xkcd

by **hideki101** » Sat Jan 17, 2009 4:09 am UTC

As far as I can tell, there is no thread here to display useful scientific resources on the web. So, following in the vein of the math forum, this thread is for the posting of the above scientific resources. I'm a physics major, so these sites are the ones I know. Other science majors are welcome to post their own fields too.
Let me get this thread started:Edit: Planning on consolidating all the given websites into one post for ease of browsing. I'll also try to categorize the sites depending on their field.

Physics
http://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html -- Physics Java applets Oscillations, waves, acoustics, EM physics, quantum physics.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html -- mathematical physics
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/--Physics Blog
http://www.askthephysicist.com/ -- Ask the Physicist!
http://planetphysics.org/ -- Physics virtual community
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/HFrame.html -- Um, kind of a short demo of a CD. Uses a network, displayed as sort of a flowchart. Gives short, concise summary of each topic
http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schw.shtml -- stuff on black holes from University of Colorado
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/ -- CERN website

Astronomy
http://www.nineplanets.org/ -- Solar system resource
http://www.nasa.gov/ -- National Atmospheric and Space Administration
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html -- Daily picture of something astronomy related. Go check it out.

Chemistry
http://www.periodicvideos.com/ -- periodic table videos: demonstrate each element
http://chem.chem.rochester.edu/~nvd/ --Information on biochem lab techniques
http://www.shodor.org/unchem/advanced/redox/redoxcalc.html -- Redox Reactions Calculator
http://scienceblogs.com/moleculeoftheday/ -- Molecule of the day
http://www.dayah.com/periodic/ -- Periodic table: easy to read, clicking on the element brings up its Wikipedia article
http://periodictable.com/ -- Theodore Gray's periodic table. Facts and uses for each element. Fairly cool

Biology
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ -- Molecular Biology. See sgt york's post for more information
http://www.brenda-enzymes.info/ -- Enzyme database
http://chem.chem.rochester.edu/~nvd/ -- synthetic organic chemistry
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page -- Wiki for sharing bio lab techniques and information
http://www.bioinformatics.org/sms2/index.html -- "...JavaScript programs for generating, formatting, and analyzing short DNA and protein sequences."
http://www.expasy.ch/ --Protein analysis helper (lots of links)
http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/home/home.do -- Protein database and articles
http://viperdb.scripps.edu/ -- Virus database
http://www.copewithcytokines.de/cope.cgi -- Cytokines & Cells Online Pathfinder Encyclopaedia.
http://www.merck.com/mmpe/index.html -- Merck Manual Online Medical Library (I'm lumping in medical stuff with biology)
http://www.cellbio.com/index.html -- Cell & Molecular Biology Online : quetzal likes the lab protocols. NOTE: may be out of date: last update in 2001
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dhO0iCLww -- The hippie ribosome synthesis video that every bio classroom should use
http://www.reactome.org/ -- "Collection of biological pathways. Really useful if you want a figure for a presentation." --BAH
http://ndbserver.rutgers.edu/ -- "a repository of three-dimensional structural information about nucleic acids" --website
http://tolweb.org/tree/ -- Goal: contain a page of information of every species EVER.

Computer Science
http://scottaaronson.com/blog/ -- CS blog

Earth Science (Meteorology, Geology, Oceanography)
http://www.noaa.gov/ -- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Environmentalism
http://www.treehugger.com/ -- Envoronmentalist site, affiliated with Discovery Channel

General
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/ -- Sort of a dictionary on science, concentrated on math, physics, astronomy, and chemistry, though it does have bios on a lot of prominent scientists, mostly historical, though there are some on current scientists.
http://arxiv.org/ -- Science Article archive
http://www.highwire.org -- Stanford-based free article archive
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm -- MIT Open Courseware
http://www.sciencedaily.com/ -- General science new site.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/ -- Explains...uh...how stuff works
http://dsc.discovery.com/ -- Discovery Channel website
http://www.redorbit.com/ -- scitech news
http://www.livescience.com/ -- Science news site, affiliated with Imaginova
http://www.newscientist.com/ -- Online part of NewScientist magazine
http://www.nature.com/ -- Nature (scientific journal) website

to be continued...

by **doogly** » Sat Jan 17, 2009 4:39 am UTC

arxiv.org is the most important development for 20th century science and I am not even shitting.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html Baez has some delightful mathematical physics

cosmicvariance.com is a group blog by a bundle of physicists, it is fun times. General purpose awesome.

scottaaronson.com/blog is the other sciency blog I follow. He does theoretical cs, which I do not do but find fascinating. There are some very good lecture notes available.

