I promise I won’t make a habit of just posting links to stuff on other sites but I am childishly proud of having a piece about macromolecular crystallography in the Guardian Science Blog.

Three unrelated things.

I was only able to attend the second day of Science Online London 2010 but was glad to be able to hear Dr Evan Harris’s keynote talk on “Turning online science into real world policy change” and the follow-up break-out session on “The Sci Vote Movement”. Any gathering of the blognoscenti runs the risk of descending into navel-gazing, so it was good to be reminded that the point of much of our online activity as bloggers or scientists

Some of you may not have heard of last week’s launch of a new science blogging site by the Guardian newspaper. They have a core group of regular bloggers — Jon Butterworth, Dr Evan Harris, Martin Robbins and NN’s own Grrlscientist — who between them will be covering good science, bad science and science policy. It’s yet another bright addition to the rapidly changing firmament that is today’s blogosphere.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” the dying replicant Roy says of his off-world experiences in one of the final scenes of BladeRunner.

Ian Sample’s _Massive – The Hunt for the God Particle_ is a fast-paced account of the quest for the Higgs boson, an elusive particle that is purported to solve the mystery of mass. If you were unaware that the question of mass was the least bit mysterious, you are in good company–with about 99.99% of the population of the planet for whom the matter of matter has never arisen.

When Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian a couple of months back about science being a new religion we all scoffed. Oh, how we scoffed. Scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff. Scoff. But having been at the Edinburgh Fringe for a few days now, I’m wondering if he might have had a point.

Walter Clement Noel was famous in the wrong circles for the wrong reasons. He died in Grenada in 1916 aged just 32. Over fifty years later, in the first decade of my life, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was far and away my favourite film. I must have seen it six or seven times, a huge tally in the days before VCRs and DVDs. The magical tale of endangered children rescued with the help of a flying car captivated my boyish mind.

I came across this today and found it quite remarkable. I’m not going to say anything more right now but, if you have a minute, test yourself with this short video. No questions just yet – just take a look. If you’d like to learn a bit more, then listen in to this week’s excellent Guardian Science Weekly Podcast. Please don’t give anything away in the comments – at least for a day.

I read an article by Matthew Reisz in Times Higher Education last week about the strained writing style of academic publications and it really got my goat. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a good piece and makes some valid points, several of which resonated strongly with me. Reisz wonders at the lack of pleasure in academic writing among writers and readers, which leads to the inanimate style of much academic prose.