Web watch

To suggest topics or sites for Web Watch, please visit http://www.physicstoday.org/suggestwebwatch.html . Compiled and edited by Charles Day

http://www.sciencemadefun.org.uk

Science Made Fun offers entertaining lay-language podcasts about astronomy, zoology, and other sciences. Four graduate students from the University of Manchester in the UK created the site, which supplements the podcasts with pictures, video clips, and links to additional material.

http://scirate.com

Dave Bacon, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, has devised a way to filter the torrent of preprints from arXiv and other servers. His experimental website, Scirate, works like flickr and other social websites. Individual users rank the preprints they come across. Scirate then gathers those rankings and lists the preprints according to their popularity.

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org

In September 2007, the National Academy of Engineering plans to announce 20 Grand Challenges for Engineering. To help identify those challenges, which are intended to inspire a century of research and development, NAE invites you to visit the project’s website and post a comment.