Science is cool! Equations, math, and white coats is what makes it awesome. Well… awesome for scientists. To us, regularmortals, we don’t know equations and don’t have white coats.We’d just like to know what science is up to without solving equations. We’d also like to just get quick information about the latest science news without browsing tens of websites or searching Google news for latest science discoveries. It takes a lot of time and attention to find out the most relevant and appropriate posts.
This is where news aggregators come in handy. They make finding new content easier and more effective than ever before. A news aggregator or feed aggregator is a software or web application that uses scraping technology to collect content from blogs, news websites, social media, and YouTube, and reformats and displays the content so that it’s easier to digest. This way, you can find all the important and necessary stuff in one place.
In this article, we will discuss our favorite science news aggregator called SciURLs.com.
SciURLs: A Neat Science News Aggregator
SciURLs is the one-stop place for science lovers as it aggregates the latest science news from the top 20 science websites and online resources. The top sites include: Medium (Science section), Scientific America, Phys.org, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum. There are many more but these are the most popular ones.
The news are collected from all sites once per hour and it really saves a lot of time. Without SciURLs, you’d have to browse all sites separately as many of them don’t have RSS feeds anymore, so you can’t read them in a RSS reader.
The site has a super-fast search engine. You can just enter a query like “nasa AND moon” and it will show all posts that are about NASA and Moon. The time taken to search and find the most relevant content is significantly reduced as the search is extremely quick and updated each time news are collected.
Clean User Interface
This news aggregator comes with a clean and neat user interface to help scientists and us, regular mortals, to find the latest news instantly. All the articles are immediately visible from all top 20 sites at once and are arranged in a grid of cards.
Search Engine
The search box on the top helps users to find articles and topics related to particular subjects and keywords. By entering specific keywords, you can instantly find articles with relevant headings and links across all the included websites. This comes in especially handy when you hear a new scientific term and want to find all articles about it.
Dashboard with Personalization Features
As everyone loves to read articles and news from their favorite websites first, SciURLs allows its users to rearrange the dashboard per individual preferences. For instance, if you want a specific site, such as BBC Science, to appear on the top, you can drag and drop it as the first site via rearrange option. Moreover, you can also deselect the sites you really don’t want to see by dragging them to hidden sites section.
Archive
Another great thing about SciURLs is that it keeps all old articles and stories in its database. If you have been on vacation for a long time and come back, you can click the “monthly” button next to each website and it will bring back all stories from the last month. And when combined with search engine, you can find articles that are years old.
SciURLs offers many more features for scientists but we have to conclude this post now. Feel free to explore the site yourself!