Science at Collins

The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine this year went to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak, for their work on “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”.

Learn more with some key publications you can find at Collins Library:

• Szostak JW, Blackburn EH. Cloning yeast telomeres on linear plasmid vectors. Cell 1982; 29:245-255.
  In print at Collins
• Greider CW, Blackburn EH. Identification of a specific telomere terminal transferase activity in Tetrahymena extracts. Cell 1985; 43:405-13.
  In print at Collins
• Greider CW, Blackburn EH. A telomeric sequence in the RNA of Tetrahymena telomerase required for telomere repeat synthesis. Nature 1989; 337:331-7.
  This issue in print at Collins; 1990 to the present online.

Or watch the prize announcement or a quick talk about the discovery honored.

• Allen, Larry Glenn, Daniel J. Pondella, and Michael H. Horn, eds. 2006. Ecology of marine fishes : California and adjacent waters. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Burns, Kate, Nick Kolias, Rhoda Olenick, Arleen Prairie, and Magna Systems, eds. 2005. Heredity and the environment [videorecording] : The beginnings of a baby. Barrington, IL: Magna Systems Inc.
• Evans, Charles, and foreword D. Michael Stoddart. 2003. Vomeronasal chemoreception in vertebrates : A study of the second nose. London River Edge, N.J.: Imperial College Press ; Distributed by World Scientific Pub.
• Light, Sol Felty,  and James T. Carlton, eds. 2007. The Light and Smith manual : Intertidal invertebrates from central California to Oregon. 4 , completely rev. and expand ed. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.
• Murray, Steven N., Richard F. Ambrose, and Megan Nichols Dethier, eds. 2006. Monitoring rocky shores. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Pearse, Vicki, ed. 1987. Living invertebrates. Palo Alto, Calif. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Blackwell Scientific Publications.
• Pollan, Michael. 2002. The botany of desire : A plant’s-eye view of the world.  New York: Random House.
• Rilov, Gil, and Jeffrey A. Crooks, eds. 2009. Biological invasions in marine ecosystems : Ecological, management, and geographic perspectives. Berlin: Springer.
• Segerstråle, Ullica. 2000. Defenders of the truth : The battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Williams, Travis. 2009. The Willamette river field guide. Portland: Timber Press.
• Yoshioka, Keiko, and Kazuo Shinozaki, eds. 2009. Signal crosstalk in plant stress responses. Ames, Iowa: Wiley-Blackwell.

PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s online digital archive of the biomedical literature, now offers the ability to fully search all articles in the database. Until now, embargoed articles (those articles not immediately freely available) could not be searched. Now, however, it’s possible to search for embargoed articles and find both their PMCID (important evidence of compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy) and their date of availability (useful to the anxious researcher).

To include embargoed articles in your PubMed Central search, click the advanced search option:

then in the resulting screen, select the limits tab:

In the limits tab, select the button to show both free and embargoed articles:

Enter your search terms, and you’ll retrieve articles available now and later. Use the tabs on the results screens to look at both freely available and embargoed articles, or look at only one category:

Find out the availability date and the PMCID at the bottom of the embargoed article’s record:

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.

• Gazzaniga, Michael S. 2008. Human : The science behind what makes us unique. 1st ed. New York: Ecco.
• Hölldobler, Bert, and Edward O. Wilson, eds. 2009. The superorganism : The beauty, elegance, and strangeness of insect societies. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Jacobsen, Rowan. 2008. Fruitless fall : The collapse of the honey bee and the coming agricultural crisis. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury.

• Glover, Beverley J. 2007. Understanding flowers and flowering : An integrated approach. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
• Gribbin, M., & Gribbin, J. R. (Eds.). (2008). Flower hunters. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.Schuenke, M., Ross, L. M., Lamperti, E. D., Taub, E., Schulte, E., Schumacher, U., et al (Eds.). (2007). Thieme atlas of anatomy : Head and neuroanatomy. Stuttgart ; New York: Thieme.
• Stebbins, G. L. 2., Hollowell, V. C., Smocovitis, V. B., & Duggan, E. P. (Eds.). (2007). The ladyslipper and I. St. Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden.
• Ortiz de Montellano, Paul R., ed. 2005. Cytochrome P450 : Structure, mechanism, and biochemistry. 3rd ed. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Many of these new arrivals come from different disciplines, but all touch on biology in an interesting way. Click the titles to be taken to the catalog record to find call numbers and availability.