by **sgt york** » Sat Jan 17, 2009 6:49 pm UTC

OK, molecular biology sites:

The standby, NCBI : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/. This is the home of:
Pubmed : the journal search tool
entrez : an excellent nucleotide database, want to know the sequence of a gene? Find it here.
BLAST : nucleotide sequence comparison tools. Proteins, too. How similar is this gene to this one? Is there an analog of human gene x in dogs?
OMIM : mendelian inheritance in man. What does BRCA1 actually do to me? What genes increase my risk of heart disease? Find out here.
TaxBrowser : taxonomy database. Browse through the whole freakin' tree.
Structure : 3D structures of various proteins
....and a ton more stuff. It's a goldmine.

To note on Pubmed: You can output searches to an RSS feed. I love this. I have all my standard searches set up that way, so the current state of my field is staring me in the face as my homepage whenever I open my browser.

There is also Pubmed central. It's part of NCBI, but it deserves its own link, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/. Many journals now put copies here, and anyone who does NIH funded research now has to copy all papers here. And it's public access. Fantastic resource.

BRENDA http://www.brenda-enzymes.info/ Fantastic resource for biochemists. Lists out damn near everything by standard numerical classification. Gives all the info you could want, from inhibitors, affinities for substrates, expression patterns, species differences, the works. I love this one.

Google scholar : I'm sure you all know about this one, but for some searches, it's even better than pubmed. Especially older stuff. When looking for an older (per-1980) paper, you have a better chance of finding an electronic copy of the actual paper through Google scholar than you do through Pubmed.

by **Yggdrasil** » Sat Jan 17, 2009 7:53 pm UTC

MIT Open Courseware
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
Free material (and some video) from classes taught at MIT

Open WetWare
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page
A wiki with lots of useful information, including many lab protocols, for molecular biology and biological engineering.

Not Voodoo
http://chem.chem.rochester.edu/~nvd/
Great site with resources for those who do synthetic organic chemistry

Sequence Manipulation Suite
http://www.bioinformatics.org/sms2/index.html
Site with many useful tools for analyzing protein and nucleic acid sequences.

ExPASy Proteomics Server
http://www.expasy.ch/
Site with many useful tools for studying proteins

Protein Databank
http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/home/home.do
Archive containing many published protein structures.

by **Sungura** » Sat Jan 17, 2009 10:58 pm UTC

I also like Highwire Press: http://www.highwire.org
(note the .org) I have the best chance at finding full text free articles there if you don't have a university account OR if you are too lazy to login through the school.

http://www.periodicvideos.com/ <- I love their periodic table videos, especially ones with cool demos. Nice to learn a bit about all the elements.

http://viperdb.scripps.edu/ <- Virus database, I don't study virus but I still think it is awesome. Then again, my friend Jack Johnson is head of virology at Scripps so I am perhaps a bit biased. Nonetheless, an excellent virus database.

sgt york otherwise beat me to what is in my bookmarks...

by **The-Rabid-Monkey** » Sun Jan 18, 2009 9:35 am UTC

Sungura wrote:http://www.periodicvideos.com/ <- I love their periodic table videos, especially ones with cool demos. Nice to learn a bit about all the elements.

THEIF!!!! That was supposed to be mine! :evil:

http://www.shodor.org/unchem/advanced/r ... xcalc.html - Redox Reaction Calculator - So you can "remember" what happens!
http://scienceblogs.com/moleculeoftheday/ - Molecule Of The Day - Interesting little facts and bits.
http://www.dayah.com/periodic/ - Dynamic Periodic Table - Awesome periodic table, gives you bucket loads of information and also links to wikipedia when you click on an element!

by **qetzal** » Mon Jan 19, 2009 3:57 pm UTC

Cytokines & Cells Online Pathfinder Encyclopaedia - http://www.copewithcytokines.de/cope.cgi. Covers tens of thousands of cytokines and other regulatory proteins.

The Merck Manual Online Medical Library - http://www.merck.com/mmpe/index.html

Cell & Molecular Biology Online - http://www.cellbio.com/index.html. I like it mainly for the links to lots of lab protocols.

by **pastrybot** » Tue Jan 20, 2009 3:35 am UTC

If you're looking for something a little less serious, I've always loved the Periodic Table Of Videos. It's done by the University of Nottingham and it's a really fascinating way to kill some time (and maybe even learn something!)

by **The-Rabid-Monkey** » Tue Jan 20, 2009 6:33 am UTC

pastrybot wrote:If you're looking for something a little less serious, I've always loved the Periodic Table Of Videos. It's done by the University of Nottingham and it's a really fascinating way to kill some time (and maybe even learn something!)

