A Blog Around The Clock

There are 56 days until the Science Blogging Conference.

Before I return to highlighting some of the people who will be there, let me finish with this Thanksgiving series of posts about the Friday pre-conference events - leaving the best for last, perhaps. If you look at the Program, you will see that Friday afternoon (after the Blogging101 session and before the Friday dinner) is reserved for Lab Tours.

As all the Lab Tours are occurring simultaneously, you have to choose only one - and what choices!

Duke Immersive Virtual Environment is a totally cool thing - you walk inside a big cube and see stuff in 3D. You can bring in your own files to see them in 3D if you want (let us know in advance). You can look at the brain and turn it around to see it from whichever angle you want, or do the same with a geological formation, you can explore how environment affects your own behavior, or play a game in virtual reality. Anton went there and wrote about his experience.

If you choose to visit The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, you will learn about their Functional Genomics Research Program and see how they do what they do to understand complex molecular networks inside our cells.

At the EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory, they "conducts research and development that leads to improved methods, measurements and models to assess and predict exposures of humans and ecosystems to harmful pollutants and other conditions in air, water, soil, and food." Go and see how they do it!

It is not easy getting access to the Duke Lemur Center (formerly Duke Primate Center, but why taunt PETA/ALF if there are no chimps there), where they work on preservation of a number of endangered primate species and do research on their nutrition and behavior, among else, trying to learn as much as they can about them in order to be able to successfully re-introduce them back into the wild.

If you choose to visit the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, you will see what kind of research they do behind the scenes, including the cleaning, preservation, analysis and mounting of fossils - from dinosaurs to giant sloths.

I always wanted a smart, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly house for myself and my family. You can see and experience one if you visit the Duke University Smart Home, a student dormitory which is all of the above.

So, if you will already be in town on Friday and want to join one of the tours, go to the Lab Tours page now and sign up by editing that wiki page. Hurry up, as some of the tours allow only 5 people!

If everything gets filled and there is more demand, we can easily add a couple of other cool local labs and institutions to add to the Lab Tour list. But first, you have to register!