Life of a Lab Rat

One of my favourite places on the 'Net now has a Facebook (spit) group. Feel free to invite yourselves.

Oh, these movies by Janet Iwasa are rather splendid.

Lots of pretty pictures, too.

(HT: Biocurious)

By the time you read this, this envelope

will be safe (I hope) in the bowels of Australia Post.

I'll tell you more about it when I have a publication date (and before you ask: No, unfortunately it's not peer-reviewed).

Henry is on the lookout for short stories to be published in the Futures series in Nature. If you have a personal or institutional subscription to Nature you can read them all: if not, there are some freebies here.

There are also Instructions for Authors if you're interested.

Science is supposed to be pretty. Not a lot of point in doing it, otherwise (for a range of values of 'pretty', at least).

So I was first pleased when I saw that an editorial Nature Cell Biology talked about the visual aspects of our work, and then disappointed when there were no accompanying pictures or movies to illustrate the point. Moreover, the link to 'further reading', which I clicked upon with great glee and haste, is empty.

Muppets.

Anyway, I got an email from Laura at the EMBO Journal last night. They are running a cover art competition;

The editors of The EMBO Journal are pleased to announce a new contest to select the best cover image for 2008.

As in the previous years, one winner will be selected from each of the two categories: Best Scientific Cover and Best Non-Scientific Cover. The prize for both winners will be a free one-year print and online subscription to both The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports.

This is a fantastic opportunity to indulge the artistic side of your scientific temperament. It's a shame that no one outside science will probably ever see your work, and the prize is hardly something that will appeal to someone with institutional access, but that's just quibbling. The closing date is 18 January 2008. Get snapping.

Oh, we like this.

These glasses were designed with wedding gifts in mind, but are equally fit for [...] Nobel prize celebrations.

They only ship to the US, which is a shame. Perhaps you could get me some boxers instead?

(HT to Eva)

Looking for pictures of certain cell types on Google this afternoon (aside: we have no whole cell biology texts in the lab. It's all molecular!) I came across a spectacular image of a big, angry macrophage.

Astrographics turns out to have a whole heap of 'science and astronomy' (isn't astronomy a science?) images and merchandise. Dennis Kunkel makes a living, it would appear, out of making and selling these pretty pictures. He's a very lucky man.

In a far, dark corner of the world wide waste there's a little oasis of light and intelligent discussion. This is LabLit.com, the culture of science in fiction & fact. It seems to attract, if the fora are anything to go by, mostly practising scientists. Go on, make the joke about needing to get better at it if it makes you feel any better. The odd occasional and regular arts graduates turn up and get a warm welcome, but I do wonder if they sometimes feel like a fish in a bowl with us all looking at them. And if any of them are reading this then let me state quite unequivocally that the thought of experimenting on you had never occurred to me, dear me no.

But I did not come here to talk about that. There was a topic in the forum Science in novels and plays earlier this year in which it was posited that the reason science gets such a poor and inaccurate portrayal on the telly and in books is because real, day-to-day science is, actually pretty humdrum and tedious.