2011 international year of chemistry

The 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution proclaiming 2011 as International Year of Chemistry, placing UNESCO and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) at the helm of the event.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy amongst others

Physical Sciences Centre funding for learning and teaching projects

Each year the Physical Sciences Centre offers funding of up to £5000 for academics to carry out learning and teaching projects. The funding can be used to buy out staff time, to employ summer project students or part time staff, or to pay for expertise not immediately available.

The closing date for bidding is 31st March 2009. Applications should be made using the template provided on the website. Contact the Centre Director, Tina Overton, for an informal discussion of ideas for projects (01482 465453, t.l.overton@hull.ac.uk).

For further information, including criteria, previous projects and details of how to apply see: www.heacademy.ac.uk/physsci/home/projects/devprojects

RSC & ChemZoo developing tools to help chemists label compounds with standard tags

The information below is an edited version of the item from Knowledgespeak Newsletter

RSC news item Web chemistry progresses InChI by InChI in Chemistry World

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and ChemZoo, a US-based software firm, are developing tools to help chemists label their own compounds with a standard computer-readable tag. A beta form of the InchI resolver is expected to be on display in March.

The standard way to represent chemical structures using a string of text, the International Chemical Identifier (InChI), was developed several years ago but is unused, even unknown, by many chemists.

The free 'resolver' would turn any InChI into a shorter 25-letter code (the 'InChI key') seen to be friendlier to search engines.

There is disagreement over what impact the collaboration could have on current gold standards in managing chemical information, such as the ACS' subscription-only Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). The ACS service allots compounds a CAS number and catalogues them using its own proprietary informatics platform. CAS holds some 40 million organic and inorganic substances in its registry - roughly double ChemSpider's existing database.

A comment "Five Questions about the InChI Resolver" posted on the blog Depth-First: walking the web of chemical informatics.

SciFinder Scholar e-seminars

Two January seminars over the web. They will be repeated and they will also be recorded and posted on the website for viewing.

To register, visit: http://casevents.webex.com

After you register, you will receive an e-mail confirmation containing the teleconference phone numbers.

You can submit questions at any time during a live e-Seminar.
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1) SciFinder: Spectra and Properties

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 - 19:00-20:00 GMT
Tuesday, January 20, 2009 - 11:00 GMT & 14:00 GMT

In addition to the 2 billion predicted and experimental properties, spectra, and data tags already available in SciFinder, 23.8 million predicted proton NMR spectra have been added.

Nearly every organic substance in the CAS REGISTRYSM now has a proton NMR spectrum.

The e-Seminar will:

* Explore the collection of expanded property information
* Share how SciFinder adds value to spectral data
* Discuss how to locate the expanded property information in SciFinder

2) Exploring New Enhancements in the Web Version of SciFinder®!

January 23 - 13:30
February 3 - 18:00
February 17 - 13:30
February 24 - 20:00

The upcoming release of the web version of SciFinder extends functionality beyond the capabilities of all existing SciFinder products. In these sessions, CAS will:

* Explore existing features
* Introduce brand new features such as one click linking to your favorite SciFinder answers, new Keep Me Posted features, related references on key scientific concepts, and more . . .
* Unveil new content such as experimental and predicted properties and reaction data

Bursaries to attend conferences in the USA

The RSC Education Division is offering bursaries of up to £1500 for academics to attend a major US chemistry education conference in order to initiate collaboration and networking with those carrying out pedagogic research in chemistry.

Searcher Facelift

The federated search engine, Searcher, has a new look. From the one interface, you can use Searcher to send searches to and fetch results from a number of different web-based resources. The major chemistry abstracting and indexing databases (SciFinder Scholar, Beilstein and Gmelin) aren't available to search this way but have a look at http://www.searcher.lib.ed.ac.uk [EASE login required] and tell us what you think.

Freely available chinese language material

From a Chinese language interface resource is available a large amount of open access resources from the National Library of China.

My Chinese colleague has summarised its content as including:

1. PhD dissertations from China (free view of the first 24 pages of over 100,000 PhD dissertations);

2. Biographies of Sinologists outside China (over 150);

3. Chinese e-books (free view of the first 24 pages of tens of thousands of books published since 1949);

4. Local gazetteers/local histories (full text all free, I think);

5. Books published in the Min guo (Republican period, 1911-1949) (full text all free; 8172 titles or 8884 volumes);

6. Min guo periodicals (full text all free; 4329 titles);

7. Min guo (Republican period) laws/legal documents (full text all free; 8112 items or 29087 pages);

8. Photos of oracle bones, characters, New Year pictures, etc, (all free.);

9. Audio and video resources (158,000 audio items and 108,000 video items since 1987; only partially available)