All start is difficult. The ACS must know that, but they still blame Google.

Amanda had a very nice post on Small molecules that modulate quorum sensing. It’s the perfect read for a Sunday morning, when you have a view looking down on Strasbourg from a hill in the Black Forrest. Biology fascinates me, particularly when small molecules are involved. And the molecular signaling used by these bacteria is just delightful. Make sure to read up on the small squids in 96-well plates too! (And we are worried about varkensflats!

Rich posted a nice quote the other day on the introduction of the forward pass in football some 100 years ago, and linked that to sciences.

The IUPAC/NIST team made a beta release of the next InChI software release:

Peter has been doing an excellent job in advocating ODOSOS , and one of his posts even hit Slashdot.

Niels and I held a JChemPaint hack-a-thon today (the IRC log). We had a quite ambitious agenda:

If you, like me, already upgrade to Ubuntu Gutsy, and use nxclient for remote login (highly recommended, though proprietary code), you might run into the problem that the login no longer works, returning the message “Cannot find KDE environment.”. Ubuntu’s Lauchpad (generally an excellent service) was rather uncooperative and disregarded a bug report about the problem, I found the solution with grep -ri kde /usr/NX:

I just installed XCMS 1.9.2 on my Ubuntu system. XCMS is a GPL-ed R package for metabolomics data analysis.

Rich blogged about Firefly embedding MDL molfiles in PNG images , which I found really cool. Rich and Noel later showed how that metadata can be retrieved again , possibly with Python.

Clustering and classification of crystal structures is hot.

An anonymous reader reported that the American Medical Association published the structure of dapagliflozin. Here are the details.