Under development: a database for synthetic biologists. (I know, that sounds weird.) “For her project, called Synthetic Biology at ASU (SB.ASU), [Karmella] Haynes will collaborate with Catherine Seiler, an associate research professor at the ASU Biodesign Institute…. SB.ASU would give researchers an archive of detailed information about the characteristics of DNA fragments and how they can be expected to behave when combined. Such knowledge could enable more rapid assembling of effective DNA sequences that will ‘provide the foundation for accelerated progress in synthetic biology,’ she says.”

BBC Scotland has created an online database of over 21,000 of the Scots who died in World War II.

Phil Bradley unearths another little gem with his writeup about a search engine for slide presentations.

Man, The Atlantic sure publishes some interesting stuff. Can Wikipedia Ever Be a Definitive Medical Text? “Wikipedia being the sixth-largest site on the whole wide Internet, these people searching for medical information online are often going to end up there. Whether or not they should be doing it, they are. I am. Patients are, and so are doctors. Which is why efforts to improve the quality of Wikipedia’s medical information are important—if you can’t lead people away from the fountain of crowd-sourced knowledge, you can at least try to unmuddy the waters.”

TechCrunch writes about a Google parody site called Google Nest. C&D in 5…4…3…2…

A new Web site lets you zoom and rotate 3-D fossils. “3D bones from elephant-like mammoths and mastodons are available on the site, along with photo galleries of early whales and other vertebrates. Three-dimensional digital models of various ancient marine invertebrates—brachiopods, trilobites, clams, crinoids, snails, and others—will be added soon.”

Apparently the JFK airport security bins have Yahoo ads. Ewww.

How the New York Public Library put a historical map into Minecraft. I LOVE this.

The Next Web looks at Riffle, a Chrome extension for getting extensive information and stats on Twitter users.

Adobe has has released a free app (looks like iPad only) for making narrated video presentations. Good morning, Internet…

I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you. Feel free to comment on the blog, or @ResearchBuzz on Twitter. Thanks!