First Snowfall in Oberlin, Gone by Midday

There was no hint of the early morning trace of wet snow by midday, as sun broke through gray clouds and blue skies chased away even the memory of slush on soggy ground.  

According to the new edition of The Weather Almanac, received today, the last time we scrapped through November with just a trace of snowfall was 2001.  The normal amount (mean) for the month is 5.1 inches (since 1980, as measured at Cleveland Hopkins Airport weather station).  The Weather Almanac is full of interesting data, as well as lengthy, factually accurate narratives on climate topics.   

The section on global warming and climate change is thoroughly updated.  If you want an well-organized, easy to read, detailed account of how climate is changing, minus the hype and political posturing, take a look at pp. 317-352.

Impact of Hydrofracturing for Natural Gas on Ohio's Forests

Buckeyeforestcouncil.org

Cheryl Johncox, Executive Director Buckeye Forest Council

will speak on

Impact of Hydrofracturing for Natural Gas on Ohio's Forests

Thursday Dec. 1, 2011 -  4:30 p.m. 

Heiser Auditorium, Kendal @ Oberlin

Ms. Johncox will describe the environmental hazards associated with fracking, and pressures being brought to bear on landowners to lease public and private lands for drilling.
Sponsored by the Kendal Environmental Concerns Committee and League of Women Voters of the Oberlin Area.  
Martha's Journal, official publication of the Buckeye Forest Council, is named for the last known Passenger Pigeon, who died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.  The Passenger Pigeon, once numbered in the millions throughout eastern forests, in flocks so huge that they took hours to pass while migrating, was driven to extinction in part by human-caused destruction not unlike the continued fragmentation of forests still standing.  
Come learn what effect hydraulic fracturing could have on Ohio's forests.  The public is invited.

Connect with Buckeye Forest Council on Facebook.

Bill McKibben in Craig Auditorium, 7 pm, Nov. 28

Learn more about 350.org and Bill McKibben as a spokesperson for Tar Sands Action.

Read one of the dozen books by author Bill McKibben in the college library.

Read Nicholas Stern's review of Eaarth: Making a life on a tough new planet.  Review published in the New York Review of Books 57(11): 35-37, June 2010. Borrow a copy of Eaarth.

Most importantly - show up at the Craig Auditorium to hear one of the most influential environmentalists of our time, and learn more about the potentially disastrous consequences of hydraulic fracturing or fracking: a practice that consumes millions of gallons of water in order to force natural gas from shale beds thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface, leading to methane release in groundwater and surface contamination, in addition to many other negative effects.

Be informed.  More on fracking from the Buckeye Forest Council and New York Times Magazine (Nov. 17, 2011)

New publication from Norm Craig, in J Molecular Spectroscopy

From ScienceDirect

A new publication from Norman C. Craig, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, published October 2011:

Boopalachandran P., N. C. Craig, and J. Laane. 2011. Gas-phase Raman spectra of hot bands of fundamentals and combinations associated with the torsional vibration of s-trans-1,3-butadiene and its deuterated isotopologues. Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy 269:236-241.

OhioLINK users can access this in the Electronic Journal Center.

Supplementary data for this article are available on ScienceDirect and as part of the Ohio State University Molecular Spectroscopy Archives. [download the suppl. figure]

On this date in 1772: Lavoisier changed chemistry for all time.

Source: Yale Univ Chem 125
history project

Here is a tidbit of chemistry history, from The Illustrated Almanac of Science, Technology, and Invention: "'A week ago I discovered that sulfur on being heated gained weight.  It is the same with phosphorus,' reported Antoine Lavoisier, 29, in a simple note to the Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.  The discovery advanced and changed chemistry for all time." (November 1, 1772).  Lavoisier showed that the weight gained equaled weight lost in the air, and established his Law of Conservation of Mass: The mass of the products of a chemical reaction are equal to the mass of the individual reactants.

What seems so basic, now, to any high school chemistry student was of phenomenal importance in 1772, invalidating the old phlogiston theory and establishing Lavoisier as the "Father of Modern Chemistry due to his use of step-by-step experimental procedures, making careful measurements, and keeping accurate records." (Scientific Laws, Principles, and Theories: a reference guide / Robert E. Krebs, p. 205).

Royal Society opens its archives and launches Open Biology

Royal Society of London Open Access

Open access news from the Royal Society of London is very welcome.  Read more about the recently launched Open Biology, "a journal run for scientists by scientists." The Royal Society says that the editors and editorial board intend to "ensure a fair and speedy review process without recourse to unnecessary rounds of revision,"  It is very new, so check back often for more publications.

The Royal Society open archive announcement coincides with Open Access Week, and celebrates free access to any article  published more than 70 years ago. This is remarkable, considering the historically significant research findings published by the Royal Society.  Try the advanced search at the Royal Society site, and you'll find that the publication date range extends back to 1665. There are not many (any?) other sites on the Internet where you can find such an authentic and rich archive of scientific discovery. Explore!

