Scitable hopes to address that by changing the way science is taught, with an emphasis less on memorization and more on experimentation.

Scitable offers a library of science education resources, along with classroom management tools and a community of scientists, instructors, and students. The resources that are available on the site are all free, peer-reviewed, and updated every other month or so, something no print science textbook can boast. Many noted scientists participate in the site as part of their grant requirements to address the "Broader Impact" of their research. These scientists make themselves available as experts and mentors for students on the site.

In August, Scitable launched mobile versions of its site, opting not to create apps but to design the site to be used on any cell phone. "Our mission is to democratize access to science education," says Savkar. And while students accessing the site on an iPhone or iPad, for example, can get a media-rich experience, the site is still accessible by those with the simplest of cell phone browsers, a strategy aimed towards making the content on the site accessible to those in the developing world with limited or no access to broadband. Savkar says that while half the students on the site are from the U.S. and Europe, the rest are from other countries.

Currently, the site is only available in English, and Savkar says that the company is working on a translation strategy. Additional content, including cell biology and ecology, is also in the works.

Dylan, who coincidentally is the eldest son of folk legend Bob Dylan, uses his familiar style to aggregate a quick selection of scientists explaining why a web-based revision of copyright policy is so important for the advancement of scientists. "Scientists are the ultimate remixers," one interviewee says, and we agree that Creative Commons in science is a very exciting idea.

Few media are as compelling as video and we hope that this new short work is helpful in garnering support for Creative Commons in the sciences.

Dylan's work joins a long list of well made Creative Commons videos, which have been helpful in explaining the movement to revise copyright to countless people, no doubt including even President Elect Barack Obama, whose own website was recently put under a Creative Commons license.

This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.

The blog Open Access News has a good round up of science blog responses to the news.

Pubmed is the likely home for much of the research, though the law is likely to breathe more life into online sites of scientific activity like the Nature Publishing Group, the science blog search engine PostGenomic and the Public Library of Science.

Data miner Peter Suber from the Unilever Cambridge Centre for Molecular Informatics discusses just one of many reasons this is exciting news.

The hard work continues. But now all fulltext derived from NIH work will be available on PubMed. Other funders will follow suit (if they are not ahead). So our journal-eating-robot OSCAR will have huge amounts of text to mine.

The good news is that we believe that this text-mining will, in itself, uncover new science. How much we don’t know, but we hope it’s significant. And if so, that will be a further argument for freeing the fulltext of every science publication.

In related science news, tech and science lovers (many of whom have libertarian sensibilities) should take note of a new video floating around the interwebs - Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution.

The Google Science Fair takes the traditional science fair and moves it to the Web. Participating students both build and submit their projects online - using Google Docs, Sites, and YouTube, for example - for all aspects of their research projects - from the data collection to the final presentation. Students from all over the world are encouraged to participate - from Paris, Texas to Paris, France, from Venice, Italy to Venice Beach.

To run this science fair, Google is teaming up with some of the most well-known names in science, technology, and education: CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific American. And the judges for the event are just as prestigious, including the founder of the FIRST robotics competition Dean Kamen, the leader of National Geographic's Genographic Project Spencer Wells, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis, and the "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf.

The prizes (oh, the prizes) include some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities: a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer, a trip to Switzerland to visit CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, a chance to work on the development of a new LEGO robotics project.

Encouraging the Next Generation of Scientists

The Google Science Fair is an effort to help encourage students' interest in science and technology. "Google's origins are in scientific experimentation," Google's Tom Oliveri told ReadWriteWeb, noting that it was a hypothesis of two young computer science students back in 1996 that the information on the web could cataloged and searched.

To enter, you can register online and create your project as a Google Site. Registration is open through April 4, and the announcement of the semi-finalists will happen in early May. Oregon high school student Tesca has created a great sample site so you can see what an online science fair project might look like.

Web science will have both social and engineering dimensions. As the NY Times reported, it will include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. For example trust and privacy are two specific areas that can be studied more. Also Web Science will look at more technical areas, such as how huge decentralized Web systems work. In the conference call, it was made clear that researching the economic consequences of the Web (and "web 2" was mentioned) is part of the agenda too.

"What we're saying is that it's becoming so important that things like Wikipedia are being created, new business models are emerging and that it's changing our lives so much that we have to have a science to understand this."

In terms of how Web Science will shape the future Web, Sir Tim told the BBC that the Web is a creative medium - and so the Web has to develop new features that "express the social properties of information which specify what it is, where its from and how trustworthy it is."

