The American Chemical Society will be offering a virtual poster session in Second Life from selected posters at the Sci-Mix session taking place April 6, 2008 at the next national meeting in New Orleans. I'm helping out with that effort and I'm pleased to say that we have our first submission from Jodye Selco, Mary Bruno and Sue Chan: "Safe and economical chemistry inquiry for the K-12 classroom".

Collaboration is a requirement for the advancement of modern science. Researchers cannot be expert at everything and must specialize to make a unique contribution. But if coordinating research within a group is challenging, effective collaboration between groups is even more so. There is often a strong temptation for research units to treat each other like black boxes. There is some logic to this - the point of having a collaborator is to distribute the responsibility of tasks in a project. If I get involved with every detail of my collaborator's work I may as well do the work within my own group. But problems can arise because of unstated assumptions between groups.

Michael Barton has posted a brief essay on Open Notebook Science on his research web site:

As you might expect from the name, Open Notebook Science (ONS) has similarities with Open Source Software. The clearest likeness between the two, is the belief that by sharing and collaborating, more can be achieved than through secrecy and competition.

From Bora Zivkovic's A Blog around the Clock:

The results are in. Jiri Gut from the Rosenthal group has run 2 of our Ugi products and they both show inhibition of falcipain-2 (EXP165) and Plasmodium falciparum (EXP166) in the micromolar range. To put this in context the activities are roughly 2 orders of magnitude lower than the positive control used for the enzyme inhibition and chloroquine for the parasite. But it is a start.

Like last year, the North Carolina Science Blogging conference was a hit. I moderated a session on public scientific data with Xan Gregg. Both of our talks were recorded and available here.