When the Society for Neuroscience gets together for their annual meeting each year, a city of scientists suddenly forms for a week. This year’s meeting has drawn 31,000 people to the Washington DC Convention Center. The subjects of their presentations range from brain scans of memories to the molecular details of disorders such as Parkinson’s and autism. This morning, a scientist named Svante Paabo delivered a talk. Its subject might make you think that he had stumbled into the wrong conference altogether. He delivered a lecture about Neanderthals.

Yet Paabo did not speak to an empty room. He stood before thousands of researchers in the main hall. His face was projected onto a dozen giant screens, as if he were opening for the Rolling Stones. When Paabo was done, the audience released a surging crest of applause. One neuroscientist I know, who was sitting somewhere in that huge room, sent me a one-word email as Paabo finished: “Amazing.”

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Spencer Debenport, a plant pathologist at Ohio State University, sports a tattoo of a tardigrade, a microscopic animal known as the water bear. “I have always loved microscopic critters, and there is none other as intriguing as the tardigrade,” he writes. “The fact that they are so hardy, yet still that odd mixture of ugly/cute drew me to them and the more I read up on them, the more I wanted one permanently on me. I am also a mycologist, so whenever I look at lichens I get to see loads of these little guys roaming around.”

Continue reading “The Toughest Bear in the Universe #scienceink” →