united states

Meteorological peril strikes Boston

By Frank ⋅ February 14, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I’m not just talking about the thousands of scientists and the hundreds of journalists flocking to the usually charming city of Boston. As the AAAS opens in Boston, MA, tomorrow, the city is covered in slush. The few inches of snow that fell last night were mixed with the litres of water coming down from [...]

Sustainable endings

By Frank ⋅ February 22, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

And so it ended, the 2007 version of the AAAS in San Francisco. Recovering from a jetlag from hell, I have fond memories of the people I met and the talks I listened to. Most impressive were the three plenary lecture speakers that honoured the meeting with their presence. First up was Larry Page, co-founder [...]

Science in San Francisco

By Frank ⋅ February 17, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

San Francisco is sizzling with science. Today marks the start of the 2007 version of the annual meeting of the AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Last year the meeting was held in St. Louis, this year I’m happy to be attending in a very warm San Francisco. The oddly toasty weather [...]

History in St. Louis, MO

By Frank ⋅ February 21, 2006 ⋅ One comment

I tried, I really honestly tried to discover the interesting historical places in St. Louis, but the city has failed me in this respect. The two interesting places are the Gateway Arch, where you can take a tedious ride up in an elevator pod that seems to have been designed for children and not adults. [...]

Party time!

By Frank ⋅ February 20, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

When you think about a science conference, with scientists and science journalists, “party animals” isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. However, both scientists and journalists mingled like their life depended on it at the warp party that was hosted by the local St. Louis science writers at the City Museum yesterday. And when [...]

Donald Kennedy

By Frank ⋅ February 19, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Yesterday the attendees of the AAAS meeting gathered to listened to the celebrity actor David Krumholtz from the hit series Numb3rs. Today the room filled with people wanting to listen to the lecture by science celebrity Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of the magazine Science. Unfortunately, dr. Kennedy had nothing noteworthy to mention in his one hour [...]

Numb3rs

By Frank ⋅ February 18, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

It’s very strange to see a television show get its own symposium on a big science conference like the AAAS. But in this case it’s more than justified. One of the most difficult fields in science to popularise is mathematics, but the CBS eggheads have done just that. The show Numb3rs, in which an FBI [...]

Newsroom

By Frank ⋅ February 18, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Each year, when the AAAS meeting is in progress, newspaper journalists feed on the science stories that are presented to them at the conference. In this digital age, stories are written and uploaded to newspapers and websites live from the conference. If you’ve ever wondered how the AAAS newsroom looks like and if it’s really [...]

Improbable in St. Louis

By Frank ⋅ February 17, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

On a lighter note the AAAS meeting was livened by a talk by Marc Abrahams about the magazine Annals of Improbable Research and the spirit of the yearly Ig Nobel Awards. Marc Abrahams, the editor of the AIR, watches as 2002 Ig Nobel Award laureate Theo Gray, the inventor of the Period Table table, delivers [...]

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