Well, the fall ACS meeting is nearly here – a few NPG editors will be attending the meeting (including myself), so don’t forget to check back for daily updates…

I also wanted to mention that we’ve put together another special issue of Nature that will be distributed at the meeting – in this week’s issue, there’s a News Feature on metal-organic frameworks and several papers:

– Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function by Hermann et al. (click here for the News & Views)

– Vitrification of a monatomic metallic liquid by Bhat et al. (click here for the News & Views)

– A transglutaminase homologue as a condensation catalyst in antibiotic assembly lines by Fortin et al. (click here for the News & Views)

– Selection and evolution of enzymes from a partially randomized non-catalytic scaffold by Seelig & Szostak (click here for the News & Views)

If you’re going to be at the meeting, don’t forget to swing by the NPG booth (booth #434) to pick up free issues of Nature, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Nanotechnology, and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

And last (but certainly not least), Paul thinks we should meet for “[d]rinks or dinner at a neutral location” – depending on where and when it is, I’ll try to swing by (and bring along a few of the other editors…) Hope to see you there!

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

In the discussion of dried-up Tibetan lakes and marine isotope excursions here at INQUA, one thing has been noticeably lacking: a sense of the bigger-picture context. In his plenary address today, Peter Barrett of New Zealand brought the crowd back to a sense of reality.

Barrett is one of those grizzled Antarctic geologists who look like they’ve spent their entire life on the ice sheet. And in fact he’s been a key player in Antarctic research for many decades (back from the time when the Beatles and the Grateful Dead were fresh, as he reminded the INQUA audience today). But in the past year or two, Barrett has started to worry more about the future than the past.

As part of a tour through Antarctic climate history, Barrett ran through the various reasons why the southern continent is so important – as a constraint on sea level rise, as a control of global weather, and as a record of deep-time climate history. But then he started whipping out the IPCC graphs, showing carbon dioxide levels rising in the future and what that might mean for the Antarctic ice sheet. The audience began to murmur, and some looked a bit confused. Had they been out to lunch in February when the latest IPCC report came out? Or have they just not spent much time extrapolating from their studies of the Quaternary to what happens next?

Kudos to Barrett for introducing a bit of activism into the normally staid surroundings of a scientific conference.