Um just a note, you might want to check past posts people, or we're going to have like 50 links to PTV...

by **mdyrud** » Fri Jan 23, 2009 1:25 am UTC

Theodore Gray's Periodic Table is a pretty good site. They have lots of interesting tidbits for each of the different elements, including where it can be found. It also has pretty thorough technical data.

by **Sungura** » Mon Jan 26, 2009 10:51 pm UTC

While it's not a science website, the ribosome video from the 70's is awesome, we watched it in my cell bio course at grad school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dhO0iCLww

by **dennisw** » Tue Jan 27, 2009 9:03 pm UTC

Ask the Physicist!

by **Hit3k** » Fri Feb 13, 2009 9:30 am UTC

Planet Physics Sister site to: Planet Math

by **GoC** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 12:55 am UTC

Hyperphysics: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/HFrame.html
Calculus Tutorials: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

by **pinaydix** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 2:27 pm UTC

I think i don't have a science web site but i think those are really helpful.. i love reading science related articles....

_________________
Pinay Showbiz

by **Boxcar Aldous Huxley** » Wed Apr 01, 2009 10:24 pm UTC

Some of these may be within the links above:

Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/
General science new site.

Reactome: http://www.reactome.org
Collection of biological pathways. Really useful if you want a figure for a presentation.

Nucleic acid database: http://ndbserver.rutgers.edu/
Similar to the pdb but does some useful things like separate structures into 'biologically active' units.

Tree of life web project: http://tolweb.org/tree/
Info on various species and evolutionary history.

by **rosalinda** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 9:58 am UTC

Here are some science websites that are commonly used for science research and these are the top 10 science websites.

1.HowStuffWorks.com
2.Discovery.com
3.NOAA.gov
4.NASA.gov
5.ScienceDaily.com
6.TreeHugger.com
7.RedOrbit.com
8.LiveScience.com
9.NewScientist.com
10.Nature.com

by **3.14chan** » Tue Jun 09, 2009 4:29 am UTC

http://www.scholarpedia.org/

There is the site in my signature too

by **Mat** » Tue Jun 09, 2009 7:06 am UTC

Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics

by **ajbleck** » Tue Jun 09, 2009 11:14 pm UTC

Phet has some cool demos done in java they are very simple but they cover tough concepts.

http://phet.colorado.edu/index.php

by **nilkemorya** » Tue Jun 23, 2009 4:51 pm UTC

This is a bit of a self plug, but this website is trying to make movie/book/video game science a little better: http://www.scienceadviser.net

by **mfank** » Wed Jun 24, 2009 6:35 pm UTC

Just one to add to the collection. All matter engineering related, regardless of discipline.

http://eng-tips.com/

by **morumotto** » Mon Jul 06, 2009 6:08 pm UTC

Before you shoot me down for not posting a 100% science site, skim through a few pages of Cocktail Party Physics to discover some of the MOST AWESOMENEST science writing out there. The contributors all seem to have professions in some sort of science or other, and they include lots of great links and videos in their posts. Other neat science blogs are listed in the sidebar.

Check it out: http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/cockt ... y_physics/

by **doctorwho** » Tue Jul 07, 2009 10:15 am UTC

A relatively new project: www.askaphd.org. Originally for PhD students of all disciplines, but everyone is welcome to join.

Doctor Who

by **Challenger Red** » Mon Jul 20, 2009 3:44 am UTC

chemicals and other assorted science things- http://www.unitednuclear.com

by **tmthomas** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 5:37 am UTC

Hi Everyone

Here, There are some science websites that are commonly used for science research and These are the top 10 science websites.

1 HowStuffWorks.com
2 Discovery.com
3 NOAA.gov
4 NASA.gov
5 ScienceDaily.com
6 TreeHugger.com
7 RedOrbit.com
8 LiveScience.com
9 NewScientist.com
10 Nature.com.

by **Mokele** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 2:33 pm UTC

http://www.digimorph.org - extensive database of CT-scanned animals & fossils, all accessible.

by **shainer** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 11:21 am UTC

http://www.neave.com/planetarium/

It's not a real website about science, but VERY useful if you want to observe stars and costellations by yourself.
You can find the geographical coordinations of your town/place, and then know what stars will be visible at night.

by **ian** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 5:27 am UTC

Does anyone know of any good science/phyiscs forums (fora?), other than this one of course?

by **Outchanter** » Sun Sep 27, 2009 9:53 am UTC

http://www.youtube.com/edu - videos from some of the best universities in the world. Many are general interest rather than academic, but MIT and Stanford have quite a few playlists containing the lectures for entire classes. (Most of the MIT ones seem to be associated with courses from the already mentioned OpenCourseware.)

