sale last year, became available to read online [yesterday].

The innovative "digital folio" provides unprecedented public access to hundreds of pages of manuscript notes and minutes kept by Robert Hooke, who is sometimes described as Britain's Leonardo da Vinci.

The remarkable collection contains Hooke's minutes of early meetings of the Royal Society, taken while he was curator of experiments and then secretary of the national academy of science, between 1661 and 1692. They record many of the scientist's own experiments and others conducted by figures such as Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren, as well as the disputes and rivalries that arose among the founding fathers of British science.

The full article is available in the library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users need to log in first.

The winners are:

Congratulations!

All of the respondents to the Library’s trial preferred Social Work Abstracts on the EBSCOHost platform. Our subscription has been switched from SilverPlatter to the EBSCO version, effective immediately. Among the advantages are the ability to cross-search with other EBSCO databases and to link from Social Work Abstracts to full text articles.

October 1, 2007
Publishers Weekly

Amazon is getting into the author-writing contest arena, launching the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award today in cooperation with Penguin and Hewlett-Packard. Amazon will accept submissions through November 5 and the winner will have his or her novel published by Penguin, which is also offering a $25,000 advance. PW will serve as preliminary judges of the material as well.

The contest is free and open to unpublished authors in 20 countries who have English-language manuscripts (complete contest rules and requirements are available at www.amazon.com/abna). Amazon, which will accept up to 5,000 entries, is assembling a panel of customers who have posted the most, and best, reviews on its site to serve as the judges for the first round. After the submissions have been cut to 1,000, a team put together by PW will give a full review to each manuscript, and the review and excerpt will be posted on the Amazon Web site where customers can read, rate and review the offerings. The PW team -- of existing and new reviewers -- will be paid to administer the reviews, and reviewers will remain anonymous. Amazon is paying PW's administrative costs only.

Penguin will pare the 1,000 manuscripts down to 100 and those will undergo "a full editorial review process," said Penguin director of online sales and marketing Tim McCall. Once Penguin cuts the submissions to 10, excerpts will again be posted on the Amazon site where customers will vote for the winner. Voting will close March 31 and the winner announced April 7. McCall said Penguin will release the book, "in the appropriate format," and he hopes to have at least a galley of the book on hand at BEA.

There have been a number of changes to the databases we get through the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) and Southeastern Massachusetts Library System (SEMLS).

The Gale Infotrac database Professional Collection was replaced by Educator’s Reference Complete. Educator’s Reference Complete includes more than 1,100 periodicals and 200 reports, most in full-text. This database covers multiple levels of education from preschool to college and every educational specialty. We also added Gale’s Massachusetts History Online, a collection of full-text articles from 50 magazines and local newspapers for coverage of Massachusetts people, places and historical events.

There were a number of changes in our online newspaper coverage. The Cape Cod Times is the only newspaper remaining in the Newsbank collection. The following newspapers had links changed from Newsbank to Proquest: Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and Worcester Telegram. We also added a number of new newspapers to Proquest including the Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield), BusinessWest (Chicopee), Gazette (Haverhill), New England Business, North Adams Transcript, Plymouth County Business Review, Providence Journal, Sentinel & Enterprise (Fitchburg), Standard Times (New Bedford), Sun (Lowell)

MBLC also supplied us with the Literary Reference Center from EBSCO with full text information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes, including 27,000 plot summaries, synopses and work overviews, 140,500 author biographies, 350 literary journals, 54,000 poems, 14,500 short stories, 8400 classic texts, 4000 author interviews and more.

September 28, 2007
From the Chicago Tribune

This environmentally conscious city is already home to the headquarters of the Whole Foods organic grocery store chain, a new City Hall built mostly with recycled materials and a municipal electric utility that features solar cells on the roof of its parking lot.

The Texas capital also pays residents rebates if they install extra attic insulation or high-efficiency clothes washers. There are steep discounts on rainwater collection barrels. Low-flow toilets are practically free.

But those are just eco-baby steps compared with Austin's latest, and most ambitious, environmental quest: to lead the nation in slashing emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

The full story of this article is available in the Library's Newspaper Source database. To read the full article from off-campus, please log in first.

The Library has free access to the following four additional Iter databases until Dec. 31. 2007. They are available either from a link on the Library’s home page to the Iter Gateway page, or from the links to the individual databases.

The John Milton Bibliography (MRTS Online)
John T. Shawcross's "Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 1624-1700(Revised) and for the years 1701-1799" is an extensive revision and continuation of "Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 1624-1700".

The Iter Italicum Bibliography
"Iter Italicum" is the most comprehensive finding list available of previously uncatalogued or incompletely catalogued Renaissance humanistic manuscripts found in libraries and collections all over the world.

Journal: Renaissance and Reformation
Full-text of the journal from volume 24, no. 1 (2000) to the current issue.

Journal: Early Theatre & Records of Early English Drama
Full text of the journal "Early Theatre" from volume 1 (1998) to the present and the earlier title of this journal "Records of Early English Drama Newsletter" from 1976-1997.

September 24, 2007
From Scientific American

Research has been piling up over the past decade that shows [musical] training can boost everything from pitch perception to visual and motor skills.

And now a new study says it may also improve language-processing abilities - a finding that lends support to the effectiveness of teaching letters and words to kids through songs, as TV programs like Sesame Street have done for years.

Researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that music triggers changes in the brain stem - as well as in the cortex or outer brain layers as previously reported. Senior study author Nina Kraus ... says this means music training may not only improve a person's ability to decipher different tones but also enhances reading and speech functions, because the brain stem is a pathway for both music and language.

Click here to read the full article.

September 25, 2007
From the Washington Post

Truth or fiction? --A high school student gains superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. --An electron beam meant to clean up a bioterrorism site transforms a mild-mannered microbe into a life form able to withstand radiation doses hundreds of times stronger than would kill a person.

