I’m in Berlin for the Falling Walls Conference 2011! It first took place in 2009, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and has now become an annual international conference on future breakthroughs in science and society. Along with five other science bloggers from around the world (pictured below), I will be liveblogging on the Falling Walls Blog. We will be posting regular updates from the events over the next two days. Everyone can participate in our online discussion by commenting on the blog posts.
Today, I’m blogging at the Falling Walls Lab where 100 young academics and professionals will have just 3 minutes to present their ideas. There is a small Irish contingent at this event as Davy Fahy from ESOF2012 is one of the jurors and two of the talks are by Eileen Diskin and Christine Power from Trinity College Dublin. A lot of concentration will be required as one lapse could mean missing an entire presentation!
The main conference takes place tomorrow where 20 of the world’s leading scientists will be presenting their current breakthrough research. Having a background in genetics, I’m especially looking forward to talks by evolutionary biologist Nick Barton about sexual recombination and Nobel Laureate Aaron Ciechanover about personalised medicine.
Liveblog: falling-walls.com/blog [No longer online]
Bloggers: Beatrice Lugger, Germany (Scilogs), Frank Swain, UK (Sciencepunk), Hillary Rosner, USA (Tooth and Claw), Luca De Biase, Italy (Nova24), Maria Daly, Ireland (Science Calling), Bahar Gholipour, France (Alterwired)
..
Post-conference update: See my posts below that were published on the Liveblog
09 Nov: Falling Walls Conference [No longer online]
- Under 30 minutes until Falling Walls 2011 begins
- Nick Barton talks about sexual reproduction
- Anastasia Ailamaki: Efficient Data Exploration
- Ferenc Krausz demonstrates capturing fast motion
- Ingrid Daubechies: Computer Stupidity
8 Nov: Falling Walls LAB [No longer online]
- Falling Walls Lab has begun!
- Constant stream of brilliant ideas
- Lab session two has begun
- More innovation in session two
- Ireland represented at Falling Walls Lab
- Falling Walls Lab draws to a close
Science Calling! 
Bain sult as. Súil agam go mbeidh deis agat cuid den chathair a fheiceáil. Naturkundemuseum ana dheas. (Chaith mé 10 mbliain i mo chónaí i mBeirlín)
Wow… you’d know all the places to visit so! Unfortunately I didn’t get much time to see the sites, apart from around Alexanderplatz and the conference venues. I hope to go back on a holiday sometime! The Natural History Museum looks brilliant (from website).
Fantastic! Hope it goes really well : ) Looking forward to hearing about it.
Thanks Áine! It was a great conference… a lot of work but it was brilliant to have the opportunity to attend.
BTW, there doesn’t seem to be a way for those still free of facebook to follow the falling walls blog? I couldn’t find an RSS feed and neither could Google Reader.
Thanks for letting me know! There’s a link to the RSS feed now: http://falling-walls.com/blog/feed/
Great stuff in Berlin. Dying to hear all about it.
Thanks Kate! I wrote a short post yesterday about my exciting week: Science writing in style