Hello again – just to remind you that I am posting more over at the Nature Newsblog – do take a look…

The Sci Mix poster session last night was hot, sweaty, and yet again underground with no natural light. I think I’m going to turn into a mole. And what’s this? Free beer at the poster session? Hooray. But there was a catch – you needed tokens, and my humble press registration didn’t include any. Thankfully the look of horror on my face when I realised this prompted the nice man standing behind me in the queue to donate one of his tokens. Thanks very much.

The session had some interesting posters – here’s a brief run down of my faves…. (oh, and watch out for a news story on the news@nature site later on one of them)

“was Boltzmann wrong?” screamed one poster. Well, I couldn’t quite remember what Boltzmann had done apart from have a constant named after him, and the details of that were hazy. Wikipedia tells me it’s the physical constant that relates temperature to energy. So was he wrong? No, it turns out, he just didn’t have to consider nanoscale properties.

Another poster was looking at using titanium dioxide to neutralise astronaut’s waste. And I don’t mean their used teabags. Yuck. But I suppose they can’t all wear nappies all the time.

There was a great poster that detailed how barnacles can be kept off ship’s hulls – but I will let you check back later to read a news piece about that…