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. He tells me all about the legal issues, how climate modelling works and little on Bjørn Lomborg, who is also here.

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. Wouldn’t it be great if Google applied some of that engineering expertise and agility to science and bioinformatics?

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. Two of my personal favourites are protein spotlight: one month, one protein written by Vivienne Baillie Gerritsen of the Swiss-Prot team and Molecule of the Month at the Protein Databank PDB edited by David Goodsell.

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 N ature , S cience or PNAS using PubMed.

What does DNA do when it’s not being transcribed into RNA? It causes DNA mania… Quote of the Day —Maurice Wilkins Read the rest in [1,2] Do you or your colleagues ever suffer from DNA mania [3,4]? A biochemist friend of mine once semi-jokingly remarked that people’s manic obsession with DNA is a bit like buying some food and being more interested in the bar-code on the packaging, than the food inside.

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? Nine hundred and sixty eight is a lot of databases, and even that mind-boggling number is not an exhaustive or comprehensive tally.

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 then download and install the required packages which can take some time on slow networks.

All I want for Christmas is a book about the semantic web, written by people who are actually building and using it, rather than “visionaries” who don’t have to. Maybe this year I’ll be lucky… A group of semantic webheads (aka HCLSIG the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group) led by Christopher J. Baker and Kei-Hoi Cheung and gathered together on public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org have written a book about the semantic web for life sciences.

Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas* is a better version of Connotea, please can you sort out it’s duplicated redundant links? In my book this particular bug is “buggotea” number one.