The Science is Vital Campaign has caught the grim mood of the scientific community and focused the energy of opposition to light a fire of protest.

A quick note here for those interested in the details of the case for support behind the Science is Vital Campaign that is fighting against cuts in the UK’s public spending on R&D. The campaign has posted key points and I have written my own digest of the case on the Naturally Selected blog over at The Scientist .

Please be patient while I experiment with audio to drum up support for the “Science is Vital campaign”:http://scienceisvital.org.uk/. It will only take two minutes and forty-nine seconds. Listen! Listen! Thank you for listening.

She’s here. She’s in the room. I’ve not noticed her before — not in previous years — but every now and then her presence is unmistakable. I am sitting in a lecture theatre in St Andrews University in Scotland, attending the 16th Meeting of the European Study Group on the Molecular Biology of Picornaviruses, or Europic, as it is more conveniently known.

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.

Three unrelated things.

I was only able to attend the second day of Science Online London 2010 but was glad to be able to hear Dr Evan Harris’s keynote talk on “Turning online science into real world policy change” and the follow-up break-out session on “The Sci Vote Movement”. Any gathering of the blognoscenti runs the risk of descending into navel-gazing, so it was good to be reminded that the point of much of our online activity as bloggers or scientists

Some of you may not have heard of last week’s launch of a new science blogging site by the Guardian newspaper. They have a core group of regular bloggers — Jon Butterworth, Dr Evan Harris, Martin Robbins and NN’s own Grrlscientist — who between them will be covering good science, bad science and science policy. It’s yet another bright addition to the rapidly changing firmament that is today’s blogosphere.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” the dying replicant Roy says of his off-world experiences in one of the final scenes of BladeRunner.

Ian Sample’s _Massive – The Hunt for the God Particle_ is a fast-paced account of the quest for the Higgs boson, an elusive particle that is purported to solve the mystery of mass. If you were unaware that the question of mass was the least bit mysterious, you are in good company–with about 99.99% of the population of the planet for whom the matter of matter has never arisen.

When Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian a couple of months back about science being a new religion we all scoffed. Oh, how we scoffed. Scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff. Scoff. But having been at the Edinburgh Fringe for a few days now, I’m wondering if he might have had a point.