Think Canada

By Michael Banks in Washington, DC

The temperatures have been mild here at in Washington DC for the 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting. But according to the latest forecast the snow is on it way just as delegates are heading off home.

The AAAS was jampacked with interesting talks. We had sessions on the search for exoplanets, storing antimatter, first physics at the Large Hadron Collider, an outline of the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, detecting traces of nuclear materials, the effect a nuclear war could have on the climate, and talks on adaptive optics. Even this breathless list only represents a tiny fraction of the complete programme of the 2011 AAAS conference.

The thing that caught my attention when I first entered the Washington Convention Center, which held the 2011 AAAS, was the big red “Think Canada” badges some people were wearing. I was slightly confused in the beginning, but their purpose quickly became apparent that it was to publicise the next AAAS conference.

That meeting will be in Vancouver, Canada, from 16 to 20 February 2012, so see you there (together with my pair of big red mittens).