Michael Brooks has scratched beneath the glossy surface of science to write a revealing and thoroughly entertaining book about its practitioners. By cutting so close to the scientific bone that it spills blood, his “Free Radicals” departs violently from the textbook image of white-coated professionalism. In eight gritty and gripping chapters Brooks uncovers the anarchy at the heart of many of the most famous advances made by scientists.

Some say April is the cruellest month but I found July to be more punishing. You might think that, for university staff like myself, July would bring respite from the tiresome enslavement of exam and project marking that fills all of June. At the end of that gruelling month the students are granted their grades and degrees and finally quit the campus.

Plagiarism is pernicious and pervasive. You can’t seem to get away from it because so many people are getting away with it. As a university teacher I have long been aware of so-called essay-writing services that tout their wares to students who think that by purchasing essays written by someone else and passing them off as their own they can buy their way to learning. Fools. That’s what universities are for.

Last Friday night as I watched U2 play Glastonbury on TV, the stream of hatred on Twitter was relentless. A torrent of unforgettable ire. I’ve long known that Bono and his band excite very mixed reactions, but this seemed to take things higher. Their music is not to everyone’s taste but on this occasion the bilious flood stemmed from the band’s attitude to taxation, or rather to tax avoidance.

Back in April — it seems so long ago now — I wrote about the problems created in university life science courses by the relatively low uptake of maths by the student intake. It provoked a very long and thoughtful discussion, both beneath the blog post and in email exchanges that I had with many of my colleagues. I am extremely grateful to everyone who took part.

Regular readers of this blog will be probably be aware of the ongoing campaign to reform the libel laws of England and Wales. These laws have pernicious effects in many aspects of public life — including science and medicine. They place a dangerous constriction on the freedom of scientists and medics to engage in robust debate on matters of public interest.

In UK scientific circles and the wider realm of academia impact has been around for a while now. Grant forms incorporate large blank spaces in which applicants are required to outline their plans for ensuring that the work they hope to do will have impact.

Yesterday, in four brief photo-posts on my Posterous account I highlighted snapshots — literally — from the British Library’s current exhibition on science fiction. I’m more of a fan of the genre in movies than in books but I had heard good things about the Library’s display and wanted to take a look. The exhibition is mostly books and manuscripts that exemplify the form — locked in glass cases in a fairly dim room — but I wasn’t disappointed.

I spent most of last weekend and all of yesterday finalising a chapter I had been asked to contribute to an upcoming monograph on human serum albumin. Monograph is a fancy word for book in academia. And academia is a fancy word for the people who work in universities and research institutes and consider themselves smart. Yesterday I was polishing the text of my latest draft and assembling the figures.

The fourth edition of Voet & Voet’s Biochemistry , which is currently the recommended undergraduate text on our degree program at Imperial College, weighs three thousand and thirty-nine point two four grams. It has one thousand four hundred and eighty-two pages of text and pictures (page 945 is particularly good) divided into thirty-two chapters covering the whole of the core curriculum. The book is in every sense a weighty tome.

What is the best seminar that you have ever attended? And what made it so good? I pondered this question after my name appeared on the list of speakers for our internal divisional seminar series this term. I thought that, rather than give another run-of-the-mill progress report, I might have a little fun with the format. And perhaps make a useful point at the same time.