Engineering Info @ Imperial College London Library

Earth Alerts is a free application that once downloaded provides ‘alert notifications, reports, and imagery on many types of natural phenomenon that are occurring real-time both worldwide as well as in specific locations within the United States (including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands)’ using data from USGS, the US National Weather Service and ‘numerous other agencies’.

From the US Energy Information Administration, the Natural Gas Annual 2005, available for free download (pdf) with the data also available in CSV file format.

A report based on a colloquium held by the American Society of Microbiology in March 2006, available for free download (pdf), Microbial energy conversion.

Roll your mouse over this Periodic Table of the Elements, and find a wealth of information about each periodic element, as well as being able to browse through the different element groups. Roll your mouse over an individual element, and its properties are displayed.

Click on the question mark at the bottom of the page for more help in using the site. The software is free to use, although it’s produced by a commerical educational resources company, Animated Software Company.

North American Transportation Statistics is a database of US, Canadian and Mexican transportation statistics, available in English, French and Spanish. A number of organisations in each country contribute content. Statistics cover 12 main themes including ‘transportation and the economy, transportation safety, transportation’s impact on energy and the environment, passenger and freight activity, and transportation and trade’.

TechXtra is an online engineering information service set up by Roddy MacLeod, and colleagues at the University of Heriot-Watt Library:

‘TechXtra aggregates content from a large number of different databases containing technology-related content. . . you can currently search 29 databases. If you need them, there are easy links to the native interfaces of these 29 databases. Hits from searches are shown by database, so you can scan their content. Sometimes this is useful, and sometimes not (we’re working on more options). If you want, you can restrict searches to a particular format (technical reports, or articles, or books, and so on), or two selected databases using the Advanced Search option.

TechXtra recently added three more databases to its cross-search:

Australian Digital Theses (ADT) (details of, and links to the full text of about 8,000 digital theses); DiVA, technology subset (an archive containing details of doctoral and undergraduate theses and research reports from 15 of Nordic universities);Open Video Project, a small repository of digitized video.

In the majority of cases, the full text of items found through TechXtra is freely available. This includes the 8,000 Australian theses mentioned above, nearly half a million articles in computer and information science from CiteSeer, items found via ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World), thousands of eprints from arXiv in mathematics and computer science, 300 earthquake engineering technical reports from Caltech Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory Technical Reports, many articles from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), theses and dissertations from NDLTD, resources from around 30 institutional open archives in the United Kingdom, learning resources from the National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS), and more . . . Sometimes, materials found via TechXtra are not available in full text, or are only available if you, or your institution, subscribes to the service, or via pay-per-view.

. . .Numerous new feeds have been added to the OneStep News service http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/onestepnews/ giving this wider coverage of breaking industry news. The new feeds are from: PRWeb, AZoM Materials/Engineering News, NASA Breaking News, MIT News, EETimes News, ENCMag.com News, and Automotive World News, and more.
Over 5,000 news items are currently listed . . . For those who’d like to subscribe, free, to numerous trade magazines, white papers and surveys, TechXtra has a Magazine Subscription section http://techxtra.tradepub.com/ All titles are free to professionals who qualify.

 . . .There are also links (Xtra Extras) to newsletters of interest in technology information, a design data search service, a bookstore, and an Offshore Engineering Information service.’

Text taken from Roddy’s advertising!

The Foundation for Water Research conducts research on behalf of a number of commissioning bodies, and many of the finished reports can now be freely downloaded online.

• Cryptosporidiosis: a report on the surveillance and epidemiology of Cryptosporidium infection in England and Wales, (Report number DWI0489) is available from the Drinking Water Inspectorate. Other DWI research reports are also available.

For the Scotland and Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research (SNIFFER), the following reports have been published:

• Wetland and groundwater interactions :Phase 1 report - knowledge base and outline framework for risk assessment of groundwater dependent terrestrial ecosystems, report no. WFD62,
• Investigation of the efficacy and cost benefits of modern technology communications media for remote data colection and site interrogation in Scotland and Northern Ireland, report no. UKCC15, and
• Assessing the benefits of flood warning: a scoping study, report no. UKCC10

To access these reports, use the Search option, and type the full report number in the search box next to ‘SNIFFER code’.

The University of California Museum of Paleontology has created an online geological timeline, with links to examples, further reading, related web resources and more.

Another of their online resources is their exhibit on plate tectonics including animations.

The Department for Communities and Local Government has published its Minerals Policy Statement 1: Planning and Materials (MPS1) and the Planning and Materials: Practice Guide this week. Both are freely available for download.

MPS1 replaces MPG1: General considerations and the development plan system, published in 1996.

Selected papers from the 10th International Conference on Urban Drainage, held in Copenhagen, 21-25 August 2005, have been published in Water Science and Technology, vol. 54, nos. 6-7, 2006.