PLoS Blogs: Making Science Understandable and Accessible

Today on one of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Blogs is an interesting account of gathering sediment cores from tropical mud, to document changes in precipitation over thousands of years by measuring amounts of hydrogen ions in the sediment.  What's so great about mucking around in the tropics to measure hydrogen ions?  As author Conor Myhrvold of MIT SciWrite explains, it gathers "physical evidence of recent manifestations of tropical climate change several thousand years ago to make sure the parameters in the [climate change] models are grounded in reality."  Reading this will give insight into what it takes, physically, to amass reliable data for understanding climate change, and a deeper appreciation for climate scientists' assessment of those data.  At the very least, it's a good way to balance what you may have heard from certain politicians. 

While at the PLoS Blogs site, take a moment to see all of the other perspectives offered there and link to the many wonderful open access PLoS journals.  Open Access Week ends soon - take this open access challenge and find an article that interests you (try DOAJ for a start) to forward to a friend or colleague, confident that he or she will also be able to read it in its entirety.  No subscription required.

Going away for Fall Break? Need access to journal articles?

Information on remote access to the library's resources is here.  In a nutshell, do this:

1. Download the VPN Client (Cisco) from the CIT website.
2. Launch the client and login before trying to search library databases or download articles.
3. Be sure the barcode on the back of your OCID has been input into the library's circulation system, if you will be requesting any items on the OhioLINK library catalog.  We can do that over the phone, if needed.  440-775-8310.

Problems?  Questions?  Contact science.library@oberlin.edu or chat with us on Meebo IM.

Have a great break!  The library will be open all week, Mon-Fri, 9-noon and 1-4:30, if you're staying on campus.

PubMed Central 10th Anniversary Video

PubMedCentral (PMC) celebrated its 10th Anniversary in 2010, and this commemorative video was posted by NCBI NLM in July 2011.  Just 12 minutes long, and definitely worth viewing despite the time elapsed since the video was distributed.  Establishing the open access archive was one of the most important developments in scientific communication in the past decade, and the video chronicles its rapid rise to prominence and influence on other repositories of scientific articles.  In addition to its role as an archive, PMC leads directly to NCBI and PubMed databases, with links to protein or nucleotide data or citing articles beyond those in the PMC, among other options.  See this 2009 article co-authored by biology professor Michael Moore and explore some of those linking options:
Rosid radiation and the rapid rise of angiosperm-dominated forests.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 March 10; 106(10): 3853–3858.

Committed to Biodiversity? Go Swim with Sharks!

Shark Tourism is a growing business with a helpful purpose that may not be entirely clear to thrill seekers in wet suits - preserving the diversity of predators essential for maintaining ecosystem balance.  Listen to this great segment on Living on Earth, October 14, 2011, featuring Samuel “Doc” Gruber, a marine scientist at the University of Miami, who has been studying lemon sharks for 20 years from the beachfront lab he started on Bahamas’ Bimini island.

If you're considering a dip with sharks (or would prefer to appreciate them from afar), check out this magnificent reference book on our new book shelf:  The Sharks of North America / José I. Castro ; color illustrations by Diane Rome Peebles.  New York : Oxford University Press, c2011

PubMed: access to free medical articles online is unmatched

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/

Open Access Gem of the Week:
For rapid, effective and entirely free (to the user) indexing to open access medical literature, PubMed can't be duplicated or surpassed.  If you need to limit your search to medical articles that are freely available, PubMed is simply the best.  Do any search and notice on the far right of the results screen a link to "Free Full Text" -- there are many other limits and very powerful search options, but this is one of the most obvious and helpful for the public.

Medline, the database underlying PubMed, can be simultaneously searched with Chemical Abstracts in SciFinder; with BIOSIS and the ISI citation indexes in Web of Knowledge; and with a whole host of databases in EbscoHost.  There are excellent reasons to search Medline in those different platforms, but none of them are freely accessible by the public, world-wide, and offer the same ease of quickly linking to free articles online.  PubMed:  our tax dollars at work, and worth every penny.  Try the advanced search interface with its "search builder" and be amazed at the options for creating a well-focused search.   PubMed Mobile provides access from just about anywhere, anytime.  Thank you, NCBI.

Cool Citation Tracking Tools @ the Geek Fest - Oct. 11

Come to the library's Geek Fest on Tuesday October 11 and have fun following citations.  Truly, it will be fun!

• Easily find Oberlin faculty members whose research has been referenced (cited) by hundreds of other authors in the past twenty years.  
• See who has cited any published paper that interests you, from any discipline or time period, using the Web of Science - and, in one more step, find all of the papers related to those citing papers with the shared reference feature.  
• Leaping (linking) from one citation to the next in mere milliseconds, all within the context of millions of scholarly articles indexed in the Web of Science - including Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and the Science Citation Index.  Plus Conference Proceedings!

Once you've mastered the Web of Science, visit other stations around Azariah's Cafe, set up to delight you with new ways to find, store, organize and use information.  Food, beverages, friendly librarians, fellow students, writing tutors, prizes!  Mark your calendar...  be there!

Rain Barrel Workshop at the Oberlin Depot

Want to conserve water with your own rain barrel? Make your own? Head to the Oberlin Depot on Saturday, October 8, 2011.

