Phil Bradley's weblog

FindZebra; Medical search engine

This is an engine that checks patient symptoms against rare or unusual conditions and is apparently only to be used by medical professionals. This is stressed quite often, and given that there's already a condition 'cybercondriac' this is an engine that should be left well alone if you worry about having some weird disease. It's called FindZebra because the term "zebra" is a medical slang for a surprising diagnosis. Physicians are taught since medical school to concentrate on the more common diseases: "when you hear a gallop, you should think about a horse, not a zebra".

The engine indexes about 30,000 medical articles on rare and genetic diseases which are freely available on the internet, from obvious sources such as Wikipedia to Health on the Net Foundation and the Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center. The project website is at the Technical University of Denmark, Rare Disease Information Retrieval Project.

Once again, since they stress it so much: "FindZebra should only be used by medical professionals. Although the articles indexed by the system have been written by medical professionals or reviewed by medical associations, it is strongly recommended that, as a patient, you consult you local health care provider. FindZebra does not replace professional health care, and cannot be held responsible for erroneous use of the information provided through the system." Does that make you less, or more likely to try it out? Yes... thought so!

via rarediseases.imm.dtu.dk

JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments - a Video Journal for Biological and Medical Research

via www.jove.com

This isn't of any direct relevance or interest to me, but I had a very nice email from the publishers and so I thought it was worth passing on the details of it to those librarians with an interest in the subject matter. They're very keen to talk to librarians, and that's always something to be encouraged!

JoVE: What is it?

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is a peer reviewed, PubMed indexed journal devoted to the publication of biological, medical, chemical and physical research in a video format.

JoVE: Rapid Knowledge Transfer

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) was established as a new tool in life science publication and communication, with participation of scientists from leading research institutions. JoVE takes advantage of video technology to capture and transmit the multiple facets and intricacies of life science research. Visualization greatly facilitates the understanding and efficient reproduction of both basic and complex experimental techniques, thereby addressing two of the biggest challenges faced by today's life science research community: i) low transparency and poor reproducibility of biological experiments and ii) time and labor-intensive nature of learning new experimental techniques.

JoVE: Addressing Complexity

The complexity and breadth of life science research has increased exponentially in recent years. Research progress and the translation of findings from the bench to clinical therapies relies on the rapid transfer of knowledge both within the research community and the general public. Written word and static picture-based traditional print journals are no longer sufficient to accurately transmit the intricacies of modern research.

Popular Science puts 137 year archive online

Popular Science: "We've partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It's an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology's incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do."

Lots of fun to be had with this - some of the articles on libraries and librarians are worth reading, for the humour value if nothing else. Then when you've exhausted that avenue, take a run down the archives with 'internet'. I particular loved 'And precisely when did the Internet become the all-consuming national pastime of seemingly everyone from high schoolers to Fortune 500 executives' - written in May 1995! And before that by a few months is an article that refers to the net as 'Internet' as in "To attach yourself to Internet..."

This resource is a serious timesink, so be warned!

VADLO

VADLO is a search engine caters to all branches of life sciences. VADLO allows users to search within five categories: Protocols, Online Tools, Seminars, Databases and Software. I did try and take a look at it, but the subject matter it so beyond my level of understanding I can't really say anything useful about it. I'd be grateful for comments from anyone who can provide a sensible view of it - I couldn't even understand the cartoons!

ToxSeek

ToxSeek is a meta search and clustering engine for environmental health and toxicology. It provides access to dozens of specialised search engines, including a large number of NLM resources, which is unsurprising given that it's the National Library of Medicine that's produced it. Unfortunately since I'm not any kind of specialist in this area I don't feel able to comment further, but if you are and have anything you'd like to say about it I'd particularly encourage you add a comment.