Random
FieldView: “FieldView is a molecular viewer/editor that is designed to show molecules with their associated Field patterns and physicochemical properties.” Free download for Windows, Linux and Macintosh (but apparently not open source). (Via MacResearch.org.)
breve: "a free software package which makes it easy to build 3D simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life." Now for Mac OS X.
From the Register article:
“Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the [sic] Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.”
2006 Abel Prize: The BBC writeup is confusing: the $900,000 mathematics prize goes to Lennart Carleson mainly for proving that, as Fourier claimed, periodic waves can be broken down into sums of sines and cosines. But isn't this an elementary result that has been known for a long time? Some digging reveals what he really accomplished: the proof that such Fourier series converge pointwise. This means that you can get arbitrarily close to any point of the approximated function if you sum enough terms in the series, and this wasn't known until Carleson proved it in 1966. There is even a book about the result. Carleson also seems to have founded the theory of wavelets.
Chinese Journals Plagued by Plagiarism
A Chinese research journal was discovered to be chock full of plagiarized articles.
2000 Years of Sea Level
20th-Century sea-level rise on the U.S. Atlantic coast is faster than at any time in the past two millennia.
Steve Schneider’s First Letter to the Editor
From the RealClimate website, a replay of part of the beginnings of the global warming debate in 1971.
Basic primitives for molecular diagram sketching
Even if chemistry is not your field, this is a useful case study of the creation of a scientific appication for a mobile device such as an iphone. Via MacResearch.
