Here I am having a whale of a time at the Fraser Stoddart 65th birthday celebrations. Celebrating a birthday with science; I like it. I like it a lot. The line up of speakers is incredibly impressive. These are all people I would want to hear talk at, say, a huge meeting like the ACS. But the beauty of this conference is that you don’t have to wade through 15000 abstracts to find the best speakers. They’re all here, undiluted.

I wrote a news story about the festivities, but was just too late to include one of the highlights of the conference – Chad Mirkin has used his dip-pen nanolithography technique to draw Fraser’s portrait in a one-molecule high layer of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid on a gold surface. Unfortunately I can’t post pictures here, but I will update later with a link to the pic. It’s well worth seeing.

UPDATE: The portrait is here

You’re going to be hearing a good deal about the Wellcome Collection over the next few weeks. The new space for medical exhibitions and events opens at 183 Euston Road on 21 June.

To get you in the mood, here’s a little game from their website. The aim is to unscramble a succession of anagrams against the clock, to reveal information about their exhibits (which include items as diverse as corsets and toothbrushes). It’s strangely addictive. See if you can beat my score of 13.

It’s worth having a go, as high scores will give you a chance of winning tickets to their grand opening on the 27 June, where you can mingle with the great and good of science. So if your supervisor tells you to stop playing computer games, tell him/her that you’re trying to boost your networking opportunities.