AAAS meeting

THE American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world's leading bodies tasked with supporting and propagating all manner of boffinry, and the publisher of Science, a pre-eminent scientific journal, knows how to throw a party. Its Annual Meeting invariably draws hordes of researchers, both bow-tied doyens and dishevelled upstarts, political movers and shakers, besuited public-relations types, press officers, students, geeky high-school teens and legions of even geekier hacks. On February 17th-21st they descended in their thousands on Washington, DC, to mingle, schmooze and, hopefully, find out about some interesting research.

One morning Babbage, never one to miss a good intellectual sortie, took advantage of the beautiful, unseasonably warm weather to saunter from the Washington Convention Centre, which the event has nearly monopolised, towards Capitol Hill. Every person he encountered seemed to be sporting a AAAS badge, fluttering in the blustery wind on a signature blue lanyard. True, the American capital was uncannily empty on Presidents Day weekend, but that only reinforced the feeling of science's ubiquitous presence.

At this point, a waggish remark would usually follow to illustrate the plethora of topics covered in the innumerable lectures, seminars, symposia, poster sessions and the like. But no quip along the lines of "topics range from the inner ear of the golden mole to synthetic magnetism in ultracold atoms" (to mention papers presented on Friday morning in just two of the dozen or so concurrent sessions) could possibly do justice to programme's awe-inspiring breadth. (Incredulous readers can see for themselves.) Although The Economist has sent two correspondents to Washington, giving us the enviable ability to be in two places at once, many interesting-sounding sessions had to be left out of the itinerary, jam-packed though it was.

Some of the speakers which Babbage and his colleague did get to listen to made a valiant effort to link their talks to the meeting's predictably anodyne theme, "Science Without Borders". But most were simply excited to present the fruits of their intellectual labour. The Economist will report on some of these in this week's print edition. Watch this space.