Coles Science Center Blog

Environmental Sciences Resources at Bobst Library/Coles Science Center

Relevant Call Numbers:
* Environmental Sciences: GE1–350
* Meteorology and Climatology: QC851-999
* Ecology: QH540–549.5
* Plant Ecology: QK900-989
* Environmental Technology: TD1–1066
* Mechanical Engineering & Machinery: TJ1-1570
* Chemical Technology: TP1-1185

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias:
* Dictionary of Ecology and the Environment: QH540.4.C65 1998
* A Dictionary of Ecology: QH540.4.C66 2005 (reference)
* A Dictionary of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics: QH540.4.L56 1998 (reference)
* The VNR Dictionary of Environmental Health and Safety: RA566.D53 1994 (reference)
* Dictionary of Environmental Health: RA566.W68 2003 (reference)
* The Encyclopedia of Environmental Studies: QH540.4.A84 1991
* Encyclopedia of Environmental Biology: QH540.4.E52 1995 v.1-3
* The Water Encyclopedia: TD351.V36 1990

Electronic Books (linked in BobCat):
* The Global Warming Desk Reference: QC981.8.G56 J64 2002eb
* Pollution A to Z: TD173.P65 2004eb
* Handbook of Environmental Data on Organic Chemicals: TD196.O73 V47 2001eb
* Water Encyclopedia: TD345.L393 2005eb

Specialized Databases:
* ENVIROnetBase
* Environment Complete (EBSCO)
* Environmental Universe (LexisNexis)

Green Building Resources at NYU's Jack Brause Real Estate Library
* Research Guide (pdf)

Environmental Law Resources at NYU's Law Library
* Databases

Sustainability at NYU
* Sustainability Task Force

Recycling at NYU
* Facilities and Construction Management's recycling services

Funding for Green Projects at NYU
* Green Grants program

Environmental Sciences Programs at NYU

Environmental Studies
(Undergraduate, College of Arts and Science)

Environmental Conservation Education
(Graduate, Steinhardt School)

Environmental Health Sciences
(Graduate, Graduate School of Arts and Science)

Environmental Medicine
(Graduate, School of Medicine)

Government Resources
* National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
* U.S. Department of Energy
* U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Satellite and Information Service
* National Geophysical Data Center
* U.S. Geological Survey and USGS Water Resources of the United States
* NASA
* Library of Congress’ Thomas Legislative Information

Nonprofit Organizations
* Air and Waste Management Association
* American Water Works Association
* Center for Biodiversity and Conservation
* Ecological Society of America
* National Council for Science and the Environment
* NatureServe
* Smithsonian Conservation and Research Center
* World Resources Institute
* Worldwatch Institute

Research Institutes
* Caltech’s Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
* Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Wave Phenomena
* Columbia University’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation
* Columbia University’s Lamont-Dogherty Earth Observatory
* MIT’s Earth Resources Laboratory
* Penn State’s Earth System Science Center
* University of California’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics
* University of Colorado at Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences
* University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center

Other Links
* EnviroLink
* GeologyLink
* Tree of Life web project

Check out these new books at the Coles Science Center.

Flower Hunters
by John Gribbin
QK26 .G75 2008
"Veteran science writers, the Gribbins (Richard Feynman: A Life in Science) tell the stories of 11 18th- and 19th-century botanical explorers. Two were Swedes, including the renowned taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, who botanized in Lapland. The others came from Great Britain, including Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook, and Francis Masson, sent to South Africa by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. With David Douglas, sent to North America by the Horticultural Society of London to obtain plants to sell to affluent gardeners, came the age of plant exploration for profit. Robert Fortune was sent to China to collect tea plants for the East India Company. Richard Spruce obtained seeds of the South American tree that produces quinine, the drug used to treat malaria. Joseph Hooker brought rhododendrons from India to Victorian Britain. Marianne North searched several continents for material for her flower paintings. The adventures of these botanists, who often risked their lives in search of exotic species, should make for exciting reading, but the Gribbins' dry biographical sketches fail to capture the drama. 30 color and b&w illus not seen by PW."--Amazon.com

Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
by Paul A. Offit
RJ506.A9 O34 2008
"Attempting to answer the enormous frustration and unhappiness of parents "tired of watching their autistic children improve at rates so slow it's hard to tell if they are improving at all," pediatrics professor and vaccine researcher Offit explores purported causes and cures. Examining false approaches like facilitated communication ("a massive, nationwide delusion") and secret injections ("no better than salt water"), and mistaken theories of origin (the MMR vaccine, thimerosol), Offit pleads with journalists to resist the lure of "dramatic headlines, advertising dollars, and ratings" rather than report an unconfirmed or untrustworthy study. The only worthwhile studies, Offit purports, are those meeting three criteria: "transparency of the funding source, internal consistency of the data, and reproducibility of the findings." Overall, Offit's text seems unbalanced: though he takes on the "$40-billion-a-year" alternative medicine industry, he's largely silent on the much larger pharmaceutical industry; and after 10 chapters of debunking the "false prophets," there's just one brief chapter on what is known about autism causes and cures. A thorough and convincing debunker, however, Offit will likely leave parents still hunting for information, albeit better armed to find it."--Amazon.com

