Science at Collins

The Geological Society of America (GSA)  is working on a citizen scientist project using data from marble gravestones to track changes in air pollution and acid rain since the Industrial Revolution. When the data gathering is complete, GSA will plot the data into global maps and release them for further study by climatologists.

To take part in the effort, you’ll need to be able to reliably recognize a marble headstone and have a GPS device & a micrometer at hand. Learn more about taking part at the Gravestone Project’s home page, or just read a bit more about this clever approach in today’s issue of Science.

Not a typo—to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Google Earth now includes a moon exploration tool!

If you’re already using Google Earth 5.0,  you should be set to go. If not, just update to 5.0 and you’ll have the moon at your fingertips. Open up the program, and you’ll see a planet icon in the top menu. Click it and select your planet.

Take a tour of the moon, review historical data and maps, or discover information every robotic spacecraft that’s landed on the moon. Get all the details at the official Google Earth & Google Maps blog.

The American Chemical Society will be moving all but three of its publications to online only formats for institutions and individual subscribers in 2010. While this will not affect Collins Library subscriptions, which are already fully online through the ACS Web Editions and ACS Legacy Archives, it’s another major step increasing the prevalence and credibility of electronic publishing in science.

While a few users have been anxious about the change, or regretted the serendipity of the stack search, most have been pleased by the more limited environmental impact and the increased potential for innovative data presentation and reuse.

For more information try:

• The June 17 Nature article breaking the story based on the leaked ACS memo detailing the plan.
• Further details in the Ars Technica blog  entry of July 6
• The July 10 note in the Chronicle’s Wired Campus

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickdimmock/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Scanning the geology shelves last week, I ran into a book I’d never have imagined existed: Herbert C. Hoover’s (yes, that Hoover’s) notes, as contributed to the Geologic Atlas of the United States’s Pyramid Peak folio.

The notes were reissued in facsimile in 1979, and reproduce the handwritten records Hoover took in the summer of of 1894 as part of his summer job as an assistant to the USGS. Paid at $60 per month, he worked with the USGS to support himself at Standford. Ultimately, these notes and the work of the rest of the team, headed by Dr. Waldemar Lindgren, were synthesized into the Gelogical Atlas of the United States, Folio 31, Pyramid Peak Folio.

Among other gems, the preface gives insight into Hoover’s reconciliation of creation and evolution. Noting the inconveniences of the horse—lack of a camel’s water tank and a coat of scaly armor, as well as an inconveniently low number of legs causing a bumpy gait—Hoover suggested that the animal was a ‘mistake of creation’ as all the features he desired “were known to creation prior to the geologic period when the horse was evolved”.

For more information, check out the notes yourself. For even more primary source information on Hoover the geologist, check out his 1909 book on The Principles of mining, or his 1912 translation of Agricola’s De re metallica.

The western tanager is only one of the many species (and, indeed classes) represented in the Western Soundscape Archive, a digital collection at the University of Utah. The Archive contains streaming audio and image files of about 80% of the West’s bird species, 90% of the frog and toad species, and many mammal and reptile species.  Species are searchable or browsable by common or Latin name.

Moreover, each species entry includes information extracted from NatureServe Explorer, including conservation status, distribution, and a brief overview of the species’ ecology and life history (including citations).

Additionally, the National Park Service has made numerous spectrograms  collected over the past 20 years available through the Archive. These files, created from sound monitoring projects around the country’s national parks, have been largely inaccessible to the public until now. However, now that they’ve been released, they provide graphic visual snapshots of the sound environment that can be used to analyze acoustic patterns revealing behaviour patterns,  sound pollution, and more.

Biology students may find this resource useful as a source of data for analysis, before field exercises, when studying biodiversity or as a way of starting investigations into particular species or ecosystems.