This coming Friday is my 34th birthday, and the lovely people from ScienceBlogs/ Seed Media Group have given me a fantastic present: they're sending me on an all expenses paid long weekend to Barcelona to cover ESOF2008.

The mission of the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) is to provide both the European and the international science and business communities with an open platform for debate and communication. It presents and profiles Europe's leading research trends in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is an opportunity to discuss and influence the future of research and innovation in Europe by involving all main stakeholders: scientists, business executives and policy-makers.

The event includes scientific, business and career programmes; the scientific programme is divided into 10 themes, including The human mind and behaviour, Engineering the body, Communicating science, and Science and art. I'll be focusing on the neuroscience sessions, but would also like to attend a few from the other themes.

I fly from Gatwick early on Friday morning, and will return late on Tuesday night. While I'm there, the idea is that I take notes during the talks and then post them on here afterwards, but I'll have my laptop with me, so if there's a wireless connection in the conference hall I might try to do some liveblogging during the sessions.

The sessions run in parallel from 8.30am to 6.30pm, from Friday through to Tuesday, and there are various social events in the evenings. I'll be meeting Laura McNeill, the editor of Seed, Tobias Maier, one of my counterparts at ScienceBlogs.de, and, doubtless, scores of other interesting people. So I imagine the weekend will be rather hectic, but I'm very excited about it all, and hopefully, will have a bit of time to explore this wonderful city and take a few photographs.