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From young Mozart to black holes, 350 years of the Royal Society go online. Britain's academy of the sciences marks anniversary with online archive including letters from Newton and Captain Cook.
Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians - and co-ordinated by Professor Michael Thompson FRS - it celebrates three and a half centuries of scientific endeavour and has been launched to commemorate the Royal Society's 350th anniversary in 2010.
Trailblazing is a user-friendly, `explore-at-your-own-pace', virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010.

Darwin Manuscripts Project - Darwin's original drafts - 10,000 pages worth - into an online archive.
The collection includes 34 of the original 36 draft leaves of the book, according to editor David Kohn. "I've sat in the Cambridge University Library since 1974, touching these documents, but this is the first time that anyone can do this -- online in this quantity and with this quality," Kohn said [MSNBC]. The project leaders intend to digitize more manuscripts down the road, and also reconstruct Darwin's library. blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/11/24/darwin-goes-digital-for-150th... [blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/11/24/darwin-goes-digital-for-150th...]

The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections.

The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. The Office of the Librarian is tasked to set policy and to direct and support programs and activities to accomplish the Library's mission.

The Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago has launched a $2 million research program on the nature and benefits of wisdom. Once regarded as a subject worthy of the most rigorous inquiries in order to discern its nature and benefits, wisdom is currently overlooked as a topic for serious scholarly and scientific investigation in many fields. Yet it is difficult to imagine a subject more central to the human enterprise and whose exploration holds greater promise in shedding light and opening up creative possibilities for human flourishing.

Following publication in the journal Science on the discovery and study of a 4.4 million-year-old female partial skeleton nicknamed "Ardi," Discovery Channel will present a world premiere special, DISCOVERING ARDI, Sunday October 11 at 9 PM (ET/PT) documenting the sustained, intensive investigation leading up to this landmark publication of the Ardipithecus ramidus fossils.

Online Museum: The Emergent Universe - Emergent Phenomena and Complexity.

The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter has released a new online museum, The Emergent Universe. This is, I think a truly novel approach to communicating the central ideas of the new field of emergent phenomena and complexity, combining the underlying physical basis of a wide array of examples with art and music. The site itself presents an animated, non-directed interface to branching sets of topics and what I guess one would call exhibits (since it's a museum after all). A lot of these are quite fun, and instructive. A visitor is left with the feeling that there is lots more to explore. The interface itself, I have to say, is very cool and a glimpse of what is to come on the internet. Today's text- and photo-heavy web pages are bound to give way to sleek sophisticated designs like this one...

The Cultural Atlas is designed to be a tool for visualizing and analyzing historical and cultural phenomena. With the capacity to create customized maps based on a theme, era and region of interest, you can quickly answer--or at least frame--questions that would once have taken a lifetime. What religions had pilgrimage sites along the Silk Road? Was there much regional variation in mortality in nineteenth century Britain? The Cultural Atlas can be used for research, teaching, advocacy, and resource discovery.

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