We are pleased to announce our new subscription to MRS Online Proceedings! The subscription to MRS Online currently provides full text access to roughly 30,000 papers from 1997 to present and by 2010 will include all proceedings past and present. Want more? MRS Online also provides full text access to MRS Bulletin from 2001 to present, presentations and tutorials from MRS meetings, and access to job classified ads. Access to MRS Online is available through our online databases.
Also remember to check out our subscription to the MRS Journal of Materials Research with online full text availability from the journal's first issue in 1986 through the most recent issue.
• CMU Robotics! First and foremost, CMU was named in CNET's special report, A user's guide to robotics higher ed. Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot (maker of the Roomba), named Carnegie Mellon as one of the top three "places that we make sure we know what's going on," as far as robotics innovation goes.
• Big news in lasers and fusion! The National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California has built the world's largest laser. From this article: "The record-breaking laser is made up of 192 individual beams, each about 40 centimeters square." According to the BBC, this laser was built for three reasons, including the exploration of fusion in the context of nuclear explosions, the exploration of fusion as an energy source, and the exploration of fusion in stars. A video about how the laser works (warning, there is a short ad before the video starts) is available here.
• Making the world: In our search for interesting engineering news, we found a video showing how globes are made:
• Biomedical news!Scientific American's July issue has an article called "Yanking Pathogens Out of Blood with Magnets." You can come see it in the Engineering & Science Library's reading area or check it out online here.
ScienceWatch reports that the rankings of the Top 20 Countries in Engineering, as determined by citation counts within Thompson-Reuters-indexed journals, have been released, and at present, the US is ranked number 1. In their words, the ranking lists "the top 20 countries which, as of the latest bimonthly update of Essential Science IndicatorsSM, attracted the highest total citations to their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of Engineering over an 11-year period, (1998-December 31, 2008). These countries are of a pool of 96 countries comprising the top 50% ranked by total citation count in this field."
The full list: 1 USA 2 JAPAN 3 GERMANY 4 ENGLAND 5 PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF CHINA 6 FRANCE 7 CANADA 8 ITALY 9 TAIWAN 10 SOUTH KOREA 11 SPAIN 12 AUSTRALIA 13 NETHERLANDS 14 INDIA 15 SWITZERLAND 16 RUSSIA 17 SWEDEN 18 BELGIUM 19 SINGAPORE 20 TURKEY
Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has launched a free online database of 7,800 chemicals, called Common Chemistry. It is intended mostly for use by the general public, but may be of use to students and researchers at CMU, as well. Here is the press release.
NSF is spending stimulus money. From the linked story, "The ARRA funds set aside for new solicitations will be divided equally between facility updgrades and lab instrumentation purchases. NSF will invest $200 million to fund repairs and renovations to existing academic research facilities. Projects will be awarded up to $10 million each and can include research spaces such as buildings, mobile research facilities, and virtual facilities that use broadband-based technologies to bring scientists together. The other $200 million will fund the purchase and development of shared-use instruments. Up to $6 million each will go to individual projects."
The Bad:
The Global Positioning System (GPS) may deteriorate in the near future. Maybe Galileo will be here in time, or maybe not (by the way, here is an article discussing interoperability between the systems).
It's National Library Week at the Science Libraries--well, all over the nation, actually--and we thought we'd celebrate by making a new and different kind of display. You can't really tell from the photo, but it's a list of fun facts about the Engineering & Science Library, Mellon Institute Library, and the CMU Libraries in general.
It will be in the display case at E&S through the end of the semester, so stop by and have a look!
Have you heard about the Snackbot? Although it is still under development, soon--hopefully later this semester--it will soon be roaming campus, selling snacks to students. (And it's so cute!) Here are some links with more information:
If you run into any news, resources, web sites, or information you think we should know about or would like to see posted to this blog, please feel free to leave it as a comment or send an e-mail to Donna Beck. We love hearing from you!
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ScienceWatch reports that the rankings of the Top 20 Countries in Engineering, as determined by citation counts within Thompson-Reuters-indexed journals, have been released, and at present, the US is ranked number 1. In their words, the ranking lists "the top 20 countries which, as of the latest bimonthly update of Essential Science IndicatorsSM, attracted the highest total citations to their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of Engineering over an 11-year period, (1998-December 31, 2008). These countries are of a pool of 96 countries comprising the top 50% ranked by total citation count in this field."
