A quick search on pubmed.gov today reveals that the freely available American database of biomedical literature has just passed the 20 million citations mark*. Should we celebrate or commiserate passing this landmark figure? Is it a triumph or a tragedy that PubMed® is the size it is? PubMed triumphs Let’s start with the reasons to celebrate the triumphantly relentless growth of PubMed.

Science Online London (#solo10 September 3-4, 2010) is an annual gathering of people interested in the use of web technologies for scientific collaboration and communication.

Earlier this year, the scientific journal PLoS ONE published their 10,000th article. Ten thousand articles is a lot of papers especially when you consider that PLoS ONE only started publishing four short years ago in 2006. But scientists have been publishing in journals for at least 350 years so it might make you wonder, how many articles have been published in scientific and learned journals since time began?

Football fever grips the globe as we reach the final stages of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Alongside the traditional game where one winning team takes all, leaving 31 losing teams to go home earlier than expected, there is another competition running in parallel. Which losing team can come up with the best excuses for formidable football failure?

[This post is part of an ongoing series about impact factors. See this post for the latest impact factors published in 2012.] Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, Impact Factor Boxing is here again. As with last year (2009), the metrics used in this combat sport are already a year out of date.

Have you ever wondered how heavy all that Gold and Malachite is in the FIFA World Cup Trophy is? Professor Martyn Poliakoff from the Chemistry department at the University of Nottingham and his partner in crime Brady Haran over at the fantastic Periodic Table of Videos explain: Which just leaves one question, who will be lifting it this year? Lúcio? Cristiano Ronaldo? Philipp Lahm? Fabio Cannavaro?  Denis Caniza? Steven Gerrard?

Release 69 of Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is now available, with 584,456 total entities, of which 21,369 are fully annotated to three star level. This months Entity of the Month is the smell of bread (baked and toasted), or more precisely 6-acetyl-2,3,4,5-tetrahydropyridine. The text below is reproduced from the ChEBI website where data is available under a Creative Commons license.

This years Reith Lectures by Martin Rees are being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during June. An important theme in the lectures this year is scientists relationship with society.

Many people are still trying to work out exactly what twitter is good for [1] but with more than 100 million users worldwide making around 50 million tweets per day, the website is clearly popular with those who like to communicate via short “sound bites” of 140 characters or less. Communication is an important part of what Universities are all about, so how many UK universities are on twitter?

The second Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) workshop will be held at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK on the 23rd and 24th June 2010. The full provisional schedule (including registration page) for this workshop is now available.

myExperiment is a research project that is exploring models, techniques and infrastructure for sharing digital items associated with  research , especially scientific workflows.