Highlights from conference call

In the conference call Tim Berners-Lee started off by mentioning the 100 million Web sites milestone recently reached by the Web. He went on to say that Web Science is about understanding the macroscopic network-driven effects of the Web, which have evolved from the microscopic aspects of the Web which he created. Ultimately though, Sir Tim said that "the goal is social" and the Web is about helping humanity.

Berners-Lee spoke about how even in the field of economics, it's not just about studying the money part of the dot com era, but how things like Page Rank have influenced the system - "the way effectively the currency now flows across the links as kudos, as reputation of web sites". So with this initiative they want to bring together lots of different disciplines (computing, biology, economics, etc), as well as focusing on understanding and engineering the Web as one big system.

According to Tim, Web Science is about "building a new Web, a better Web, building things on top of the Web infrastructure" - making the Web infrastructure a space where things can happen and making that space more powerful. He spoke about how the Web started off with simple rules - e.g. http. But you can't tell the macroscopic effects of that by looking at the rules of http - "the macroscopic system is very complicated". He also mentioned building "a fractal society", which he's spoken about a lot before and I've written about in the past too.

In the Web Science initiative, Tim said they'll be "developing new ways of analyzing things and we'll be building systems which have completely new properties". But he made a point of saying that because the Web is about people, social aspects will be a very important part of it. Also the creativity aspect of the Web - Tim said at one point that "the really important thing about the Web is that it's a universal space".

Summary

I for one am very pleased that studying Web systems is now an official discipline - and who better to lead it than Tim Berners-Lee and MIT. In many ways, some of us tech bloggers have been unofficially studying the Web for quite some time, but of course you also need hard data and complex analysis as well - which is where Web Science will hopefully shine. As Tim Berners-Lee said, the Web system is huge and complicated. There's a lot we're still learning about the Web and its effects on society and business.

Participants can have up to three partners. They pose a question, develop a hypothesis, test it with an experiment and submit the findings online. Last year's winners became scientific superheroes, meeting the president, speaking at TEDx Women, just generally kicking butt. There are also prizes, including a $50,000 college scholarship, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic or an internship at Google or any of the partner organizations.

This year, the contest is open to even more participants, accepting submissions in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Russian). 90 finalists around the world will be selected, and the top 15 will be flown to Mountain View, Calif. for the final event.

There's also a new category this year, the Scientific American Science in Action award, for a project that addresses a social, environmental or health need. The winner will get $50,000 and a year-long mentorship to help implement the project.

The Google Science Fair is now open for submissions until Sunday, April 1 at 11:59 p.m. GMT (that's 6:59 p.m. Eastern/3:59 p.m. Pacific in the U.S.). Submit your projects at google.com/sciencefair.

Via Facebook Live and Livestream, Obama answered questions from Zuckerberg, the crowd and participants across the Web. Even though Obama was sitting on stage at the quintessential Web 2.0 corporation, not much of the conversation veered towards technology.

Questions included the national debt, the budget, the economic recovery, the Dream Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors), immigration, Medicare and Medicaid and education. For a while it sounded more like an "Obama For Re-Election in 2012" campaign stop than it did a conversation with one of the leaders of the Internet industry.

This is not the first time that Obama has gone to techland. In February he met with the leaders of the tech industry and had dinner with some of the most influential people in the United States. It is also not the first time that Obama has visited the home turf of a tech giant to tout education, as he did when he visited Intel in February to reiterate the need for more engineers in the world. Since his last State Of The Union address where he spent a significant amount of his speech on the need to pour money into tech, Obama has been making the rounds of the leaders in the industry to push the point home.

"We are in Silicon Valley, so, let's talk IT stuff," Obama said at one point. "I will try to pretend that I know what I am talking about."

Obama makes jokes that he is not tech savvy, but he is perhaps the American president most attuned to how current and emerging technology can lead the United States to a new economy and status in the global ecosystem.

For Obama, that all starts with education.

The president praised Zuckerberg as well as Bill Gates' charitable organizations for the work they do in advancing education in the realm of science and technology.

"Government alone cannot do it, there needs to be a cultural shift where we buckle down and say 'this stuff is important,'" Obama said. "That is why the work you, Mark, are doing is important, work that the Gates Foundation is doing in philanthropic investments in best practices in education [is] going to be so important. We have to lift our game up. That is hopefully one of the most important legacies I can leave as president of the United States."

