Life Sciences

[Denni]

Wolfram Alpha has huge potential, but it would be useful if it would be integrated with a dictionary so that it could derive the meaning of scientific terms from the word's roots.

I was looking up the term for an organism that can live both in fresh water and in saltwater (a wide range of salinities). After some browsing, Wikipedia yielded the answer: euryhaline (eury=wide, broad, hal=salt). Here the roots of the word are Greek, but many scientific terms are a mix of Latin and Greek.

It would be nice if there was a way to submit and check dictionary definitions, which are not 'facts', as such.

And WA needs a _lot_ more data about biology!

[FatBaron]

Ah well .. that is right. I'd love to see an annotated E.coli genome for example.

Felix


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[christianroxy]

I share the same concern. I am a biologist and it is odd to me that there is not a biology section to this website yet. I would love to type in "American Mistletoe" and it show me the scientific name and other things such as demographics for the species and what it is commonly used for even a picture would be great. Hopefully, Wolfram will soon add on and quickly come up with some helpful items for biologist and ecologist.

[briangilbert]

The specification of Wolfram alpha requires the words it uses to be curated in order that they be computable. So what you ask for is already a requirement. Perhaps this has been overlooked. Wolfram Alpha is a front end for Mathematica plus a database from a computing point of view. The Mathematica language is definitely computable. It remains to make sure that the Wolfram Alpha database is also computable.

So it is not just scientific terms that need defining in computable terms but every word in the WA database.

[WolframAlphaMathHelp]

Definitions of scientific terms is currently under investigation. This thread has been forwarded on to the development team for further review. Thanks.