In the daily morning plenary lectures at Lindau, the Nobel laureates have a chance both to share the significance of their discoveries, and also words of advice for the young scientists eager to follow in their footsteps. During the course of the week, the audience is taken on a week-long tour of the ultimate scientific scrapbook as each page is lovingly turned by one narrator after another. Working models of data, scribbled pages from lab books, personal anecdotes, family photos and even famous quotations illuminate what it means to be a scientist for the different speakers.

The most enthusiastic scrapbook curator of the week was Harold Kroto. In what must be a record number of slides for a talk at the meeting, his personal clippings were glued together by the theme of creativity. He showed images including a hand-drawn frog, tattoos and the “bucky balls” for which he won his Nobel Prize, as he mused aloud about science, education and ethics. While describing some of his own influences, Kroto explained that the first prize that he won was not for science, but for art. Playing with images is something he clearly finds a lot of fun – from creating a koala bear’s head by colouring the individual faces of a football, to trying to start a secret club based on handing out bumper stickers of Darwin’s original tree of life drawing.

Other highlights of the week were Oliver Smithies’ original hand-written notes on testing blood samples from his friends and photographs of eccentric items of kit that he’d used in some of his experiments. Like last year, Ada Yonath described the importance of her family, and in particular, her grand-daughter in motivating her, also using photographs to illustrate her narrative. You can read more on similarly entertaining talks that Smithies, Yonath and Tsien gave last year as well as more detailed reports on Tsien and Kroto's talks from this year.

Finally, we've created a "scientific scrapbook" of our own by compiling a Storify storyboard (below) which collates some of the best pieces of advice from the laureates that were tweeted during the week. See what they think about topics including winning prizes, the role of mentors and how to stay motivated.