OSWAMP-Oberlin Stormwater Management Project
Sign up for a RAIN BARREL WORKSHOP

Sat. Oct. 8, 2-5 pm
Oberlin Depot (beside the bike path, between S. Professor and S. Main St., just south of South Street)

Image from Chesapeake Bay Trust

Send $20 cash or check (made out to City of Avon Lake) before Oct. 1 to:
Annika Sullivan
OCMR 2515
Oberlin College
Oberlin OH 44074

Bring power tools!!!

Jennifer Crozier '09 published in Infectious Disease Reports

It is great to see a paper by former science library student assistant Jennifer Crozier '09 in Infectious Disease Reports, an Open Access, peer-reviewed journal published by PAGEPress, Pavia, Italy. Crozier is one of five authors of Nanoparticles containing siRNA to silence CD4 and CCR5 reduce expression of these receptors and inhibit HIV-1 infection in human female reproductive tract tissue explants. The article reports research under the direction of Susan K. Eszterhas and Alexandra L. Howell of the V.A. Medical Center, White River Junction, VT and Dartmouth Medical School Department of Microbiology and Immunology. PAGEPress is devoted to "open access knowledge" and credits Public Knowledge Project for Open Journal Systems (PKP | OJP)

Visit Open Access Week
Open Access Week will be celebrated world wide during Oberlin's Fall Break, so we will highlight Open Access resources in the sciences during the coming weeks. Some important Open Access journals are listed here. Have a favorite Open Access journal that isn't noted on the list? Let me know!

Summer slipped into September... need a study carrel?

After weeks of anticipation, the new academic year has begun!  It feels like late October already, but hot September weather is sure to hit us when we least need the distraction of summer breezes on top of September's academic expectations.  Regardless, the science library is a great place to study.  If you want a study carrel here, stop by and fill out an carrel application form.  Leave it at the circulation desk anytime before 4pm on Friday, September 9, and you will have complete consideration along with everyone else in your class and major (senior science majors are given priority).  More about Study Carrels in the science library.

Julia Bair, 5th year double-degree student, publishes in Eur. J. Neurosci.

Just indexed in ISI Web of Knowledge and co-authored by Julia Bair, double-degree Bassoon performance/Neuroscience major from Glencoe, Illinois:

What subcortical-cortical relationships tell us about processing speech in noise.
Parbery-Clark, Alexandra; Marmel, Frederic; Bair, Julia; Kraus, Nina

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE 33 (3): 549-557  FEB 2011 [access @ OhioLINK EJC]

Bair's co-authors are based in various departments at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, including the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.  The team investigated the "effects of background noise on both subcortical- and cortical-evoked responses, and the relationships between them, in normal hearing young adults."

See a sample issue of the journal at Wiley Online Library.

Amanda Schmidt's latest post from China: digging for snails

Assistant Professor of Geology Amanda Schmidt is studying the properties of loess in China, as part of an effort to understand the natural hazards of a region characterized with this sediment. She writes from China: "These [samples] will be used to determine how strong [loess] is, what makes it break in blocks, and what makes it flow. We suspect that the original loess is rather weak and flows easily, but that once it has flowed and set up again, it is quite a bit stronger." Schmidt's posts appear in the New York Times Scientist at Work blog. The bit about snails refers to finding snails buried in undisturbed loess sediments, to use for dating the deposition age. Schmidt includes a great photo of the 3-year old daughter of the park science translator, enjoying her first time "playing in dirt," and helping to sort snails from sediment.

Basic Protocols Freely Accessible in JoVE

JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments is a peer-reviewed online journal of videos and other forms of visualization that demonstrate complex procedures, most of which are rather more specialized than needed for our curriculum -- but the "Basic Protocols" section includes 56 videos that are freely accessible and of potential use in the undergraduate laboratory.  See, for example, Generation of Single-Cell Suspensions from Mouse Neural Tissue, by Sandra Pennartz, Sandy Reiss, Rebecca Biloune, Doris Hasselmann, and Andreas Bosio. Free access to the protocol, which is accompanied by a written abstract and pdf describing the technique, is sponsored by Miltenyi Biotec.

Biology major Dylan Holmes co-author in Animal Behavior

About the Journal

Congratulations to junior Dylan Holmes, who co-authored a paper appearing in the current issue of Animal Behavior:

Sing softly and carry a big stick: signals of aggressive intent in the song sparrow.
Akcay, Caglar; Tom, Mari E.; Holmes, Dylan; Campbell, S. Elizabeth; Beecher, Michael D.
Animal Behaviour 82 (2): 377-382 August 2011 [access at OhioLINK EJC]

Also recently published is an article by chemistry professor Matt Elrod:
Kinetics Study of the Aromatic Bicyclic Peroxy Radical plus NO Reaction: Overall Rate Constant and Nitrate Product Yield Measurements.  Elrod, Matthew J.
Journal of Physical Chemistry A 115 (28): 8125-8130 July 21, 2011 [access at ACS Publications]