• Aronson, Jay D. 2007. Genetic witness : Science, law, and controversy in the making of DNA profiling. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
• Gawande, Atul. 2002. Complications : A surgeon’s notes on an imperfect science. New York: Picador.
• Schwartz, James. 2008. In pursuit of the gene : From darwin to DNA. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Martin Johnson Heade’s 1871 painting, Cattleya Orchid and Three Brazilian Hummingbirds, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Fitzwilliam Museum, the very museum Darwin visited and enjoyed at Oxford, has curated a show tracing Darwinian ideas in nineteenth century art. Though the exhibit is currently at Yale and on the wrong coast for easy visiting, the New York Times exhibition review, complete with slideshow, gives a vivid sense of the exhibit.

The exhibit’s own home page, Endless Forms: Darwin, Natural Science & the Visual Arts gives a structural overview and shows further images, including some very vivid images interpreting ideas about the war of nature (transformed by Herbert Spencer into the now-familiar phrase ’survival of the fittest’) and tensions over the role of women as mate-selectors, as embodied by pre-Raphaelite enchantresses.

Find out more about biological illustration and the history of scientific illustration at Collins Library!

• Ashcroft, Frances M. 2000. Ion channels and disease : Channelopathies. San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press.
• Chivian, Eric, Aaron Bernstein, Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme, and IUCN–The World Conservation Union, eds. 2008. Sustaining life : How human health depends on biodiversity. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
• Crooks, Kevin R., and M. A. Sanjayan, eds. 2006. Connectivity conservation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Darwin, Charles1882, and Joseph Carroll, eds. 2003. On the origin of species by means of natural selection. Peterborough, Ont. ; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press.
• Holmer, Marianne, ed. 2008. Aquaculture in the ecosystem. S.l.: Springer.
• Hoberman, John. 2005. Testosterone dreams : Rejuvenation, aphrodisia, doping. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Kokko, Hanna. 2007. Modelling for field biologists and other interesting people. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.<br/
• McCarthy, Michael A. 2007. Bayesian methods for ecology. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Parker, Sue Taylor, and Karin Enstam Jaffe, eds. 2008. Darwin’s legacy : Scenarios in human evolution. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
• Pechenik, Jan A. 2007. A short guide to writing about biology. 6th ed. New York: Pearson/Longman.
• Riegl, Bernhard M., Richard Eugene Dodge, and National Coral Reef Institute, eds. 2008. Coral reefs of the USA. Dordrecht: Springer.
• Stern, David Benjamin, George Witman, and Elizabeth H. Harris, eds. 2009. The chlamydomonas sourcebook. 2nd ed. Oxford ; Burlington, MA: Elsevier/Academic Press.
• Stolzenburg, William. 2008. Where the wild things were : Life, death, and ecological wreckage in a land of vanishing predators. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury.
• Storch, David, P. A. Marquet, and James H. Brown 1942 Sept.25-, eds. 2007. Scaling biodiversity. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

BioOne, a collection of searchable full-text biology journals we subscribe to, has released a new platform and announced new additions to the online collection.

Not only is the new platform more visually appealing and pleasant to browse, it also lets you make more efficient use of its resources.

Now you can:

• Quickly learn about a journal. Each journal or article page lists the journal’s publisher, impact factor and ISI ranking in the left column on any article or journal page:
• Find links in the right hand column of any article page that will let you easily export that article to RefWorks or sign up to track when the article is cited.
• Take advantage of linked references for articles to immediately see abstracts of interesting works cited (Look for the link at the end of the citation) . If the abstracts are worth following up, use the Journal Locator to find them at Collins, or ILLiad to request them.

By signing up for a personal account, you can save even more time:

• Collect your favorite journals or articles in one place.
• Save searches (a great time saver if you’re interrupted during a complex search).
• Request email alerts when a particular article is cited or to deliver new tables of contents for select journals.
• Sign up for RSS feeds for selected journals, so you can see tables of contents in your feed reader (look for this logo: , then click it to subscribe).

In addition to improving ease of use, BioOne has added new content for 2009: two new open access journals apropos to our marine and western environment have been added: Marine and Coastal Fisheries (American Fisheries Society) and Monographs of the Western North American Naturalist (Brigham Young University Press), while BioOne.1 has added Tree Ring Reseach (Tree-Ring Society).