The NIST/TRC Web Thermo Tables (WTT) Professional Edition is an online database of critically evaluated thermochemical properties. There are two versions of the database, the Professional (with all the data) and the Lite (with 150 selected commonly used compounds). We subscribe to the Professional version.

Presently, the Professional version of WTT contains data for 7729 compounds.  Data includes critical properties, vapor pressures and boiling temperatures, phase transition properties, volumetric properties, heat capacities and derived properties, transport properties, reaction state-change properties, as well as index of refraction, surface tension, and speed of sound.  Various search options and interactive data plotting capabilities are provided via the web interface.

This is a subscription database (not the same as the freely available NIST Chemistry WebBook). The two products are complementary however, and each one has internal links to the other.

Synthesis Digital Library Update for December 2010

• Bacterial Sensors: Synthetic Design and Application Principles by Jan Roelof van der Meer, University of Lausanne, Switzerland (Synthetic Biology Series)
• Deformable Surface 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Images by Mathieu Salzmann, Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago and Pascal Fua, EPFL Switzerland (Computer Vision Series)
• Fundamentals of Object Databases: Object-Oriented and Object-Relational Design by Suzanne Dietrich, Arizona State University and Susan Urban, Texas Tech University (Data Management Series)
• Geometric Programming for Design and Cost Optimization, Second Edition by Robert Creese, West Virginia University (Engineering Series)
• Processor Microarchitecture: An Implementation Perspective by Antonio Gonzalez, Intel and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain (Computer Architecture Series)
• Search-Based Applications: At the Confluence of Search and Database Technologies by Gregory Grefenstette and Laura Wilber, Exalead, S.A. (Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services Series)
• Speech Enhancement in the Karhunen-Loeve Expansion Domain by Jacob Benesty, INRS-EMT, University of Quebec (Speech & Audio Processing Series)
• Tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico: A Call for a New Engineering Ethic by George Catalano, SUNY Binghamton (Engineers, Technology, & Society Series)

Images play an increasingly significant role in scholarly communication. If you're looking for photographs, graphics, charts or graphs relating to the life sciences, the Bioscience Library website has added an Electronic Images page offering links to image resources. The resource links are grouped in the categories Molecular & Cell Biology, Microbiology, and Medicine; Integrative Biology and Environmental Science; and Interdisciplinary Image Collections. Each entry offers a link to the resource, a capsule description of the scope of the collection and its points of access, and the name of the sponsoring organization. A list of image search engines is also included for those who want to explore beyond Google. A world of scientific images awaits you!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are millions of images worth? NCBI Images allows you to search about 3 million images from articles in the biomedical literature database PubMed Central, including charts, graphics, and photographs. Searchable fields for the images include caption title and text, author, journal name, and PubMed ID. Search results include thumbnails of the images, a truncated caption, a citation for the source article, and a link to the full text. Mousing over a thumbnail generates a preview of the image; clicking on a thumbnail takes you to a larger version of the image plus its full caption. You can save images temporarily to the clipboard, or permanently as a My NCBI collection. Of course, use of images may be governed by copyright; consult the NCBI Copyright and Disclaimers page for more information.

As part of the mandatory campus Winter Holiday Closure and Energy Curtailment Period,  all of the UC Berkeley libraries will be closed from Thursday, December 23, 2010, through Sunday, January 2, 2011.

Most libraries will reopen on January 3.  Some of the science libraries are closed the week  of Dec 20. Make sure to check the Library Hours page.  You can select a date, or click on the "Calendar" link next to a particular library to display its hours.