If you’re a grad student or postdoc planning to attend the Fourth International Volvox Conference, don’t forget that travel grant applications are due this Saturday.
Fierce Roller
Evolution, transitions, and volvocine algae
If you’re a grad student or postdoc planning to attend the Fourth International Volvox Conference, don’t forget that travel grant applications are due this Saturday.
Some travel awards will be granted to students and postdocs attending the Fourth International Volvox Conference (Volvox 2017) in St. Louis. Applications are due July 1, 2017. If you are planning to attend the meeting as a student or postdoc, you really should apply.
Don’t forget, abstracts for the Fourth International Volvox Conference (Volvox 2017) in St. Louis are due this Friday, June 16, 2017.
Dr. David Kirk, Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis.
I just found out from Jim Umen, who’s organizing the Fourth International Volvox Conference, that David Kirk is planning to attend. This is great news; we’ve been wanting Dr. Kirk to come since the first meeting in 2011, but it hasn’t previously worked out.
Discounted registration for the Volvox 2017 meeting has been extended to June 16th. This is a pretty good deal as scientific meetings go: $550 for faculty includes registration, most meals, and a shared room. Registration for postdocs and students is $100 less, and there are travel grants available. If you’ve been debating whether or not to go, it’s decision time: prices will go up $100 after the 16th.
Just a reminder, abstracts for the Fourth International Volvox Conference (Volvox 2017) in St. Louis are due next Friday, June 16, 2017.
Just what the headline says: early registration for The Fourth International Volvox Conference ends May 19th. After that, prices go up $100 for everybody. The registration fees sound a bit steep (up to $650), but when you consider that they include meals, lodging, and transportation between the hotel and the conference, they’re not bad at all:
Yesterday I volunteered as a Meeting Mentor at the AbSciCon meeting. It’s not a big commitment; essentially all you have to do is hang out with a high school student for half a day, going to talks and enjoying the meeting as you normally would.
During a break, I was chatting with my mentee about Betül Kaçar’s research, and he surprised me by pointing out that (as he put it), “Devolution isn’t a thing.” The student I was paired with is interested in physics and space exploration, but his comment showed an insight that not even all professional biologists really own. From what I’ve seen, it’s an insight that very few creationists own.
Yesterday was the first day of AbSciCon 2017 in Mesa, Arizona.
Phoenix is not my favorite town; it’s got all the brutal heat (and then some) that Tucson gets, without a tenth of Tucson’s charm. That said, it’s been fairly pleasant so far, only getting into the 80’s yesterday. The hotel restaurant is pretty lame, but there is decent food about a ten-minute walk away.
Yesterday started with a bizarre plenary talk about planetary protection. This is a big deal in the astrobiology community, the concern that sending probes to potentially habitable worlds such as Europa and Enceladus could contaminate them with Earth life. It’s also a harder problem to solve than it sounds like, partly because advanced electronics of the sort that are likely to run a probe don’t get along well with the things we typically use to sterilize equipment: bleach, extreme heat, radiation, and the like. The talk used a real-time interactive system, allowing the speaker to ask a question and display the results on the screen in real time. Multiple choice questions displayed as bar graphs, fill-in-the-blanks as word clouds, both changing from second to second as new answers came in.