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Royal Society Opens Free Online Archive

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mr.-newton-meet-mr.-boyle dept.

greenechidna writes "The Register reports that the Royal Society has put its archives online. From the article: 'One of the world's most important historical records will be made available online for the first time today. All the Royal Society's journals are free for two months and include stone-cold scientific classics going back to 1665 and the foundations of modern inquiry.'" You can set up your own account at the Royal Society; if you follow the link in the Reg article, you get logged in to some random account.

9 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. DNA by neonprimetime · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you're bored at work, read this.

    Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA (1954) - requires no introduction really

    1. Re:DNA by innes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Rosalind Franklin if I remember right who did a fair amount of work on it, but so did others as well, Watson and Crick just got most of the Credit. And the Nobel prize which Franklin never got as she died before the award of cancer, and you don't get them posthumously

    2. Re:DNA by dan+dan+the+dna+man · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have sat down and read this, as a geneticist for the first time. I'm surprised given how much I've read about the failure to credit Franklin with the work exactly how many times she and Wilkins are referenced and name checked all throughout the paper. At least once per page. It's lovely to read this paper though, without it I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing and to see the discovery of the structre laid bare like this rather than simply shown to me in a textbook is rather wonderful.

      --
      I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
    3. Re:DNA by Quelain · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's not their original paper, try this one:

      http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf

      This is the one with the classic line:
      "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

      --
      Cthulhu loves you.
  2. Re:F/S by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, it is a lowercase s.

    The "long s" looks like a letter f without the horizontal bar. The "short s" looks like the familiar letter s. Short s is used at the end of words. The Greek alphabet does the same kind of thing with lowercase letter sigma.

    Wikipedia sez: Long S

    The funny thing is, it turns out that this style of writing is where the character ß (used in German) comes from. I'd always just assumed it was borrowed from Greek.

  3. What fun! Now I can take another look... by dpbsmith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One of the pleasures of graduate school was access to a very good research library. The university I was at had the Transactions of the Royal Society back to volume 1, number 1. (When I commented positively on this to a librarian, meaning I was delighted by this, she missed my point and tut-tutted, say, "Yes, I know, it's just terrible, but they won't approve the budget for expanding the Rare Books room...)

    It was fascinating to open volumes at random at publication intervals of about fifty years and see the evolution of the scientific writing style. Before 1800, it was lively and enthusiastic and communicated a sense of excitement and joy. Around the mid-1800s a transformation took place and it acquired the stodgy, distanced, passive-voice writing style that persists to this day.

    --

    "How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!

  4. Discovery of the atomic nucleus by bholzm1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is the experiment that led Rutherford to propose the nuclear model of the atom: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link.asp?id=u31 8373867x2v351

  5. Re:Ra Ra Ra by Anon-Admin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I dont see an opensource project on that. It would be nice but the number of people that can read Demotic and Hieratic is small. Many more can read Coptic, Kemetic Heiroglyphics and those could get translated.

    I can only think of about 12 people who can translte Hieratic, and only another 13 or 14 that can transpose the Hieratic chacters to Kemetic Heiroglyphics.

    It would be fun, but if you translate it and write it into a book you can re-copyright the works (my understanding of current copyright law)

    I can see it now, Yes your honor He has violated the copyright on my book which is 3000 years old. :)

  6. Re:anyone going to archive this? by Carthag · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As soon as I saw the announcement I got out my trusty curl & wget commands, but the urls are a complete nightmare. I suspect I'll have to write a 50+ line perl script to get it done! I'm working on it, though. First I gotta clean up some space on my HD ;)