Cath Ennis wrote back in June about the reluctance of some of her colleagues to write lay summaries of their work when applying for grants. Clearly for some scientists the effort of casting their work into a form that is accessible to the general public is just too much like hard work. But, as has often been stated on NN, making our science intelligible to the public is a valuable activity.

On Tuesday, following a tip-off from Maxine, Richard noted the passing of the Daresbury Synchrotron in Cheshire, which shut down finally in August. This gave me pause for quiet reflection since I had been a Daresbury user since 1991, cutting my teeth as a crystallographer by spending long nights in the darkroom developing the film packs that we used to record the X-rays scattered by our crystals.

Let’s face it: scientists aren’t in it for the money (except perhaps those with a more entrepreneurial bent). More often we are preening our egos and chasing a kind of immortality—the chance to create a legacy that will outlive us. Of course, this is an entirely irrational goal, coming oddly from a profession that often spouts its single-minded adherence to rationality!

Taking my cue from Ben Goldacre’s comments at SciBlog08, I’d like to unleash the power of the blogosphere.

My co-stars and I are €400 richer thanks to this blog becasue I am delighted to report that our recent video was awarded first prize in the competition run by the organisers of the EuFMD Meeting on the Global Control of FMD, Tools, Ideas and Ideals (held just this past week in beautiful Sicily). Sunset in Sicily last Wednesday The award was based simply on the number of hits that each entry received and our effort—shamelessly

Most days you can call me Mr Molecule for I am to be found with my head buried in a thicket of atomic bonds. But every so often I pull myself free of my protein structures and take a look at the world outside.

I couldn’t not do a quick post about this – today’s Futures story in Nature which provides an interesting medical twist on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a tale that resonated with me a couple of weeks back.

“The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur .” Thus—allegedly—spoke soon-to-be ex-President George Bush. It may be an apocryphal tale but I do so want it to be true. And speaking of entrepreneurs, Michael Birch, founder of the social networking site bebo.com, gave a talk at Imperial a couple of weeks ago. Birch, a physics graduate back in 1991, was speaking at the College’s Alumni Reunion.

The Guardian runs an interesting ‘”Writer’s Rooms” feature in its Review section every Saturday in which a writer (or sometimes an artist) discusses a photograph of their office or workroom, pointing out significant objects. The idea (as in Desert Island Discs) is to gain an oblique insight into the subject’s mindset. Well, it’s hardly an original idea but wouldn’t be interesting to take the same approach with scientists?

It looks like SciBlog08 was very much ahead of the curve in issuing the call for more scientists to get involved in blogging. A former student (thanks Ananyo) has just drawn my attention to an open access article on science blogging that has appeared in this month’s PLOS Biology.

My resemblance to Blanche DuBois has not been remarked on before but last Wednesday evening it was unmistakeable. There I was travelling on the tube to the TalkScience event at the British Library when, like Tennessee Williams’ fateful Southern belle, I found myself entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. Still recovering from a cold, I was suddenly overcome by a severe coughing fit.