As Father Ted might have explained it to Dougal, this one is very small: Atom but that one is far away . Mars (NASA) And yet it is the distant planet and not the nearby atom that seems to excite the greatest interest in the public mind. I blame Carl Sagan. And bloody Brian Cox.

“May you live in interesting times”, goes the Chinese curse. Chinese scientists are certainly living in interesting times (as reported today in Nature ) but they are unlikely to see it as a curse. The budget of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has increased sevenfold since 1998 and is set — as part of bold plans — to rise 70% in the coming year.

The following is a commentary that has been published today (in a slightly edited form) in Chemistry and Industry . Only the excellent need apply. Such is the message on research funding from nobelist Sir Paul Nurse, incoming president of the Royal Society.

The government is worried about the economy and rightly so. It’s in a bit of a state. When Value Added Tax was raised by 2.5% to 20% at the turn of the year, there were nervous glances to see what impact it might have on consumer confidence. The VAT increase was probably carefully calculated to ensure that people out shopping would not be deterred from their purchases, so that the consumption merry-go-round would keep on turning.

Ben Goldacre wrote a short blogpost today to bemoan the habit of many media outlets of not linking to the primary sources for their reports and headlines. He was referring to stories that have appeared today about Asian gangs abusing white girls (e.g. this form the BBC). In typically trenchant terms he dismisses such shoddy reporting, “If you don’t link to primary sources, you are dead to me.” I sympathise.

For the longest time I thought he was French. It’s the name — Joule; it sounds French and in my physics class at school no-one thought to explain otherwise. In fact, Joule was not even introduced as a name — the word was simply handed to us as the SI unit of energy, a replacement for Calorie who, for all I knew, might also have been from France.

It’s all been rather unsettling but I guess that’s life these days. Moving the blog to its new home was a bit more fraught than I had been anticipating. Though I can piece together a rationale for Nature Network’s rather precipitate decision to change the locks, I’ve not really had a satisfactory explanation from them for their actions.

This amused me. It might amuse you too. The other night Ed Yong asked on Twitter if anyone could remember mention in a recent blogpost of the fact that salts of arsenic often contain phosphate.

“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.

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.