toxportal

Here it is, the hefty Guidance on Information Requirements and Chemical Safety Assessment.

The purpose of the concise guidance is to support the processes needed to meet the information requirements on intrinsic properties of substances to be registered, and where relevant to carry out a chemicals safety assessment.

A viable alternative
Railing against ‘ tick-box’ toxicology…

“We conclude that NP are much less phagocytized by AM than large particles but are effectively removed from the lung surface towards the interstitium. Even from these interstitial sites they undergo AM-mediated long-term NP clearance to the larynx.”

Efficient Elimination of Inhaled Nanoparticles from the Alveolar Region: Evidence for Interstitial Uptake and Subsequent Re-entrainment onto Airways Epithelia
Semmler-Behnke M, Takenaka S, Fertsch S, Wenk A, Seitz J, Mayer P, Oberdorster G, Kreyling WG. 2007. Environ Health Perspect: doi:10.1289/ehp.9685. [Online 6 February 2007]

In case you were curious….

GrantsNet: International Funding Index
The International Grants and Fellowships Index offers the latest listing of funding opportunities from Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Despite my initial enthusiasm for Connotea (see below) I quickly found that, whilst various popular import and export formats are supported, it does not allow you to export as .rtf reference list. This is a function that I’m sure most researchers would like, as a way to save on the drudgery of typing-in all those citations, nicely formatted.

I can see all you endnote users smiling smugly right now. But not everyone want to pay $299 for a reference manager

With so many resourceful and generous open-source developers out there, a quick scan of Sourceforge revealed JabRef, a free Java-based reference manager with some very nice features, including a solution for the aforementioned formatting malaise, and the ability to import/export in other popular formats. Regular expressions are supported!

JabRef works perfectly at home, but there is no access to Medline through the proxy server at work (!?). So, Connotea stays in my favourites list for now, feeding JabRef with all that information.

Another score for efficiency and a tip of the hat to the Open Source community.

A revealing article by Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, gives a cold-eye view relevant to today’s IPPC firm pronouncement of guilt on human activities as the major cause of global warming. 

A Personal Call For Modesty, Integrity, and Balance by Hendrik Tennekes

For anyone tired of being confined to endnote to collect  references, a mobile solution is at hand! Today I came across an elegant and free web2.0 solution called Connotea:

http://www.connotea.org/

Quite easy to set-up, it allows you to painlessly store, manage and share bibliographic references and, to enter multiple tags for each reference. This means you can strip out the references to any RSS reader or other formats - fantastic!

Using a copy of equally wonderful GreatNews RSS reader on a usb stick, your valuable bibliographic hoard is in your pocket.

REACH, Climate Change

“I cannot hide the feeling that the proposal could have been more far-reaching and that I would have wanted to see a more ambitious chemicals management‘s regulation. Despite the shortcomings of the new emerging text on REACH, the two main goals (abolishment of current dual system for the risk assessment of chemicals and the burden of proof) of REACH still hold. And it is better to have a law that a draft law!” 

“It will be interesting to see who will be the first producer who would provide the full safety file to the Chemicals agency….”

I would be more worried about whether the shiny new European Chemicals Agency will have the capacity!

Experts tell EU to prop up ethics in nanomedicine
Nanotechnologies can open up promising areas in diagnosis and treatment but measures are needed to ensure that related medical products and devices are safe, scientific experts told the Commission.