Science News & Information Links

Science Daily Daily science news.

Science News The weekly newsmagazine of science.

Nature magazine, one of the premier general science journals, has a fair amount of free material online.

Scientific American A standard science news & info source for over 150 years.

Science Reference Websites

NIST Standards Reference National Institute of Standards and Technology Reference Databases, with constants, units and conversions, atomic and molecular spetroscopy info, etc.

Martindale's Reference Desk has multidisciplinary links to courses, tutorials, databases, calculators, and more.

RefDesk Science & Technology

Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science

Science Search Engines

Google Scholar searches many academic journals with this one form:

US Government Science Search

Science.gov searches over 36 databases and 1,850 selected websites, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information, including research and development results.

Science Preprint Search

The arXiv.org preprint server, now run by the Cornell University Library, began at the Los Alamos National Laboratories. arXiv is a searchable archive of over 100,000 papers in the fields of physics (including astronomy), mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. You can read abstracts online, or download full text files.

Scientific Document and Citation Search

CiteSeer^x (originally ResearchIndex, then CiteSeer), hosted by Penn State's School of Information Sciences and Technology, "is a free public service that aims to improve communication and progress in science". Over 1,164,939 articles and over 22 million citations are included in the index.

DOE OSTI Search

The US Department of Energy Office of Scientific & Technical Information OSTI Search searches research and development results, project descriptions, accomplishments, e-prints, conference proceedings, patent records, technical reports and more. The OSTI search has replaced the discontinued Science Accelerator, which had replaced the discontinued PubSCIENCE.

Science History Websites

Chenistry History Images are over 3000 images depicting science history, mostly pre-1850, from the U. of Pennsylvania Edgar Fahs Smith collection.

Science Service Photos is a gallery of 600 science historic science news photos taken between the 1930's and 1960's by Science Service.

Science Infotainment Websites

The San Francisco Exploratorium has science fun for all ages.

Mad Scientist.org is a popular site for general science information, with a user's questions answered feature.

Stories and Structures – New Connections is a gallery of photographs from electron microscopy showing you very small things looking large.

Science Ethics, Bad Science, Junk Science...

Online Ethics.org The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science-- a comprehensive site, with articles, a glossary, and links.

Bad Science Covering common science misconceptions, e.g., whether the coriolis effect causes drain water to spin in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres.

Junk Science Containing "all the junk that's fit to debunk", defining junk science as "faulty scientific data and analysis used to used to further a special agenda", this site has junk science news, commentary, and a "trash talk" forum.

Annals of Improbable Research is a lampoon site, with the annual IgNobel Prizes.

Look for more specialized search engines in their respective categories. You can find patent search forms on the Tech News & Links page and PubMed-Medline search forms on the BioMed Search & News page.

General News Photo Galleries

• TIME: Photography • WaPo: Photos • NYT: Multimedia • Newsweek: Photos

See also: Biomedical News & Search - Reference - News Search

TIME Magazine, September 13, 1948, p. 56:

SCIENCE: Don't Be a Dodo
...Of the 58,000 chemists who might have come, 2,321 crystallized in Washington last week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society...
Most of the papers were interesting only to tiny groups of specialists. Chemistry has divided and subdivided until a cellulose chemist can hardly tell what a fuel chemist is talking about...

A few days later, when the Chemical Society held a second meeting at St. Louis, its president, Dr. Charles Allen Thomas of Monsanto Chemical Co., gave his flock a timely talking to. He did not come right out and call the chemists dodos, but he warned them that overspecialization (the nemesis of the dodo) might make their science stagnate.
"The danger..." said Dr. Thomas, "is in our specialized approach to the study of science. We have transferred the techniques employed in the mass production of goods to the study of... fundamental phenomena... We have failed to see the great difference between physical and intellectual production...

Treadmill. Dr. Thomas admits that some specialization is necessary, but he thinks it is seductively easy to develop too much of it. Many animal species specialized to live in the seas, or the forests, or the air. "Each was a specialized animal adjusted to a specific environment. And when the environment changed, other species became predominant..."

"The appearance of man... with his generalized form, and his ability to adapt himself to changing environment... was flexible enough to survive a variety of changes... specialized species either perished... or stagnated in static societies... The point I want to make is that biological specialization can eventually lead to... destruction or a treadmill of repetition...
"Is the specialist, in the confines of his narrow discipline, failing to accept the challenge of unfamiliar territory, to risk the uncertainties and the tensions of coupling and interconnecting the many aspects of science?... If this is so, he is no longer a true scientist."

Classic articles, most from the New York Times or LA Times (randomly selected at page load)

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