Wikimania

http://www.wikipathways.org

WikiPathways — the latest Wikipedia-like database to be developed for molecular cell biologists — launched recently, joining the likes of WikiGene and WikiProteins.

Developed by bioinformaticians Bruce Conklin, Chris Evelo and colleagues, WikiPathways is an open-source tool that allows scientists to curate biological pathways. Each pathway has a dedicated page with a description and visual representation, relevant references, component lists and version history. Crucially, a custom-designed graphical tool allows scientists to amend and annotate all the pathways online.

While the creators hope that WikiPathways will “serve as an example for how the continuing flood of biological data can be managed and utilized by the community to irrigate future hypotheses and discoveries”, the ultimate success of WikiPathways depends on community input. So make sure your pet pathway is included, and let the amending and annotation begin.

Need (science) news?

http://esciencenews.com

Dissatisfied with the quality of science articles listed on the Google news aggregator, Canadian HIV researcher Michael Imbeault has launched e! Science News — a site that gathers news specifically for scientists.

Using mathematical modelling, clustering algorithms and Bayesian statistics, e! Science News scans, collates and ranks the contents of 40 top science news sources, such as the NY Times Science section, the Guardian Science section, Popular Science and ScienceNow. The fully automated site continuously sorts articles, considering factors such as timeliness and frequency of appearance on the web, to ensure that you always have fresh links to science news stories from around the world to check during 5-minute breaks between experiments.