Digital Briefs

Online

(1) The World Of Chemistry is an online video series of 26 half-hour programs that gives young chemists and teachers a front-row seat to industrial and research chemists demonstrating a number of processes that are too dangerous or impractical for direct involvement. Program subjects include "Modeling the Unseen," "The Atom," and "The Busy Electron," and support nationally recognized science standards prescribed by the National Science Teachers Association and the National Committee on Science Education Standards & Assessment. Originally produced by the University of Maryland and the Educational Film Center, this series is offered by Annenberg Media. Videos are freely accessible on the Web from either a Mac or PC. Annenberg Media, www.learner.org

SciLink aims to do for scientists what MySpace doesfor the young: provide a networking opportunity with management tools in an online format. Through deep mining of the Web, SciLink has built a database of more than 5.8 million scientists, 14 million articles, and 106 million relationships in the "tree of science"-all searchable by the user. The scientific- and medical-field-tailored software also has a searchable job board and a content matching engine called the Phoenix, which suggests information of potential interest to the user that is gleaned from the user's activities in real time. SciLink is supplied as a software service via the Internet. It is compatible with all platforms that have a Web browser. SciLink, www.scilink.com

(2) AKS v2.1 is a knowledge management system that mines literature to uncover relationships among genes, proteins, drugs, chemical compounds, symptoms, and diseases. Based on the PubMed database, the system automatically extracts relevant information from abstracts for updates within the AKS database on a user-determined basis. The system's many search, report, and visualization tools used to identify these relationships allow the data to be exported directly to Excel and PDF formats. The system is available via the Internet and is compatible with any platform that has a Web browser, although Internet Explorer and FireFox are recommended. The system also can be installed locally. Active Motif, www.activemotif.com

SOFTWARE

(3) ACD/SpecManager v11.0 software enables users to remotely analyze data using industry standard and advanced algorithms. The software's wide-format support allows uniform processing of laboratory data from 1-D NMR, 2-D NMR, mass spectrometry, chromatography, near-IR, mid-IR, far-IR, Raman, UV-Vis, thermal analysis (DSC, TGA, DMA, etc.), X-ray diffraction, or fluorescence. This updated version includes more data filters for searching, custom coloration schemes, Excel export compatibility, and new macro commands. ACD/SpecManager v11.0 runs on all Windows versions up to XP. ACD/LABS, www.acdlabs.com

Instant JChem is a desktop application for management of chemical structures and data on local and remote data tables. The software includes multiple cheminformatics tools and a native database engine with the flexibility to easily create and share chemical databases; import and export structure files; and view, search, sort, analyze, and edit contents (including via structure-related properties pK_a, logP, logD, etc.). Instant JChem-free to all academics-runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac platforms. ChemAxon, www.chemaxon.com