I am presently attending a conference on Caliciviruses in Chile and am enjoying being immersed in both the warm spring sunshine and the latest research on this important group of pathogens. Any of you who has suffered at the hands of the ‘Winter vomiting bug’ is already closely acquainted with caliciviruses.

After the amazing success of the Science is Vital Rally on Saturday (see here for video and Jenny’s report and here for another first-hand account by Prateek Buch), it was off to the House of Commons today. Not quite in my brand new shoes, but they had at least been cleaned following extensive glue coverage in Friday night’s marathon placard-making session.

The Science is Vital Campaign has caught the grim mood of the scientific community and focused the energy of opposition to light a fire of protest.

A quick note here for those interested in the details of the case for support behind the Science is Vital Campaign that is fighting against cuts in the UK’s public spending on R&D. The campaign has posted key points and I have written my own digest of the case on the Naturally Selected blog over at The Scientist .

Please be patient while I experiment with audio to drum up support for the “Science is Vital campaign”:http://scienceisvital.org.uk/. It will only take two minutes and forty-nine seconds. Listen! Listen! Thank you for listening.

She’s here. She’s in the room. I’ve not noticed her before — not in previous years — but every now and then her presence is unmistakable. I am sitting in a lecture theatre in St Andrews University in Scotland, attending the 16th Meeting of the European Study Group on the Molecular Biology of Picornaviruses, or Europic, as it is more conveniently known.

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.