Use this tool for searching

lemur by digitalART (artct45)
A search engine for open notebook science:
[Via Michael Nielsen]

There has been some great discussion in the comments on my post about “Open science”. One outcome is that Jean-Claude Bradley has created a search engine customized for open notebook science:

http://tinyurl.com/4multu

Fittingly, many people contributed to the discussion!

This demonstrates one of the nice abilities of Web 2.0 approaches. Google permits you to set up a custom search for a group of websites. This allows you to perform a directed search using specific terms against a designated group of websites.

This example examines a group of Open Science sites but it is easy to see how this might be useful for other sites. This way you do not have to work your way through a multitudeof irrelevant sites.

RSS is really good for bringing me content but what if I want to find an article from one of my newsfeeds from a few months ago? With this, I can simply add all the websites I track to the custom search. Then I am searching a much smaller but very directed subset of the web and am much likelier to find the old article I read.

A user-generated subset of Google web searches may be very useful for linking the content of several sites. This could be fun to play with. I’ll have to put one together for Science 2.0.

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New Science Tools

Avogadro
Avogadro: Open Source Molecular Building:
[Via MacResearch – Online Community and Resource for Mac OS X in Science]

Avogadro is a new, open source molecular editor for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It is an advanced molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible rendering and a powerful plugin architecture.

While still in beta, the recent 0.8 release brings general usability to viewing and editing molecules on your Mac. You can quickly export graphics to PNG, JPEG, or even POV-Ray rendering, or copy from the editor and paste a transparent PNG into programs like OmniGraffle. Avogadro supports reading from over 80 chemical file formats, courtesy of the Open Babel library.

read more

These sorts of tools will become more and more common – Open Source, mashable, easy to use. The last paragraph says a lot about the goals.

Future plans for the Mac version of Avogadro include integration of Spotlight and QuickLook, as well as built-in scripting in Python. Work is also underway to allow copy/paste from ChemDraw and other 2D chemical drawing applications. Additional builders (e.g., for biomolecules, nanotubes, and nanoparticles) and interfaces to other computational chemistry packages are due for future versions as well.

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