The Agenda

DEADLINE APPROACHES » Need some extra cash for sequencing? You have until December 31st to submit a grant proposal to Applied Biosystems, which will award one first prize of 60GB or 750M tags of mappable sequence data as well as the primary analysis, and 10 second place prizes of 10 individual (2 slide runs) from the SOLiD™ 3 System, deemed the #1 innovation of the year (Top Innovations of 2008). For more information, visit: http://tinyurl.com/6bmk6s

DARWIN COLLEAGUE HONORED » 150 years ago this month, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote an essay describing some of his ideas on the origin of new species and survival of the fittest species—not all of which match those of his colleague, Charles Darwin (Better late than never). You can attend an international symposium honoring Wallace in Makassar, Indonesia, Dec. 10-13 (http://tinyurl.com/6k4gwf).

DESCEND UPON SAN FRAN » From Dec. 13-17, thousands of cell biologists will meet in San Francisco for the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (http://tinyurl.com/6zh32f). You might see Klaus Hahn of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of this year's judges of the top 10 innovations, who is conducting a minisymposium (http://tinyurl.com/6zh32f) on imaging and biosensors.

DINING A LA NOBEL » On December 10, this year's Nobel Laureates will sit down to a scrumptious banquet, one of the many perks of being a prize-winner (http://tinyurl.com/6orely). Stephen Pincock travelled to Sweden to sample menus from previous banquets, an experience described in Nobel nosh.