This week, reports from both our London blogger, Joanna Scott, and The News blog have revealed that proceeds from the multi-million pound sale of a Picasso will be given to obesity research.

A Pablo Picasso painting donated to an Australian university has sold for £13.5 million at auction. The proceeds will benefit obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular research at the University of Sydney.

In a previous blog post, The News blog had announced the sale, revealing that the work depicts Picasso’s lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he met in 1927 when she was 17 and he 45. The painting was donated by an anonymous benefactor. If you want to find out more about what the university plans to do with the money, or see the rest of the art from the auction, which raised a total of £140,019,200, read Joanna’s post.

Laureate meeting

Next week, Nature is going to be covering the Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting which has been taking place every year for the past 61 years. Set on the idyllic island of Lindau on Lake Constance in Germany, it’s a chance for selected young scientists to meet with Nobel Laureates for a gathering of plenary discussions and informal conversations. So to keep you all in the loop about our coverage of the conference, you can read our summary post which details Everything you need to know about the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting #lnlm11. In the post you can find links to the new social media aggregation website, read posts from last year’s coverage and watch videos of the Nobel Laureates. You can also join in the discussion yourself, by submitting a question for a Laureate and entering a competition to win an X-Box! Make sure you check it out!

The Belief in Dialogue conference

With news of another conference, this week’s Soapbox post comes from the Belief in Dialogue conference, where guest blogger Dr Fern Elsdon-Baker argues that science may be universal in its results, but the way its role in society is understood, or communicated, is not. She suggests that an intercultural understanding is all the more important for global scientific development:

But the cradle of all scientific inquiry is the broader societal and cultural context in which it sits. Not just the cultural perspective of the individual or team of researchers, but the context of the political system which supports or suppresses, the funding stream that can inadvertently create fashions and trends, and those of us in wider society who are ultimately the end users of any research and in turn fuel both political and funding priorities.

What do you think? Feel free to join in the growing discussion.

What kind of man are you?

In Raf Aert’s latest post, he presents five stereotypes of the modern man.

An applied typology of modern men in five cases:

Figure 1 – A typology of modern men in five cases: a. the Twitterhipster, b. the Teva walker, c. Singlet man, d. Purple tie man, e. Cargo bike dad.

Using a scientific approach (which includes a spider diagram) he attempts to fit himself into these stereotypes. You can read his results in his post.

Learning Science and the Web

David De Roure’s latest post has been looking at The Science of the Web. He asks readers to think of the Web as a growing organism. How does it behave? Can we describe it and explain it? Can we figure out how it works inside and what makes it behave the way it does? His post explains why Twitter provides a fantastic resource for Web Science:

… for example, one Twitter paper looked at filtering of political information in the German election, another at epidemic surveillance. Social networks are clearly a hot topic, or perhaps I should say sociotechnical systems – like the paper applying computational social science to online and offline criminological concerns, drawing inspiration (and evidence) from massively multiplayer online games.

In a similar vein of thought, Scitable’s blogger Nick Morris has been urging educators to Push, don’t pull your eLearners. He reveals the positives of using social media tools such as Twitter:

It doesn’t really matter how the information is Pushed to the students (or from the students to the educator), as long as it reaches the intended recipient. The idea is to eliminate the need for users to visit a site just to check if new information has been added.

In order to keep their element writing competition in the forefront of everyone’s minds, The Sceptical Chymist blog have ignited an old post – Neil Wither’s first ever post! In his piece he looks back into the depths of time, to his first ever science lesson at school where magnesium featured:

In order to prove that things really do get heavier once you’ve burnt them, he carefully weighed some magnesium foil in a crucible, then set fire to it. After the bright white flame died away, he re-weighed the crucible and guess what? The weight had indeed increased.

You can read more of Neil’s school memories in his post and how it ties in with the “In Your Element” chemistry competition.

Science Festivals

We are now in full-blown festival season and this month we have gone Science Festival mad! In the grand finale to our mini-series, we have complied a map which marks the World’s Science Festivals. This map is by no means complete – we would like to know if there are any more festivals in Asia, Africa and South America. Or if you think we have missed off another important science festival, please let us know and we can add it to the map. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far. Keep the suggestions coming!

A Funny fungus

GrrlScientist has been asking:

What’s round, bright orange, full of holes and resembles a sponge? A newly-discovered fungus that was named SpongeBob SquarePants!!

You can find out more about this new fungus in her post, as well details of where this terrestrial fungus lives.

Fighting Cancer

With this second post in a blog series covering the St. Louis Imaging Sciences Pathway (ISP) Retreat, blogger Paige Brown discusses the research of a graduate student who is using glowing bacteria to analyse interactions between bacteria and cancerous tissues. Its application may prove useful for identifying tumours in a non-invasive way, but may potentially have another use:

Beyond using the preferential localization of glowing Salmonella bacteria to tumor sites for cancer diagnosis, researchers like Flentie are taking it a step further with plans to use special ‘bugs’ for cancer treatment. For example, genes that produced bacterial toxins like the Shiga toxin, which is currently adding to the deadliness of E.coli-1. outbreaks in Germany, may be engineered into tumor-hunting bioluminescent Salmonella bacteria.

You can find detailed explanations in her post.

The Spoonful of Medicine blog in their latest post, The times they are a-changin’ discuss the regulatory process surrounding the use of Genentech’s Avastin for treating breast cancer:

It has been like watching a dramatic and slow motion game of tug-of-war. In 2007, a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel narrowly voted down the drug, citing a handful of deaths in the company’s pivotal trials due to side effects alone.

They reveal that less than a year later, the agency granted Avastin an accelerated approval. But after more trials showed that patients do not live longer despite the breast cancer’s slowed spread and given Avastin’s somewhat nasty toxicity profile, an FDA advisory committee voted to pull the $100,000-a-year drug from the pharmacy shelf. Now, a meeting slated for next week will determine the drug’s fate. You can find the details in the post.

Finally My Chemical Romance

Viktor Poor is celebrating the International Year of Chemistry with this interesting love letter, describing a chemical romance: