Here comes the Geek Calendar! 14 months, 20 geeks, a small bio and several words on the shoot. Enjoy some of the photos on the Guardian’s website (where this image also comes from)!

Science 3.0 is a rapidly growing online community of scientists and people with wide-ranging interests. Discussing science with the current and future tools and concepts of information is a great endeavour we are all happy to take part in! In order to increase this emulation, we decided to launch the ‘Science 3.0 Blogging Contest’.

Science publishes today a Science & Policy article about regulation of the famous Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) genome testing. An interesting discussion highlighting the crucial importance of joint efforts:

Effective regulation will require cooperation from governmental agencies, and flexibility to accommodate the complexities of tests, like those offered by DTC companies, that provide genome-wide analysis producing results with variable and often uncertain validity and clinical utility.

DNA repair is a very interesting field to me even if I didn’t go into for my PhD. I’m still following the news from it though. Here is a summary from a study published in Nature several days ago which describes a novel mechanism for DNA repair.

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The Science Hack Day will take place in San Francisco (USA) on November 13 and 14, 2010. You can already sign up given that they have only 100 places (tickets are free of charge). The schedule can be consulted here. Happy science hacking 🙂

A report was published in Science last week titled “Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups”. They set up the “c factor”, for collective intelligence, somehow a parallel of the g (for general intelligence. I told a bit about this after Prof. Haier’s conference at the EMBO meeting). In brief, what the authors report, is that individual intelligence of people constituting a group (a team) is not correlated with the success of the team to solve a problem. Further, when extending the tests, it came up that having more women in the team increases the so called “social sensitivity” and improves performance. Groovy, eh?

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In 2011 will be held the 5th edition of Science Online, the conference on online science. You are a blogger? You enjoy reading blogs about science? You are not that comfortable about how to begin discussing science through a blog and want to meet some veterans? Join Science Online 2011!

But beforehand: let all of us help Bora and Anton to make this happen! Here are the 10 things everyone can do:

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In brief, Andre Geim (from the University of Manchester, UK) just won the Nobel Prize for Physics 2010, with Konstantin Novoselov (from the same university), “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”. You can read more on their discovery on the official Nobel laureats website.

But it seems that Andre Geim is definitely an awesome scientist.

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Here is this highly colourful description of people you (can) meet in the lab. Actually, it happens quite often that you meet more than 2 of those at a time in a given lab. This essay by Adam Ruben is titled “Don’t Worry, I’m (Un)Professional: A Guide to Your Laboratory Colleagues” and reminded me some colleagues 😉 . And what about you?

I had always thought of scientists as serious, responsible people. A bit socially awkward, maybe, but certainly smart and probably boring — the sort of folks you’d have dinner with and then tell your spouse, “Well, I didn’t understand everything they were saying about tuberculosis, but in general they seemed pleasant.” In reality, though, scientists are as idiosyncratic, incompetent, and irresponsible as people in any industry. We just have cooler coats.