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This synthesis of thirty-six sites (sixty cores with over 27 000 measurements) located around the world facilitates scientific research on the climate of the last 21 000 years ago obtained from oxygen isotope ( or delta-O-18) measurements. Oxygen isotopes in speleothem calcite record the influence of ambient temperature and the isotopic composition of the source water, the latter providing evidence of hydrologic variability and change. Compared to paleoclimate proxies from sedimentary archives, the age uncertainty is unusually small, around +/−100 years for the last 21 000-year interval. Using data contributed to the World Data Center (WDC) for Paleoclimatology, we have created consistently formatted data files for individual sites as well as composite dataset of annual to millennial resolution. These individual files also contain the chronology information about the sites. The data are useful in understanding hydrologic variability at local and regional scales, such as the Asian summer monsoon and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (as discussed in the underlying source publications), and should also be useful in understanding large-scale aspects of hydrologic change since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).

Microarrays are a large-scale expression profiling method which has been used to study the transcriptome of plants under various environmental conditions. However, manual inspection of microarray data is difficult at the genome level because of the large number of genes (normally at least 30 000) and the many different processes that occur within any given plant. MapMan software, which was initially developed to visualize microarray data for Arabidopsis, has been adapted to other plant species by mapping other species onto MapMan ontology. This paper provides a detailed procedure and the relevant computing codes to generate a MapMan ontology mapping file for tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) using potato and Arabidopsis as intermediates. The mapping file can be used directly with our custom-made NimbleGen oligoarray, which contains gene sequences from both the tobacco gene space sequence and the tobacco gene index 4 (NTGI4) collection of ESTs. The generated dataset will be informative for scientists working on tobacco as their model plant by providing a MapMan ontology mapping file to tobacco, homology between tobacco coding sequences and that of potato and Arabidopsis, as well as adapting our procedure and codes for other plant species where the complete genome is not yet available.

CViT (chromosome visualization tool) is a Perl utility for quickly generating images of features on a whole genome at once. It reads GFF3-formated data representing chromosomes (linkage groups or pseudomolecules) and sets of features on those chromosomes. It can display features on any chromosomal unit system, including genetic (centimorgan), cytological (centiMcClintock), and DNA unit (base-pair) coordinates. CViT has been used to track sequencing progress (status of genome sequencing, location and number of gaps), to visualize BLAST hits on a whole genome view, to associate maps with one another, to locate regions of repeat densities to display syntenic regions, and to visualize centromeres and knobs on chromosomes.

The fourth fMRI Experience meeting was held at the Bethesda, Maryland campus of the National Institutes of Health on May 13th and 14th, 2002. The purpose of the meeting was to provide a platform for students working with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to present their research to an international audience of peers. This year’s meeting featured special lectures from Dr. Leslie Ungerleider (“Imaging Mechanisms of Visual Attention”) and Dr. Daniel Weinberger (“Genetic Variation and fMRI Response”).

Aerosol optical thickness (AOT) was retrieved using the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) PATMOS-x Level-2b gridded radiances and the two-channel algorithm of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The primary retrieval product is AOT at 0.63 μm channel. AOT is also retrieved at 0.83 μm or 1.61 μm channel for consistent check. The retrieval was made during day time, under clear sky and snow-free conditions, and over the global oceans. The spatial resolution is 0.1×0.1 degree grid and the temporal resolution is both daily and monthly. The resultant AVHRR AOT climate data record (CDR) spans from August 1981 to December 2009 and provides the longest aerosol CDR currently available from operational satellites. This dataset is useful in studying aerosol climate forcing, monitoring long-term aerosol trends, and evaluating global air pollution and aerosol transport models over the global ocean.