Just reading today’s edition of Wired UK before I go in the office, and there’s a great article in it about Slogging, Science Lab Blogging. I’m surprised there’s been no talk on here about it.

Apparently, Slogging (looks like the website has fallen over as it is too popular at the moment!) is really popular in Norway, where it was developed.

It allows scientists to post short “slogs” (256 characters long – apparently as they realised that no scientific term could reasonably be expected to fit in Twitter’s 140 character limit) either manually using a computer or a glove-enabled iPhone by typing or voice, or automatically by connecting lab equipment to the Slogging network.

Finally, and most excitingly, you can use specially-developed intelligent fabric that you wear under your labcoat which automatically logs your thoughts and fears as your experiment progresses.

Olaf Pirol, the developer, was inspired by the Twitter baby monitor and thought that that would be ideal for scientists “too busy to write in their labbooks”. He persuaded the Norwegian Academy of Science and Technology to mandate all their funded scientists to take up the technology, and now he’s looking for it to spread worldwide.

It looks like it could hit Britain soon – I asked Paul Drayson, the science minister via Twitter if he thought this was a good idea, and he just replied saying, “Yeah! Let’s get all Brit scientists slogging morning, noon, and night! V Inspiring! k thx bai”

What do you think? Are you slogging away in the lab today?

Had a wonderful, if surreal night at the Science Museum this evening, for the opening party of the Wallace & Gromit Present: A World of Cracking Ideas, their new exhibition, which opens on Saturday and runs until November.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman, the Intellectual Property Office, the Science Museum and an exhibit design company SG Productions. It’s squarely aimed at children, but with some nods to the accompanying adults. For the opening party, kids, families, Aardman creatives, MPs and business types in suits all explored the exhibition together.

What interested me the most (perhaps as I got to wear both my science communication and my R&D Society thinking hats on at the exhibition) was the theme of the exhibition: it’s not about science or technology.

Ada Lovelace Day is a brilliant concept, executed brilliantly on the web.

Suw Charman-Anderson is a woman working in technology, in social media consultancy and journalism. One day, she got angry. Angry about how woman working in technology felt disempowered, ignored, objectified by the very community of tech professionals they work in. And when Suw got angry, she got blogging. And twittering. And PledgeBanking.

The concept was simple. Inspired by the idea that women in tech needed more female role models (backed up by some peer reviewed research ), she thought about getting 1000 people to talk about “a woman in technology whom they admired” – a role model. And on a very small budget, using all the social media tools available, she got, as of 1,907 people to pledge, and 754 (755 when I finish this) to blog. Computer Weekly, the Guardian, (and again ), the Science Museum, the Wellcome Library, and even the Royal Society got involved.

And me. So who’s a woman in technology I admire?

The Periodic Table of Typefaces has been created by graphic design agency Squidspot to list “100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces today.”

It’s a delightful combination of two of my favourite things: chemistry and typography. The designer, Cam, derived the top 100 typefaces from a variety of “top nn” lists, and then ranked and grouped them by families and classes. So what should be the atomic number is not in the same order as an actual periodic table, and the format is ever-so-slightly different.

But it’s pleasing to try to make connections between the typefaces and the elements…

For instance, Helvetica’s super-abudance in the universe twins nicely with hydrogen. Iridium’s stability and softness echoes that of Palatino. And boron’s presence in glass makes it pair nicely with Gill Sans’ clarity.

Other connections are perhaps more tentative. Is DIN’s teutonic, clean structure and systematic nature similar to calcium? Can argon’s inertness really be linked to the flashy, 1990s wunderkind Eurostile? Is neon Avant Garde (or vice versa)?

In any case, it’s an interesting conceit, and, if nothing else, shows the cultural acceptance and ubiquity of the format and style of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table.

The Times lists the 50 most popular celebrities on Twitter today – prompting me to ask, where are the scientists on that list?

Well… anyone?

Eva kindly alerted me to this post from one of her friends about CupcakeCamp.

Yes, you heard that right. CupcakeCamp.

As the website puts it,

Cupcake Camp is the greatest un-conference of them all! It originated in San Francisco and is based on a BarCamp / DemoCamp, which is a participant generated social web event for designers, developers, etc. The participants sign up to demo software they’ve been working on, or give awe-inspiring presentations. As exciting as this is, remove the software demos / inspiring presentations and replace them with cupcakes and you’ve got sheer brilliance!

So, a bit of a cheat in the sense of it being a cupcake show and tell event, but still, who wouldn’t want to go to that?

Google offers a Safe Browsing feature – a system that finds and records websites that seem to have “drive-by downloads” or MalWare on them – software that downloads automatically, which you don’t ask to receive.

It flags up such sites in its search results with a warning under the result, “This site may harm your computer.” and an interstitial page, if you insist on clicking on the link, explaining how it may harm your computer.

Sadly, today, it seems to have gone mad, flagging every website, including its own, as potentially harmful.

Is not the precision of the weights required but the lack of a scientific name for beef dripping.

Flour is rerendered as polysaccharide powder, kitchen grade and milk becomes reduced-lipid bovine lactate but poor old beef dripping is just poor old beef dripping.

Not to mention, eggs are eggs.

Still, kind of John Emsley (“a scientist” as the First Post puts it – come on, at least label him a chemist!) to help out a correspondent whose Yorkshire pudding was not rising four inches. (Gee? Richard? Are you there?)

And apparently, this is all part of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2009 theme of food which has also seen them serve up gruel and, err recommending how food can be sourced in the future sustainably.

So here’s hoping to more molecular gastronomy as the year progresses. Not gruel though. I am having a bit of trouble with my pastry though. Hello, RSC?

It is International Astronomy Year, an opportunity for everyone to celebrate the joy of the night skies.

And it seems from two news stories reported in Friday’s Royal Society Science in the News bulletin, a chance for researchers to grab their spades and exhume dead astronomers.

Researchers are hoping to be granted permission to open the Prague tomb of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, in the light of new evidence that he died from mercury poisoning administered by a contract killer.
The Times, p36, 1/3p (includes a reproduction of the Brahe portrait in the possession of the Royal Society)

British and Italian scientists plan to exhume the body of Galileo to determine whether an eye condition affected his observation of the planets.
The Daily Telegraph, p18, brief
The Guardian, p28, 2/3 col

Who else should we be digging up this year? And what is it about great scientists (Einstein and his brain comes to, umm, mind) that we keep wanting to fiddle with their bodies?

I got a note that JPG magazine was folding, so their archives were free to download until they go. So I hopped over there to see what was going on.

But just on the front page this jumped out:

Making science in the top of the World – On The Job by Ramon Terrado
Making a PhD might not sound exciting… unless you do your fieldwork onboard an icebreaker in the Arctic!

I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the relationship between science and photography – that requires books rather than a blog post, but I’ll just say that:

• Ramon’s photos are stunning, and his text explanation of his life as a researcher are inspiring too.
• The comments on Ramon’s photos are revealing too – I liked the comment about it becoming personal, especially. The idea that the camera in the hands of the scientist provides direct, unedited, personal access is interesting and uplifting.
• Ramon give a comment link to a friend and colleague who took a Holga to the Arctic. I haven’t had time to check these properly yet, but they look beautiful and revealing too.
• I love photography – both taking and appreciating the work of others. I think it’s one of those creative practices, like cooking or music, that has creativity within a structure or formal process, which appeals to both sides of my brain.

and no I don’t know why the list is in smaller font, it works fine in preview…) Hopefully the bullet points above are the same size as the rest of the text.