Obama talked about the need for a cultural shift in American education that would create the type of people that can lead the United States in a technological evolution.

"That is why we are emphasizing math and science, that is why we are emphasizing math and sciences for girls, that is why we are emphasizing making sure that black and Hispanic kids are getting math and science. We have to do a much better job at STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education and that is one of the reasons that we had one of the first science fairs at the White House in a very long time [was] just because we want to start making science cool."

Space Lab will allow students to submit a science experiment by video, and a panel of scientists and astronauts, including Professor Stephen Hawking, will pick the best submissions. The winners' experiments will be performed aboard the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the whole world.

As if getting your own science experiment performed live on the ISS for the entire world wasn't enough, there are also prizes like zero-G flights, Lenovo IdeaPad laptops, a trip to Japan to watch your experiment launched into space, or a cosmonaut training experience in Star City, Russia.

Space Lab is part of YouTube's educational channels available at YouTube.com/EDU. Teachers can visit YouTube.com/Teachers to learn how to incorporate Space Lab into their classrooms.

Read more on the official YouTube blog.

InnoCentive has lots of other crowdsourced projects and problem solving challenges on their site than the PopSci challenge, it is worth checking out if you haven't heard of them before or read our article from several years ago here.

This is the week for contests. Over on our ReadWriteHack site we mention a contest being run by the US Defense Department for wannabe computer forensic examiners. And over on our Enterprise site, we wrote last week about how Intuit paid out a series of prizes for QuickBooks and Quicken App developers .

These finalists traveled to Mountain View to pitch their projects to an all-star panel of scientists, inventors and Nobel prize laureates that included Dean Kamen and Vint Cerf. And as Google noted on its blog today, the final decision was all about "girl power" as the award in each of the three age categories was handed to a young woman:

The winners went home with some great prizes. Bose, for her part, received a $50,000 scholarship, as well as a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer and an internship at CERN. Hodge and Shah each received $25,000 scholarships and internships at Google and Lego.

These winners beat out stiff competition from a lot of other budding young scientists, all of whose projects, as Google noted, aimed to "bring significant, actionable change to the world."

As I argued earlier today in my story about Microsoft's Imagine Cup, as well as my coverage last week of Lego Education's robotics programs, these sorts of endeavors - particularly when they are practical and community-oriented - help expand interest in science, technology and engineering beyond what may have been a traditional - and very gendered - population. They emphasize not just scientific discovery or technological prowess per se, but tie those things to efforts that bring about real-world change.

Congratulations to all the students who participated in the Google Science Fair, but - yes, this is my bias here - an extra fist pump to the girls who entered and the girls who won.

WorldWideScience is a science portal developed and maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), an element of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy. The WorldWideScience Alliance, a partnership consisting of participating member countries provides the governance structure for the WorldWideScience.org portal.

When it debuted back in June 2007, it linked to 12 databases from 10 countries. Today, the portal links to 32 national, scientific databases and portals from 44 different countries.

WorldWideScience Homepage

How To Use WWS

To use the portal, you just enter a search term, as you would with any search engine and click "search." An advanced search feature lets you specify more details like title, author, or year, and lets you specify which databases to query.

Unlike Google, where results are ranked based on an algorithm that essentially displays items by popularity, WorldWideScience provides only authoritative scientific information by relevance - a ranking that is noted by the number of stars next to the result. The higher the number of stars, the more relevant the result.

Another difference between WWS and other search engines is that WorldWideScience's results are retrieved in real time. So, as you search and results come in, you may see a box appear with a "include these results" button. Clicking this will update the list with the latest information.

On your search results page, there are several features that make finding the answers you need easy to do. On the left, are "clusters," which let you narrow down a broad subject by specifying topics or dates. On the right, a snippet from Wikipedia provides a quick definition and link to an article about the subject you queried. Below that, a "EurekAlert!" section provides links to relevant articles from EurekAlert!, an online, global news service operated by AAAS, the science society. EurekAlert! is like a PR news wire for scientific research, providing a central place through which universities, medical centers, journals, government agencies, corporations and other organizations can bring their news to the media.

