With the ever-increasing volume and heterogeneity of data that we need to cope with, data visualization is a skill that every effective scientist needs to master. Like most essential scientific skills, data visualization is one of those things that is not so much learned in classes, but rather absorbed from one’s surroundings. So if you want to improve your data visualization skills, where can you turn?

A recent article discussed two free services for cheaply integrating CAPTCHAs into Web applications. One of these services, captchas.net, apparently has no publicly-available Ruby library. Given the popularity of Ruby on Rails for building Web applications, and the increasing need for spam protection offered by services such as captchas.net, it seems only logical that such a library should exist.

If you run a blog or website that allows public input, you’ve almost certainly been subjected to a spam attack. This is a problem because even one successful attack can eat up hours of time. After a recent spam attack on this blog, comments were disabled altogether. They’ve now been restored with the help of a more robust kind of protection, which is the subject of this article.

Hanjo Kim of the Bioinformatics & Molecular Design Research Center (BMDRC) in Seoul, South Korea writes in to tell about his Korean-language cheminformatics blog Agile2Robust. Some of his articles, such as this one on PubChem have been translated from Depth-First; others are based on Depth-First articles. This completes a circle.

The peer-reviewed literature and patents are chock-full of valuable biological screening data. The problem is not finding it; the problem is putting it all together. A company called Aureus Sciences has stepped into this void by offering a product aimed directly at collating and mining published biological screening data.

A recent D-F article discussed a method for encoding machine-readable molecular structure information as image metadata. This article generated some interest among developers. For example, Noel O’Boyle posted code for reading PNG image metadata with Python. The popularity of Python in cheminformatics makes this approach especially attractive. But how would you write PNG image metadata with Python?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a million. ScienceHack offers a service that helps users find free videos in a variety of scientific fields, including chemistry. Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Sieh dir dieses Video auf www.youtube.com an oder aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein sollte. Perhaps more noteworthy than the service itself is how ScienceHack works.

The Boston ACS provided yet another opportunity to look at chemistry as a social networking phenomenon. Having attended several talks inside my areas of expertise (organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and chemical informatics), I was struck by two things: Most talks were laser-focused on one tiny aspect of chemistry that is of little interest to the average chemist, but of great interest to a few chemists.

You can find them in nearly every scientific discipline: the anonymous science blog. For a variety of reasons, their authors have decided not to reveal their identities, as is their right. Styles range from the absolutely analytical to the cynically sarcastic. I have nothing against anonymous science blogs. Some of the most interesting writing I’ve seen has been posted to them.

You’ve heard the hype about PubChem, but you’re still not convinced. In your mind, the fans have yet to show anything that PubChem does to make your job (which is to get stuff done in the lab) any easier. You’ve got SciFinder, which does everything you need to do. Why bother with this free Internet thing? New technologies need to prove themselves. Those that don’t simply disappear, or morph into something whose value is more apparent.