Every fortnight we’ll be collating all the careers related content across Nature, just in time for some weekend reading.

‘Boot camps’ teach scientists computing skills is an interview with Kaitlin Thaney, the director of Mozilla Science Labs about their programming boot camps: Software Carpentry. Richard van Noorden also speaks to two others who have taken part in the boot camps themselves.

How to tame the flood of literature showcases several tools that scientists are using to keep track of the incredible volume of scientific literature that they are trying to read. Considering 6,000 academic papers are published every year, it’s no wonder that scientists are getting creative: “Last year Bergman, a computational geneticist studying fruit flies (Drosophila) at the University of Manchester, UK, turned to a fresh approach: an automated Twitter account (or ‘twitterbot’) that he named FlyPapers (@fly_papers). The bot trawls PubMed and the arXiv preprint server to find papers containing the word Drosophila, and spits them out into its followers’ feeds. Bergman finds it much easier to catch up with FlyPapers popping up in his Twitter feed — and his idea has spawned around 55 twitterbots in other disciplines.”

Nature has launched a new hub called Nature Toolbox, a space for scientific software, apps and online tools. Worth keeping an eye on.

Put focus back on basic research, say science unions is about the battle between blue-skies and applied research that is causing tension in France and many countries around the world. Patrick Momfort is a microbial ecologist with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Montpellier and the secretary-general of the French National Trade Union of Scientific Researchers (SNCS-FSU). He explains that research institutions, in and outside of France, are coming under the control of governments, causing the research to turn toward quick-turnaround, short-term rewards.  

Life outside the lab – the ones who got away showcases three “superstar” scientists that left academia to pursue other, alternative, careers. What the article is trying to convey is that there is a misconception about which scientists leave academia: it is not only those that do not fare well. Some of the brightest and most promising do too.