For some reason I can't fathom, the above collection fails to include:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=npt ... =playlists - India's National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning, including hundreds of lecture videos from IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology).

http://www.khanacademy.org/ - highschool and undergraduate level science video lectures.

http://videolectures.net/ - has categories for every branch of science, however computer science is definitely the best represented with 1772 videos, 794 of which focus on machine learning.

http://www.math.odu.edu/~jhh/counter2.html - free textbook on tensor calculus and continuum mechanics.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html - free textbook on information theory. (File under statistics/physics/computer science...)

http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html - Gerard 't Hooft's guide to becoming a theoretical physicist, with links to relevant online resources.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html - textbook on algorithms (originally from this thread in the Computer Science subforum, consider merging?)

Free High School Science Texts (South Africa, grades 10-12, collaborative writing and editing, LaTeX sources available)

National Council of Educational Research and Training online textbooks (Indian textbooks, grades 1-12)

Open Text Book (blog linking to other projects and individual books)

Textbook Revolution (entire books under a free license)

by **4=5** » Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:34 pm UTC

Bill Beaty's cool site

by **Fallen Angel** » Sun Jan 03, 2010 1:37 am UTC

Discovery is a valuable website that covers varies topics.

by **SimpleSimon** » Wed Jan 27, 2010 1:09 am UTC

The science section of the bbc news website often carries some quite interesting stories

by **Peter Galbavy** » Mon Feb 01, 2010 2:27 pm UTC

... but sadly the BBC covers science the same way as a Microsoft originated website would cover Linux.

by **thoughtfully** » Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:21 pm UTC

University of California Museum of Paleontology
The History of Life feature is a much more user-friendly tree of life site than tolweb.org.

by **Coffee** » Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:28 pm UTC

So ya wanna be a marine biologist eh?

http://www.oceancareers.com/2.0/program ... sort=state

by **amdurso** » Mon Apr 05, 2010 11:06 pm UTC

This is my collection of authoritative resources in taxonomy and species identification:

ITIS - http://www.itis.gov/ - for looking up the authority, year and validity of any taxon name
NatureServe - http://www.natureserve.org/explorer/ - really good for range information for all Western hemisphere species
Mammals - http://www.bucknell.edu/msw3/ - probably the weakest one out there (but see http://www.ultimateungulate.com/ungulates.html for ungulates and http://whozoo.org/mammals/mammalianphylo.htm for higher level mammalian phylogeny)
Birds - by far the best is http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/ but it's paid access only, except for universities and research institutions - AviBase (http://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/avibase.jsp) is worldwide and will do in a pinch
Reptiles - http://www.jcvi.org/reptiles/search.php
Amphibians - http://www.amphibiaweb.org/ and http://research.amnh.org/vz/herpetology ... /index.php and http://igsaceeswb00.er.usgs.gov:8080/mapserver/naa/ for range information of North American species to the county level
Fishes - http://www.fishbase.org/
Insects (and a few related groups) - http://bugguide.net/node/view/15740
Cephalopods - http://www.cephbase.utmb.edu/
All fossils - http://paleodb.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl?us ... ayHomePage
The tree of life - for phylogenetic relationships of all organisms - http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html

And a pretty cool device called TimeTree (http://www.timetree.org/) for finding out the age of the most recent common ancestor for any two taxa.

If anyone has any others that they have field tested (I have used all these extensively) I'd love to hear about them.

by **LucasBrown** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 11:45 pm UTC

www.ph.biu.ac.il/~rapaport/java-apps has some physics simulations--various kinds of granular flow, Ising model, quantum wavepackets, etc.

by **Plasmic-Turtle** » Wed May 05, 2010 7:57 am UTC

Biology:
www.twiv.tv - 'This week in Virology', lots of interesting netcasts about viruses, vaccines, prions. Brilliant for when you're doing some boring data processing that requires computer but so little brain that you start to go crazy.

Earth Sciences:
www.iris.edu - Seismology: the latest news, information on recent earthquakes, teaching resources, internship & job opportunities, basic learning information including little animations

by **Aleifr** » Sat May 08, 2010 7:58 pm UTC

http://www.physorg.com

Great site. It's sort of a science news site. A lot of interesting articles about nanotechnology and computer science, and pretty much everything else too. You can create a user profile so you can favorite articles, and some other handy stuff too. I reckon this site belongs under "General".

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