THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME?

Great things are happening in the world of science and academics.

Google has finally launched their academic search engine Google Scholar which enables you to search all possible online journals and official sources including books for any damn thing under the sun. Its fantasticabulous!! Of course, it includes natural and social sciences, engineering and medicine, and probably anything else that can be considered under the heading 'academics'.
It displays a list of results based on the usual criteria, namely the importance of the key word in the publication, the number of citations, the citations for the journal itself, and the number of times a particular author has published on that subject. Of course, your university or institution still needs a subscription to the journal (Google is still not THAT great). But now you no longer need to browse slightly ungainly sources like PubMed and WebOfScience. Now you directly get the article and the PDF. A must for researchers in every and any field. Check it out (However, I have to assume it's still not as good as Scifinder)

The latest issue of Nature is dedicated to nuclear proliferation. And it's about time, with the US again trying to use it's leverage in the UN to act as Iran's nuclear watchdog. The articles in the issue are perspicacious and quite honest in most, if not all parts. For one thing, in one of them, the author correctly berates Colin Powell who was being ultra-paranoid about Iran's nuclear capability, conveniently ignoring his own country's behemoth silos and repositories. If this is not being a hypocrite, then what is? The articles explore the central and seemingly utopian question; Can we actually have a world without the pall of nuclear power? Read on for yourself! Apart from other measures, an old, sober and simple plan, whose principal architect was my favourite J. Robert Oppenheimer, is seen in a spirit of resurrection.