Rowland Institute Library Blog

While calling Google “a great search engine,” this article lists 10 areas where it falls short and why one should consider more than one search interface. (Source: The Virtual Chase)

Scientists at the MIT Space Nanotechnology Lab report making “the world’s most precise ruler.” (Source: O’Reilly Net)

A New York Times article explores Microsoft’s entry into the search
engine arena and what it means for Google and other competitors.
(Source: LIBLICENSE-L)

Update, 2/11/04:  An article
in the Seattle Times casts doubt on Microsoft’s attempts to
catch Google, saying that comparisons to Netscape are not apt, that
Google is a much bigger innovator than Netscape and much more
business-savvy.  (Source: The Virtual Chase)

A series of Chronicle articles explore how NIH funding has doubled in recent years and at the same time how some universities have received less; others question what NIH has gotten for the money. A colloquy on the topic will be held Thursday on the Chronicle’s web site.

The Electronics Engineering lab, under the direction of Winfield Hill, co-author of The Art of Electronics, has designed and built more than 500 instruments for the research groups at the Rowland Institute. Two are exhibited in their site’s Project Highlights. Take a look at the “Tweezer Squeezer,” designed by Chris Stokes for picking up very particular phenomena. The Rowland USB Response Box (RURB) was designed for brain mapping experiments once conducted at the Institute and with MGH, but has atttracted considerable interest from users in other fields. More to come.

The Bacterial Motor Works lab at Rowland has made available software that runs in MATLAB and is useful for tracking fluorescent beads and particles and gliding bacteria. The lab web site also features movies of bacteria in motion, some with fluorescently-labelled filaments. For more than thirty years (and nearly 20 at Rowland and Harvard,) Howard Berg and colleagues have studied bacterial motility and the flagella that propel them.

At the meeting of of the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy on Jan.29-30, there was a declaration advocating a move towards greater access to publicly funded scientific research. It can be found in Annex 1 of this communique, further down the page. Excerpt: “balancing the interests of open access to data to increase the quality and efficiency of research and innovation with the need for restriction of access in some instances to protect social, scientific and economic interests.” (does the last clause trump the previous statement?) The U.S. was one of the signatories. (Source: Open Access News)

Scientists at NIST and Colorado announced that they observed a new
state of matter this week. From the news release: “In
the current experiment, a gas of 500,000 potassium atoms was cooled to
temperatures below 50 billionths of a degree Celsius above absolute
zero (minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit) and then a magnetic field was
applied near a special “resonance” strength. This magnetic field coaxed
the fermion atoms to match up into pairs, akin to the pairs of
electrons that produce superconductivity, the phenomenon in which
electricity flows with no resistance. The Jin group detected this
pairing and the formation of a fermionic condensate for the first time
on Dec. 16, 2003.”

The experiment is published in the Jan. 30th issue of Physical Review Letters.

Update: See also an excellent Physics News Update discussion that explains developments in the field that made the experiment possible.

Update (2/11/04): Dr. Deborah Jin, who made the experiments, 
will  speak at Harvard on Wednesday, February 18, 2004, 4:30 p.m.
at the Joint Atomic Physics Seminar,
Jefferson Laboratory, Room 256, “Making Condensates with a Fermi Gas of Atoms.”

Update (3/3/04); The research is profiled in PhysicsWorld, with speculation on future directions. 

 nanotechweb.org, a service of the Institute of Physics (IoP), features a digest of the latest papers in nanotechnology, including their journals and publications from APS, Kluwer, Elsevier and other publishers. Links to abstracts are available and full text (restricted to subscribers). The entries are listed according to the date they were added to the page.