As well as big famous superstars at Science Foo Camp (scifoo), there is a chance to meet and “geek out” with younger engineers and scientists like Vince Smith, Aaron Schwartz and Vaughan Bell. Aaron Schwartz and the open library project On Sunday at scifoo, Aaron (of archive.org) gave a quick demo of the Open Library.

On day three of Science Foo Camp (scifoo) biologist Lincoln Stein (picture right) gave a presenation on what he calls “genome voyeurism”, using Jim Watsons genome as an example.

Some of the most interesting conversations you have at Science Foo Camp (scifoo) are in the corridors, foo bars and even the bus that shuttles between the Googleplex and the hotel…On Saturday, for example, I ride the bus with David Hawkins who is a laywer working in the area of climate change.

My boss, Douglas Kell, who has kindly allowed and paid for me to attend Science Foo Camp (scifoo), says to me “tell me what you get up to”. So here goes. Scifoo day 1, A chance to meet and around 250 engineers, scientists, philosophers and other odd people from all over the world.

These days, new Google products and code seem to appear on a weekly basis. Take, for example, Google Gears which takes advantage of SQLite, mentioned on nodalpoint recently. They certainly don’t hang about at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

What should your three main priorities be as a Scientist? Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration.

There are a number of “Molecule of the Month” style mini-reviews on the web, which highlight one particular molecule (usually a protein) every month, in an accessible style.

A crude score for benchmarking scientists Have you ever wanted to compare different scientists by their publication record? It’s not always an easy task, but here is a crude and handy way to benchmark people by their journal publications in Nature, Science or PNAS using PubMed.

What does DNA do when it’s not being transcribed into RNA? It causes DNA mania… Quote of the Day “DNA, you know, is Midas’ gold.

The 14th annual Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) database issue 2007 has just been published, open-access. This year is the largest yet (again) with 968 molecular biology databases listed, 110 more than the previous one (see figure below). In the world of biological databases, are we waving or drowning?

Happy Christmas from the myGrid team, who are pleased to announce the release of version 1.5.0 of the Open Source Taverna bioinformatics workflow toolkit [1]. This is now available for download on the Sourceforge site and includes some substantial changes to version 1.4. Taverna 1.5.0 is a small download, but when first run it will […]