A Handy App for a Handy Site
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Everyone loves a handyman. And with good reason: Individuals with the uncanny skill to speak to – and heal – broken air conditioners and automobiles are simply priceless.
Handy apps can be pretty important too. And that’s why the OSTI, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information within the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, has been developing them. One, the Science.gov Mobile application, m.science.gov, was recently named to Information Week’s 10 Handy Mobile Apps from Uncle Sam.
Information Week noted that the site searches, “Scientific information from more than 50 databases and 2,100 government-affiliated websites,” and added that users can also receive, “Wikipedia and EurekAlert results related to their searches.” Science.gov also serves as a portal for content from seventeen different organizations in thirteen separate federal science agencies, and searches a total of 200 million pages of science information.
That makes the site handy for citizens interested in the scientific work supported by the government, for researchers striving to understand a particular problem or for students frantically trying to finish a paper. The site is also useful for everyone in between. As Government Computer News pointed out when it named the site one of The 10 best federal mobile apps, “If you have a science-related question, there is a good chance that someone in government has asked the same thing at some point, and probably commissioned a study to get the answer.”
OSTI provides those answers, and those apps, for a reason. By sharing knowledge it accelerates discovery; and by advancing science, it strengthens society. So here’s to OSTI and its handy apps.
Now about that broken air conditioner . . . .
The Department’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information please visit http://science.energy.gov. For more information about OSTI, please go to: http://www.osti.gov/.
Charles Rousseaux is a Senior Writer in the Office of Science.
