This blog is no longer being updated. For conference reporting from Nature‘s team of journalists, as well as up-to-the-minute coverage of research and science policy see Nature’s news blog.

So I hiked up to the famous quarry itself on Saturday, on a day with remarkably clear blue skies and cool mountain air. It’s relatively strenuous – about 3 or 4 hours uphill, with a few steep sections, and then an unremitting 3 hours of knee-pounding downhill switchbacks. If you fancy seeing the quarry for yourself, you’ll need to sign up for a guided tour. The quarry is a national herritage site, so you can’t wander in there alone, nor can you take any fossils away with you. This was, of course, a source of great despair to the paleontologists on our hike, who found fossils (some relatively rare) and were forced to simply put them back on the ground and walk away. (If truly interesting pieces are found, they are put in a locked cupboard in the quarry for study and/or to show tourists like us some good specimens from the site.) There aren’t exactly fossils on every bit of loose shale, but there are a reasonable few scattered around. Enough that, for example, I ate my lunch whilst sitting on a trilobite. We spent our time in the quarry marvelling at the view (we didn’t know which way to look – out towards Emerald lake and Walcott peak, or in towards the quarry), taking commemorative pictures with Derek Briggs (who famously helped to recognise the strange character of many Burgess shale fossils) and with a toy model of opabinia, which one of the researchers had brought up with him specifically for the photo-op. Marianne Collins was also on our tour — the artist who drew many of the recreations of these creatures, including the five-eyed, long-snouted opabinia. A glorious end to a fantastic meeting.

Image: Your intrepid blogger with Derek Briggs

Posted on behalf of Nicola Jones

One presentation that stirred things up a bit suggested that Anomalocaris wasn’t the fierce predator it is usually portrayed as (see my news story here). This animal is almost always shown munching on a hard-shelled trilobite, but it seems that maybe it was incapable of such attacks. Opinion is still divided, but even Simon Conway Morris threw up a picture of a classic reproduction of Cambrian life during his talk, featuring an Anomalocaris gripping onto a trilobite, and quipped “so here we see an Anomalocaris putting a trilobite gently to bed…”. This was met with many chuckles – not, I think, because the idea of a gentler Anomalocaris is laughable, but simply because people don’t know quite how to respond to classic ideas about Cambrian life being overturned. If the ‘gentler’ image holds up, they’ll have to redraw all the Cambrian life pictures.

Posted on behalf of Nicola Jones

It’s a controversial claim and one that would be easy to dismiss if the man saying it hadn’t been Brian Deer. For those that don’t know Deer’s work at The Sunday Times and elsewhere, check out his articles on the MMR vaccine and Andrew Wakefield here. Deer says it took him months to dig behind the original paper to get the facts and he believes that a number of characteristics of medical research papers make them easy to falsify – such as the fact that patient records have to be anonymiszd to protect privacy. As a result, Deer claims clinical research is “chock full of charlatans”. Such “cheats” are not easy to spot, Deer says, though many eventually give themselves away because they get greedy.

The claim caused some ripples at the World Conference of Science Journalists session with former medics or medical journalists leaping to the defence of the medical profession. I doubt that Deer was suggesting that the majority of doctors are “cheats” – though that was how some attending the session interpreted his comments. Instead, I think he was raising an important point about the nature of clinical papers – that despite peer review, the academic process (particularly in clinical research) depends on trust and is open to abuse. And the extent of that abuse is difficult to gauge.

Has the press played up fears when reporting the swine flu epidemic? An unpublished study, commissioned by the European Centre for Disease prevention and Control, suggests not. Looking at swine flu coverage in 33 European countries between 27 April and 5 May, the analysis found that 94% of articles were either factual or supportive of measures being taken by international organisations such as the WHO or national governments. Just 4% criticized governments or international organisations for not doing enough.

The findings were presented by MIke Granatt, a partner in City of London consultancy Luther Pendragon and a former holder of various communications posts within the UK government at a session on swine flu at the WCSJ 2009.

The morning plenary of the World Conference of Science Journalists was Gearing up for Copenhagen and David KIng was on the panel, together with the Guardian’s Damian Carrington and climate scientist Rajendra Kumar Pachauri of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So in the run up to Copenhagen what sort of coverage would King – former chief scientific adviser to the UK government and now advising Rwanda’s government – like to see? King says journalists need to focus on the approach being taken by leading nations in the run up to Copenhagen. To what extent, for example, is Canada’s position driven by the country’s desire to extract oil from its tar sands? King’s claim that no-one is covering this seems a bit strong – see the Nature News online special, for example, where we’ll be tracking national positions over the next few months. However, King is right to demand more analysis on this – he points out that both Japan and Canada have both recently got rid of their science advisers. Given their stances in the run up to Copenhagen – are these countries moving away from science and taking a more narrow stance based more simply on economic gain?