According to a recent article, “A growing segment of the medical community believes that is a realistic possibility and is increasingly looking at ways to harness the power of blogs, news outlets and social-networking websites to detect disease patterns around the world. Dozens of researchers gathered Monday at a pandemic conference in Toronto to hear about the progress one expert has made toward achieving those goals. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist who works as a researcher at Children’s Hospital Boston, told researchers instead of relying solely on government-based disease-surveillance systems, they should recognize the power of clues coming from individuals on the ground.” Read more

A recent article makes the case for a standard language in the life sciences. The article begins, “In July, hundreds of international scientists from dozens of
biomedical fields will meet at the University at Buffalo seeking a common language with which to energize cross-disciplinary research… The public may assume that when biomedical scientists talk, they use the same words to mean the same things. But as [Barry] Smith points out, in different research fields, even such common terms as ‘pain,’ ‘gene,’ ‘blood’ and ‘cancer’ may have very different meanings as used in different contexts. With the exponential growth of biomedical data, this simple fact has enormous implications. It leads to incompatibilities that frequently confuse, halt cross-disciplinary research and severely limit communication among researchers.” Read more

According to a recent article, “Praxeon, Inc., the award-winning Boston-based leader in delivering knowledge solutions for the Healthcare and Life Science communities, today announced the launch of DocumentLens. Their cloud-based web application helps scientific researchers deal with the ever increasing deluge of online and electronic data and information from peer-reviewed journals, regulatory sites, patents and proprietary sources. DocumentLens provides an easy-to-utilize environment to enrich discovery, enhance idea generation, shorten the investigation time, improve productivity and engage collaboration.” Read more

Software developers have a new opportunity to test their abilities and help researchers in the process: “Elsevier is offering $35,000 in prizes and challenging software developers to help more than 15 million researchers, medical professionals, librarians and students navigate scientific content, improve scientific search and discovery, visualize sophisticated data in more insightful and attractive ways and stimulate collaboration.” Read more

The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid has announced that, “twenty Spanish research groups, employing over 150 researchers from 18 higher education institutions, have set up the Spanish Linked Data Thematic Network, with the aim of improving knowledge exchange and transfer between Spanish researchers working in Spain or abroad on related fields, as well as increasing the international visibility of Spanish research on linked data.” Read more