The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
by Sarah Manguso
RC416 .M36 2008
"In 1995, when Rome Prize–winning poet and fiction writer Manguso (Siste Viator) was a junior at Harvard, she suffered the first attack of a rare autoimmune disease called CIDP, which would turn her body against itself. CIDP attacks the myelin coating of the peripheral nerves. The result is increasing numbness, followed by paralysis spreading from the extremities inward, until the sufferer can no longer control his or her breathing, and dies. In short, lyrical chapters—the book free-associates between memories, while sticking to a rough chronological order—Manguso recounts the harrowing indignities of her treatments, frequent relapses, descents into steroid-induced clinical depression, crucial college sexual experiences had and missed, and trips back and forth between schools, hospitals and her parents' Massachusetts home. What makes this lightning-quick book extraordinary is not just Manguso's deadpan delivery of often unthinkable details, nor her poet's struggle with the damaging metaphors of disease, but the compassion she acquires as she comes to understand her pain in relation to the pain of others: suffering, however much and whatever type, shrinks or swells to fit the shape and size of a life."--Amazon.com

Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine
by Jonathan B. Imber
R724 .I5446 2008
"Trusting Doctors discusses the emphasis that Protestant clergymen placed on the physician's vocation; the focus that Catholic moralists put on specific dilemmas faced in daily medical practice; and the loss of unchallenged authority experienced by doctors after World War II, when practitioners became valued for their technical competence rather than their personal integrity. Imber shows how the clergy gradually lost their impact in defining the physician's moral character, and how vocal critics of medicine contributed to a decline in patient confidence. The author argues that as modern medicine becomes defined by specialization, rapid medical advance, profit-driven industry, and ever more anxious patients, the future for a renewed trust in doctors will be confronted by even greater challenges."--Amazon.com

Exploitation and Developing Countries: The Ethics of Clinical Research
by Jennifer S. Hawkins (Editor), Ezekiel J. Emanuel
"Exploitation and Developing Countries is an attempt by philosophers and bioethicists to reflect on the meaning of exploitation, to ask whether and when clinical research in developing countries counts as exploitative, and to consider what can be done to minimize the possibility of exploitation in such circumstances. These reflections should interest clinical researchers, since locating the line between appropriate and inappropriate use of subjects--the line between exploitation and fair use--is the central question at the heart of research ethics. Reflection on this rich and important moral concept should also interest normative moral philosophers of a non-Marxist bent."--Amazon.com

The Coles Science Center at Bobst Library Presents a
Special Coles Science Salon in Honor of World AIDS Day

"HIV Prevention Reconsidered for a New Generation of Young Gay and Bisexual Men: Preliminary Findings from Project Desire"

by Perry Halkitis, Ph.D., M.S., Robert Moeller, Ed.M., and Daniel Siconolfi, M.P.H.
Center for Health, Identity, Behavior & Prevention Studies (CHIBPS), NYU

Project Desire, in collaboration with the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, is a mixed-methods investigation to better understand the recent increase in HIV incidence in young men who have sex with men (YMSM) in New York City. We also seek to develop and test HIV prevention messages tailored to this population. Project Desire will 1) document the patterns of sexual risk-taking behavior in a racially and ethnically diverse sample of YMSM in NYC, 2) develop a qualitative understanding of sexual-risk-taking in this population, and 3) determine the effectiveness of HIV prevention messages as well as the needs of YMSM with regard to prevention messaging.

DATE: Monday, December 1, 2008
TIME: 5-6pm
PLACE: Avery Room, 2nd Floor, Bobst Library*

Please join us for the talk, followed by a discussion. Refreshments will be served.

For more info on Project Desire, please read the NYU Today article.

*Entrance to the library requires a valid NYU or affiliated institution ID.
More info on access to Bobst here.

***RSVP Required***
Go here: http://tinyurl.com/salon-rsvp

LIFE images dating as far back as the 1750s are now available from Google! To limit your search to the LIFE photo archive, just add "source:life" to your Google Image search box along with your keyword(s).

Suggested search terms for neat science-related images, both historic and contemporary:
science
DNA
chemistry
nuclear
earth
microscope
math
space
astronaut
medicine
brain
electricity
microwave
time exposure
human body
and on and on and on...

Coles is now on Twitter! Follow us here: http://twitter.com/ColesSciCenter

Here's a little something to "chew on" from Wired Science regarding your upcoming Thanksgiving meal:

"Most everything on your plate has undergone tremendous genetic change under the intense selective pressures of industrial farming. Pilgrims and American Indians ate foods called corn and turkey, but the actual organisms they consumed didn't look or taste much at all like our modern variants do."

image source: Wired Science blog

Bottom line: turkeys over twice the size, sweeter corn, and starchier potatoes. What, no pumpkin pie?