Lars Vegard:key communicator and pioneer crystallographer

The Norwegian physicist Lars Vegard studied with William H. Bragg in Leeds and then with Wilhelm Wien in Würzburg. There, in 1912, he heard a lecture by Max Laue describing the first X-ray diffraction experiments and took accurate notes which he promptly sent to Bragg. Although now remembered mainly for his work on the physics of the aurora borealis, Vegard also did important pioneering work in three areas of crystallography. He derived chemical insight from a series of related crystal structures that he determined, Vegard's Law relates the unit-cell dimensions of mixed crystals to those of the pure components, and he determined some of the first crystal structures of gases solidified at cryogenic temperatures. © 2013 Taylor and Francis.

Data compilation on the biological response to ocean acidification: environmental and experimental context of data sets and related literature

The exponential growth of studies on the biological response to ocean acidification over the last few decades has generated a large amount of data. To facilitate data comparison, a data compilation hosted at the data publisher PANGAEA was initiated in 2008 and is updated on a regular basis (doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.149999). By January 2015, a total of 581 data sets (over 4 000 000 data points) from 539 papers had been archived. Here we present the developments of this data compilation five years since its first description by Nisumaa et al. (2010). Most of study sites from which data archived are still in the Northern Hemisphere and the number of archived data from studies from the Southern Hemisphere and polar oceans are still relatively low. Data from 60 studies that investigated the response of a mix of organisms or natural communities were all added after 2010, indicating a welcomed shift from the study of individual organisms to communities and ecosystems. The initial imbalance of considerably more data archived on calcification and primary production than on other processes has improved. There is also a clear tendency towards more data archived from multifactorial studies after 2010. For easier and more effective access to ocean acidification data, the ocean acidification community is strongly encouraged to contribute to the data archiving effort, and help develop standard vocabularies describing the variables and define best practices for archiving ocean acidification data.