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Deepak recorded his first podcast. Even if I am not a big fan of podcasts, I found it interesting to hear. Maybe it could serve as platform for a radio version of his blog. The idea of doing interviews would be really nice. In general I prefer reading because I can do it much faster than listening. Next year, when I go back to doing more bench work I will probably try consuming podcast while working.

(Via Deepak, Roland, and Konrad) Freebase is a very promising new web service. For those who have heard about semantic web, it will look familiar. They want to organize data by allowing users to add metadata to the information stored on the site. This will be great for aggregation of content and data mining. For science it could serve as place to deposit and organize data for collaborative projects.

(Via BioHacking) Microsoft has announced the winners of the first award for computational challenges in Synthetic Biology. Six projects were awarded a total of $570,000 (USD) to develop tools for synthetic biology.

(Via Jason Stajich) My own favorite model organism database (SGD) has created a wiki for community annotation. Anyone interested in S. cerevisiae biology, methods, reagents and strains can go there and help populate the wiki.