Tips for prospective post-docs, Science Online 2010, and pipetting in 2154.

Anyone looking for a post-doctoral position at the moment would do well to read Mitch's article at the Chemistry Blog (http://go.nature.com/xDgi3N). In his post “The Hidden World of the PostDoc Interview” he outlines some lessons that I suspect a lot of people would prefer to learn before their first interview. These include: have an hour-long talk ready to give to the whole department, be ready to last all day and wear a suit. Jared also offered useful advice in his comment: candidates shouldn't be afraid to ask the interviewers beforehand what to expect “and just try to relax. They're real-live human beings, too.” After Mitch learnt lesson one the hard way, he seems to have got into his stride, because he thinks his “job hunting is over, thankfully it didn't last long.”

What do you get it if you put a load of scientists, bloggers, journalists, web developers, publishers and programmers together for four days in North Carolina? The answer is Science Online 2010, a conference that aimed to “discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science and promoting the public understanding of science.” You also get an awful lot of blog posts and tweets — just search for '#scio10' for a flavour. One place to start dipping your toe into the ocean of blog posts is at the official website's blog coverage page (http://go.nature.com/r24TSm), which links to all the blogposts and media reports generated by the conference.

And finally, in a galaxy far, far away Chemgeek of Homebrew and Chemistry (http://go.nature.com/DubT8V) wondered: “Avatar has made a billion dollars and counting. You would think they could have hired someone to teach Sigourney Weaver how to use an Eppendorf pipette.” It seems Chemgeek wasn't alone in spotting this, because Weaver's poor pipette technique has already made Avatar's 'goof page' on the Internet Movie Database (http://go.nature.com/2kGPCP).