--Altered by the absence of gravity, an everyday bacterium aboard a spacecraft mutates into a highly lethal bug that poses a surprise threat to astronauts. Okay, Spider-Man is still fiction. But a pair of independent studies has brought the other two scenarios to life.

The twin tales of menacing mutants are stark reminders of the microbial kingdom's immense versatility -- and of the inadvertent biological transformations that can be wrought by human activities. But they also point to potential new therapies for cancer and infectious diseases that otherwise might never have been identified.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left navigation menu of the Library Home page to read this article.

The Library has a trial of the Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970 for Massachusetts. These historical fire insurance maps provide detailed property and land-use records for Massachusetts towns and cities. Please try this database and send your comments to Kendra St. Aubin at kstaubin@bridgew.edu by October 19.

Maxwell Library and the Bridgewater Public Library have a long-standing agreement about the host of services Maxwell Library can and will offer to town residents. The services will be clearly articulated in a statement posted on the Library's web page. It is important to remember that Maxwell Library provides services and resources for an academic community and that the town library provides information resources for a general readership community. Our two missions are not exact and our collections are distinct.

The policy statement can be accessed from the library home page under About Us section

A new research tool, Credo Reference, was just added to the Library's database list. You can use it to

* find full text, images, sound files, data, maps and more
* discover new connections in context, with the Concept Map
* format your citations, so you won't have to
* see your library's custom collection of Credo Reference titles
* test your wits with the Starter Quiz.

Credo Reference features full-text, aggregated content from more than 260 reference titles from 55 publishers, with nearly three million entries covering every major subject. Content includes encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, and subject-specific works. Additional key features include customizable, dynamic data tables; tens of thousands of images; audio pronunciation files; over 90,000 atlas images of places and geographic features; and a Concept Map that visualizes your search results.

To access Credo Reference on campus, go to the Library's Research Tools page. It is listed under the General Topics section. Off-campus Users can click this link to access Credo Reference.

From the San Francisco Examiner

Pounded and strained by heavy traffic and weakened by missing bolts and cracking steel, the failed interstate bridge over the Mississippi River also faced a less obvious enemy: pigeons.

Inspectors began documenting the buildup of pigeon dung on the span near downtown Minneapolis two decades ago. Experts say the corrosive guano deposited all over the Interstate 35W span's framework helped the steel beams rust faster.

Although investigators have yet to identify the cause of the bridge's Aug. 1 collapse, which killed at least 13 people and injured about 100, the pigeon problem is one of many factors that dogged the structure. "There is a coating of pigeon dung on steel with nest and heavy buildup on the inside hollow box sections," inspectors wrote in a 1987-1989 report.

Click here to read the full article.

From the Chicago Tribune

In the buffet of reasons for why Americans are getting fatter, researchers are piling more evidence on the plate for one still- controversial cause: a virus.

New research announced Monday found that when human stem cells -- the blank slate of the cell world -- were exposed to a common virus they turned into fat cells. They didn't just change, they stored fat, too.

While this may be a guilt-free explanation for putting on pounds, it doesn't explain all or even most of America's growing obesity problem. But it adds to other recent evidence that blames expanding waistlines on more than just super-sized appetites and underused muscles.

Clicke here to read the full article.

From the Guardian (UK)

Natural pigments that give certain fruit and vegetables a rich red, purple or blue colour act as powerful anti-cancer agents, according to a study by American scientists. The compounds, found in foods such as aubergines, red cabbage, elderberries and bilberries, restricted the growth of cancer cells and in some cases killed them off entirely, leaving healthy cells unharmed.

The study combined laboratory tests on human cancer cells with experiments on animals that were designed to see whether a diet rich in the foods made a difference to their risk of developing cancer.

Foods with the highest levels of the compounds were most effective at slowing cancer growth, with exotic purple corn and chokeberries stopping the growth of colon cancer cells and killing 20 percent in lab tests. Foods less enriched with the pigments, such as radishes and black carrots, slowed the growth of colon cancer cells by 50 percent to 80 percent. The findings bring scientists closer to unravelling the key ingredients responsible for giving fruit and vegetables their cancer-fighting properties.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left navigation menu of the Library Home page to read this article.

From the Washington Post

Steve Johnson scans the hot, translucent sky. He wants to make rain -- needs to make rain -- for the parched farms and desperate hydro companies in this California valley. But first, he must have clouds. The listless sky offers no hint of clouds.

Inside a darkened room near the Fresno airport, Johnson's colleagues study an array of radar screens. If a promising thunderstorm appears, Johnson will send his pilots into it in sturdy but ice-battered single-engine planes, burning flares of silver iodide to try to coax rain from the clouds.

This year, few promising clouds have gathered, to the dismay of the farmers, ranchers and power companies who hire Johnson's cloud seeders.

"We can increase the rainfall by 10 percent. But Mother Nature has to cooperate. Ten percent of zero is zero," says Johnson, a meteorologist and director of Atmospherics Inc.

A few miles south of Fresno, Steve Arthur is looking the other way for water. His company is working around the clock, drilling wells to irrigate fields in California's 400-mile-long Central Valley, one of the most productive food-growing areas in the world.

"People are really starting to panic for water," said Arthur, whose father started drilling wells in 1959. They must drill ever deeper to tap the sinking water table. "Eventually, the water will be so deep the farmers won't be able to afford to pump it," he said. "There's only so much water to go around."

As global warming heats the planet, people will take more desperate measures. The climate will be wetter in some places, drier in others. Changing weather patterns will leave millions of people without dependable supplies of water for drinking, irrigation and power, a growing stack of studies conclude

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left navigation menu of the Library Home page to access this article.