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NEWS NATURE|Vol 453|1 May 2008 ZOO NEWS Colossal effort Zoologists at the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington have embarked on perhaps their biggest and most delicate feat of engineering so far. They have started the lengthy process of Programs promise to end thawing out the most complete specimen of colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni). The 10-metre, half-tonne PDF paper-chase creature was caught and frozen last year. Researchers are buzzing about a new type of of Suzuka National College of Technology in software that allows them to manage their Japan. The second version of the software, ON THE RECORD research paper downloads from online jour- released in 2006, has been downloaded more Gravity’s not really nals much more effectively. than 13,000 times. my“ friend right now. One of the most popular programs is Papers, “It definitely speeds things up,” says bio- ” a commercial offering released last year with a chemist Jocelyn Côté of the University of Peggy Whitson, an astronaut on similar interface to iTunes, Apple’s successful Ottawa in Ontario, Canada. Côté says that he the Soyuz capsule that came near disaster last week, reflects on the music-file organizer. Papers and similar pro- struggled to invent a consistently useful file- unpleasantness of pulling 8.2 G grams are able to read a file’s ‘metadata’ so that a naming algorithm for his hard disk’s burgeon- during the craft’s botched re-entry. batch of PDF (portable document format) files ing paper collection. Although his PDF library can be sorted by, for example, author, journal has grown from 500 papers to roughly 3,000, You would have name or year. Users can add new files to their Côté says iPapers still enables rapid recall. thought“ I claimed the hard drives by ‘dragging and dropping’ or use Adobe Systems in San Jose, California, the program to search and download directly which created the PDF file format, says that it pyramids were carved from databases such as PubMed, IEEE Xplore has its own management software, called Dig- by lasers. and the arXiv preprint server. ital Editions, but that other such programs are Materials engineer” Michel Barsoum Papers was developed by Alexander Griek- a welcome addition to the market. wonders why so much hostility has spoor and Tom Groothuis, then working at Both iPapers and Papers were developed for greeted his theory that the Egyptian pyramids were ‘cast’ like concrete, the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amster- Macintosh operating systems, although the pro- not built from stone blocks dragged dam. The idea was borne of the frustration grams inspired graduate student Derek Ander- from quarries. they experienced in trying to sort and search son at the University of Texas, Dallas, to create a papers they downloaded from online-access Linux version of the software called gPapers. journals. Griekspoor refers to Papers as a The programs do not yet build bibliogra- “personal library of science” — the full text phies like traditional reference management of papers in the library is indexed and easily tools. Some programs, such as Bookends by searchable, he says. US company Sonny Software, organize PDF Users have responded excitedly to the soft- files while allowing some citation formats. ware, arguing on the blogosphere about the var- Reference tools, such as Thomson Scientific’s ious merits of programs from the free BibDesk EndNote, have recently begun to bridge the gap to Sente. “It means I can remember something by including some file-management functions, I have read somewhere, and I can type a few such as linking to PDF files. words and find it again,” says Papers user Tim Managing papers is just the first step, devel- Hubbard, head of informatics at the Wellcome opers say. “PubMed is an absolutely fantastic SCORECARD Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK. repository, but it’s a one-way street. You can Although Papers has achieved a fair amount download something, but you can’t contribute Artificial meat of success, an earlier open-source program anything,” says Griekspoor. Ultimately, he thinks Animal-welfare group called iPapers still has its devotees. iPapers programs such as Papers may network research- PETA has offered a emerged in 2004 and is still managed on a part- ers to share information and commentary. ■ US$1-million bounty to the time basis by its developer, Toshihiro Aoyama Rachel Courtland first scientist who can produce marketable lab-grown meat, The Papers thereby saving real animals from application the abattoir. for organizing downloaded research Snacks papers has a similar MEKENTOSJ.COM Confectioners might interface to iTunes. K. GARRETT/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY IMAGES GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY K. GARRETT/NATIONAL be worried by a British study of appetite, which suggests that dieters who think hard about their last meal are less tempted by the prospect of eating biscuits. Sources: BBC, PETA, New Scientist, Associated Press, boston.com SIDELINES 12.

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