December’s entity of the month at ChEBI is Adrenaline, for all the adrenaline junkies out there. This accompanies ChEBI release 63, containing 536,978 total entities, of which 19,501 are annotated entities and 678 were submitted via the ChEBI submission tool. Text reproduced below from the ChEBI website: References Abel, J.J. (1899) Ueber den blutdruckerregenden Bestandtheil der Nebenniere, das Epinephrin. Z. Physiol.

You know it’s December when it starts snowing in your web browser. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Or programmatically: snowStorm = new SnowStorm(); There was a time, not so very long ago when JavaScript snow would have been “best viewed in browser x”. Thankfully now JavaScript much more reliable, the JBrowse [1] Genome Browser provides a nice example of this in bioinformatics.

Last Friday, the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam hosted a workshop called Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences (SWAT4LS) 2009. Following on from last year [1], the workshop proceedings will be published at ceur-ws.org and in a special issue of the Journal of Biomedical Semantics, but if you want to find out what happened in the meantime, take a look at the #swat4ls2009 hashtag on twitter.

November’s entity of the month at ChEBI is the antimalarial drug Artemether.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organisation committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature freely accessible to everyone via open access publishing. As recently announced they have just published the first article-level metrics (e.g. web server logs and related information) for all articles in their library.

As Vince Smith once put it [1] data are the fuel of Science: “The fabric of science is changing, driven by a revolution in digital technologies that facilitate the acquisition and communication of massive amounts of data. This is changing the nature of collaboration and expanding opportunities to participate in science. If digital technologies are […]

The XML Summer School returns this year at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford from 20th-25th September 2009. As always, it’s packed with high quality technical training for every level of expertise, from the Hands-on Introduction for beginners through to special classes devoted to XQuery and XSLT, Semantic Technologies, Open Source Applications, Web 2.0, Web Services and Identity.

Last Saturday, The Royal Institution of Great Britain (R.I.) hosted a conference called Science Online London (#solo09) co-organised by mendeley.com and network.nature.com. The event centred around the fantastic Faraday Theatre which according to the R.I. is a “beautiful, historic theatre [which] has deeply raked seating that creates an intimate atmosphere, even when full to capacity”. Absolutely.

Quite by chance, I stumbled on this interesting paper [1] yesterday by Philip Campbell who is the Editor-in-Chief of the scientific über-journal Nature [2]. Here is the abstract: It’s well worth reading the views of the editor of an important closed-access journal like Nature , a world champion heavyweight of Impact Factor Boxing.

One of the people I enjoyed seeing at Science Foo Camp this year was Joshua Bloch. Josh is a Java Junkie [1,2,3] and software engineer at Google. When he wasn’t playing harmonica around the foo camp fire (see picture right), he was giving interesting talks about optical illusions, some of which can be found in his book Java Puzzlers. So I bought the book, and have been doing a puzzle a day to keep the doctor away.

Today, the 20th July 2009, is the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing. There has been plenty of global coverage, stargazing, astronautical analysis and heavenly commentary recently. But for me personally, the Apollo 11 anniversary brings back fond memories of rocket science lessons [1] – specifically, the things I learned in Chemistry at school.