This website received over 66 million hits in 2000. There are over 1900 images, along with text, tutorials, laboratory exercises, and examination items for self-assessment. The subject matter demonstrates gross and microscopic pathologic findings associated with human disease conditions. The material is organized clearly. For example there are 60 slides on liver pathology, including cirrhosis and hemochromatosis, that may be of interest to biochemists. The photos are well captioned and include a good number of whole organ shots demonstrating visible pathology. For advanced histologists there is a case of the week for diagnosis. For tourists there is a pleasant diversion of 42 scenic photographs of Utah (recommended viewing). The site also offers the WebPath 6.0 CD-ROM that includes extra material and can be purchased for $60 for individual purchasers and $395 for site licenses. The CD has over 4200 images, 3100 examination questions, 29 case-based laboratory exercises, and 36 tutorials. The S-Star.org alliance is among six different universities, Karolinska Institutet, National University of Singapore, Stanford University, The University of Sydney, Uppsala University, and the University of the Western Cape. This is an impressive array of Ivy League-level colleges. The first Trial Bioinformatics Course began in November 2001. You can register for the next course to listen to S-Star.org online lectures, participate in S-Star.org discussion forums, and take an assessment test for each of the 12 lectures comprising the course. The lectures are also publicly accessible via the website for those who wish to learn more about bioinformatics without going through the course requirements. There are clear descriptions of the contents of each lecture, so it is easy to be selective. The course slides are available in .pdf format for downloading, and there is audio narration of the slides. Do not be dissuaded by the need to register. This a commercial company that serves academics and industry with modeling software. The technology show case offers a three-dimensional virtual reality markup language library of over 2,000 molecules. The demonstrations I chose were mostly molecular rotations that failed to excite. However this is a commercial site, and the best material needs to be paid for e.g. the Molecules CD with 100,000 structures costs $199. Molecular Arts offer their own proprietary modeling software. Microbe Library is supported by funds from the National Science Foundation and the American Society for Microbiology. Most of the materials from the Microbe Library are available free for the purposes of teaching and learning in the biological sciences. However current issues of the Focus on Microbiology Education newsletter are available only to members. Two categories of selectable links are for “Visual” and “Curriculum” resources. The material has been built by American Society for Microbiology members and includes animations and numerous photographs and videos of the microbial world. There are also laboratory exercises. The Microbe Library is additionally linked to a recommended core curriculum for introductory microbiology education for dissemination via the World Wide Web. In using the search engine provided, a good start is to ignore the multiple fields for organisms etc. and enter a simple search word into the “Search String” field. Searching for “replication” and “respiration” turned up animations and slide shows that are central to general metabolism. It is a highly professional site and deserved being the Learning and Teaching Support Network (United Kingdom) center for bioscience site of the month for October 2001. Scientific American Explorations is a junior version of the Scientific American magazine directed to parents who want to encourage a love of science and technology in their children. The inaugural issue (four issues a year) features a report on the state of science education in America, “Are US Children Getting the Science Education They Need?”. There were no specific articles on molecular biology in the first issue. The magazine contains science museum and exhibit updates (for the United States) and reports about what's new on the Web. There are home experiments and a highly visual style of presentation. Unsolicited contributions of articles are also welcomed by the editors. The website is independently useful, because it links to a number of resources including 100 science centers in the United States (choose “Further Explorations”).
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Aug 25, 2016
G Ranieri + 9
Open Access