WorldWideScience Search Results

The WorldWideScience portal is a great resource for anyone looking for the most current findings from fields such as technology, energy, medicine, agriculture, environment, and more. You don't have to be a student, professor, or researcher to enjoy the richness of the data provided, either, as WWS has been designed to be easy enough for anyone to use. You can try it out for yourself here: worldwidescience.org

Can yet another organization really make a difference? Some observers seem to be suffering from Organization Fatigue, but we're interested to see what Berners Lee can do. A group dedicated to deep study of the web and the obstacles to its growth sounds like a great idea to us. Not everyone agrees.

The Foundation launched with a three part plan, including:

• Web Science and Research

Studying the web "as an interconnected complex system (that combines disciplines of science, biomedical science, social science, and computer science, for example)" and creating curriculum for other Web Scientists to be trained with around the world.
• Web Technology and Practice

Advancing standards.
• Web for Society

"To learn from people in socially or economically deprived communities how the Web can better serve them." (Nice that it's phrased this way.) Creating programs to extend access around the world.

Concerns

We are a little concerned about a conversation Berners Lee had with the BBC prior to unveiling the Foundation where he argued that there needs to be some way to brand trustworthy websites as trustworthy. That strikes us as either silly or frightening, possibly both.

Web standards guru and blogger Molly Holzschlag sums up what is probably a common feeling of ambivalence about the new Foundation.

I would love to feel optimistic about this, but at this point I've really decided that creating more groups is just adding layers of problems on top of what we're already doing.

On the other hand, if this empowers greater outreach, education and fosters real influence in returning to the core ideals of an interoperable Web for all, then I'm all for it.

Eran Hammer-Lahav, Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo! and party to the founding of another group, the Open Web Foundation, has sharper words for Berners Lee's group.

Seems odd to ask for money, and a lot of
it, with so little detail as to what this organization is about?...We've been asked many times why a new org, and I think it is fair to ask it back. Seems to me that most of this should/could be done within the W3C. If the W3C is no longer able to promote its own mission, it raises the question: should the same leadership be trusted to run a new effort that seems to try and fix what their first effort failed to accomplish?

We are sympathetic to both opinions here. The problems being engaged with are thorny enough that we applaud anyone for trying tackle them - and the inventor of the web certainly brings credentials to the effort. Also, it's not our $5 million so we're not going to lose too much sleep even if the effort goes no where.

What do you think? Does the World Wide Web Foundation website give you hope that the organization will be effective? If these topics are of interest to you, see also the Digital Divide Network.

Think the scientific genius behind Q, the fictional gadgetmeister that keeps James Bond ahead of the bad guys, combined with the technological expertise our own recently named CTO Aneesh Chopra has, and you might just see the perfect applicant.

"It will involve a sort of future-gazing to see where technology will be taking us in a year or so," Prof Beddington said.

Beddington adds that the successful applicant will not need to develop a weapons system for the latest Aston Martin.

Candidates will need to have "world-class scientific expertise and credibility in relevant scientific and technology disciplines." If you want to apply, you've got until April 24.

The two are completely different efforts, but the idea is to extend botanical knowledge through various Web-based materials and allow scientists and students to collaborate online. A herbarium is typically a huge collection of dried plants maintained by large universities and botanical gardens - two of the largest are found at the Bronx, NY and St. Louis, Missouri. To give you an idea of the size of these things, the St. Louis collection contains more than 5 million plants and is housed in several buildings. There are several hundred others located all over the country as you can see by the map above.

Led by Mary Barkworth, a professor at the Utah State University, the project aims to coordinate all of these heretofore independent herbaria efforts around the country. The virtual edition has just gotten started, and the researchers are figuring out common data markups and trying to catalog the individual plant species that each institution has on file, which Barkworth estimates is in the several millions. Part of the problem is that the plant collections go offline, as universities change their funding and science emphasis, and are either tossed aside or dispersed to interested collectors. So, tracking these herbaria down isn't a simple task. Another problem is that these collections aren't static: researchers are continually adding to their collections.

Eventually, the entire catalog will be imaged and placed on the public Internet so that researchers from anywhere can find a particular leaf, fern or seed. Right now there is the Index Herbarium maintained by the Bronx NY Botanical Garden here, but it is more a collection of pointers to institutions, rather than a database of the actual plant materials itself.

The Open Science network is an entirely different effort, but also presented its progress at the biology conference this week. Here more than 40 academic institutions are trying to help science educators improve their curricula with all sorts of virtual tours: you can take a recorded video walk in the woods with a noted bio prof and hear him provide commentary and descriptions of plant life, for example. It aims to make science more hands-on and interactive and engaging. There are links to lesson plans, lectures, and summer field courses that students can take.