This is shameless, shameless self-promotion but I was interviewed back in May by Carl Carruthers for his Meet a Scientist Monday podcast, which has gone live today. The interview was long enough ago for me — being of advanced years — to have forgotten what I’d said, so I’ve just had a listen.

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.

I was back at the Diamond Light Source today — the synchrotron that we use to blast protein crystals with X-rays to figure out the structures of protein molecules. The beamlines at the synchrotron where we do our experiments have some very fancy kit and, in explaining the apparatus to one of my students, I was reminded of how much things have changed in the past twenty years.

I have Jim Franks of Newton TV to thank for the opportunity to sit around a table with some of the current scientists at the world-famous MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to talk about the legacy of its founder, Max Perutz. The discussion was part of a video that you can see at The Guardian web-site and is intercut with previously unseen interview footage of Pertuz himself looking back on his scientific life.

On Wednesday last I was fortunate to find myself an outlier among the great and the good at the Wellcome Trust Image Awards for 2011, where hefty glass slabs were being handed out by Adam Rutherford as prizes to imaginative individuals who had conjured a captivating image from their scientific work.

As Father Ted might have explained it to Dougal, this one is very small: Atom but that one is far away . Mars (NASA) And yet it is the distant planet and not the nearby atom that seems to excite the greatest interest in the public mind. I blame Carl Sagan. And bloody Brian Cox.

Henry started it by banging on about his iPad. Somehow the subject of blogging came up and I mentioned the BlogPress app, so here I am testing it out. I used it once on MT4 but this is my first go on WordPress. Seems OK so far… Second, what exactly is this thing called Quora? I came across it on Twitter earlier in the week and, like a social media addict, signed up straight away. Quite a few other people seem to have done the same thing.

I promise I won’t make a habit of just posting links to stuff on other sites but I am childishly proud of having a piece about macromolecular crystallography in the Guardian Science Blog.

Walter Clement Noel was famous in the wrong circles for the wrong reasons. He died in Grenada in 1916 aged just 32. Over fifty years later, in the first decade of my life, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was far and away my favourite film. I must have seen it six or seven times, a huge tally in the days before VCRs and DVDs. The magical tale of endangered children rescued with the help of a flying car captivated my boyish mind.

This is a quick one. The internet’s not working terribly reliably at home so, in case you missed it on Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, here is a short film about what myself and some of my group got up to last Saturday. Hit it Van… Thanks to GrrlScientist for already promoting it on her blog.