Nascent

I'm in rather a hurry to go to Sunday's sessions, but to give you a flavour of what's going on at Science Foo Camp, here are some sessions that I attended on Saturday:

• A discussion about how to stimulate citizen science and individual invention in order to more effectively monitor the climate and the oceans.
• Humans' evolutionary future.
• Power laws, lognormal distributions, and the difficulty and importance of telling between then. (Much more interesting that I've made it sound.)
• Transferring huge data sets around the globe on a 'freight train' of large-capacity hard drives.
• The promises of nanotechnology.
• Web 2.0 at Nature. (OK, that was my own talk.)
• Second Life as an educational and scientific environment.
• Analysing Mars using images and probes (including some amazing facts about the CO₂ icecap at the south pole, and a plan to smash a huge copper ball into the planet to check for the existence of water).
• 3D camera technology.
• A discussion about how to get scientists to stop being so conservative and take more risks.
• Does the prospect of ubiquitous embedded computing, all using CMOS chips, introduce a single point of failure for our society? (Consensus: probably not.)

OK, back to the Googleplex for Sunday's sessions.