VADLO

I'm wondering how this works. VADLO is a web search engine for biologists, and my first attempts at using it...it worked surprisingly well. I looked up a few techniques I've been using, and actually turned up some useful articles.

Tags

More like this

Mike Adams (a.k.a. the "Health Ranger") has been a regular blog topic for several years now. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that, among supporters of quackery, no one quite brings the crazy home the way Mike Adams does, be it writing antivaccine rap songs, abusing dead…
I've now read all of the science-related (that's applying the term "related" very generously) stuff in Ann Coulter's awful, ghastly, ignorant book, Godless, and it's a bit overwhelming. This far right-wing political pundit with no knowledge of science at all has written a lengthy tract that is wall…
Anyone who's read this blog knows my opinion of Mike Adams, the proprietor of the quack website known as NaturalNews.com. It is not favorable, to put it mildly. All you have to do to realize that is to type his name into the search box of this blog and see what comes up: Anger at his attacks on…
I had wanted to proceed to part 5 of my Medicine and Evolution series, but, frankly, I wasn't much in the mood for anything serious over the weekend, and, let's face it, that case of the blog blahs continued even into yesterday. Otherwise I would have done my blog buds Abel Pharmboy and Bora more…

I really love the "Life in Research" cartoons on that site! Great cartoons!

YEAH! A new search engine. Great. Screw Cuil. Oh wait, I'm not a biologist. Dammit.

By John Marshall (not verified) on 03 Aug 2008 #permalink

It failed my test. I searched for 'influenzae' (as in the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae) and, except for a couple of hits to genome databases, all the hits in every category were to 'influenza' (as in the flu virus).

The cartoons are also pretty lame compared to PhD (and have very few women scientists).

Wow! WOW!

What a resource for biology students and teachers. (and others)

Check out database of powerpoint presentations on different topics.

Well, I'm huffed; it didn't list me when I searched my own name. Still, apparently "biology" is only animals, not plants, even to a lot of biological scientists....

By Louis Irving (not verified) on 03 Aug 2008 #permalink

For those with a hankering for science cartoons, I'd recommend "Lab Initio", but it seems it's disappeared down the memoryhole. A great loss.

Ah, I guess "biology" doesn't include much microbiology. No luck searching for stuff on HERVs.

By Terry Small (not verified) on 03 Aug 2008 #permalink

I thought there was already a big biology search engine, called pubmed.

Oooh, thanks for the info on this search engine. I looked up Chip-on-chip, which I am doing in full force right now, and it gave me lots of good stuff.

Thanks, I use SCIRUS, but I am always interested in new engines. Using this one and searching "Henle's loop" ( I think this is one of the newer poster children of irreducible complexity) turns up only two links with vadlo. Scirus turns up way too many. There has to be a happy medium.

http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/

@ #9

Now that's odd. I was getting no hits for the search term when I made my post.

By Terry Small (not verified) on 03 Aug 2008 #permalink

I have to agree here with some people... my research didn't turn up anything useful, either.

#10 Pubmed doesn't give you protocols or ppts or software, I think. At least I only know it for research articles, sequences and proteins (but it has many nice functions concerning that).

It seems like the database has a lot of stuff in the "powerpoints" section, which is also known as the "seminar" section. (why they use a different term is a mystery; it sure is confusing). It's not wikipedia (clearly they are meant to illustrate a talk, not be the whole presentation), and there isn't any quality filtration, but for any major topic (e.g. meiosis) you get lots of hits on PPTs which appear to be college and HS teacher PPTs on specific topics.

It would appear to be a pretty good starting point for developing your own PPT on a topic, as you can get your hands on any number of useful graphics, and a variety of "angles" on presentation format.

Yay- finally an alternative to scholar.google.com that actually gives me the information about protocols I am looking for. Exhausted research students awake at 3am around the world rejoice! ^__^

Thanos I got 9 hits in the database section for 'Loop of Henle'. Note that vadlo seems to display the top two results, you have to click the show all link for the rest.

By Peter Ashby (not verified) on 04 Aug 2008 #permalink

Try www.nextbio.com. It is a very useful search engine for the life science research community.

Cool. I just did a search for "turtle" and came across a Turtle necropsy manual! Further proof that everything is on the internet!