Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

MANY thanks to everyone who joined us for another four-day spectacular at New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ Live last weekend. As ever, the exhibits on the show floor were immense, but for me, the best bit is meeting our readers – and seeing the talks.

To hear scientists describe their latest work – whether building liquid xenon detectors for dark matter, or using hot water to drill through the Antarctic ice sheet – is a thrill and a huge privilege.

Rock-star palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger was the standout for me. His story of discovering ±á´Ç³¾´ÇÌý²Ô²¹±ô±ð»å¾± at the bottom of a suffocatingly narrow shaft in a cave in South Africa is one he tells brilliantly and with sparkling humour (see “Lee Berger: We have made another major discovery about early humans“). But every talk I went to inspired me.

After hearing Joe Pecorelli at the Zoological Society of London talk about the citizen science behind the return of eels and seahorses to the Thames, I feel so differently about the murky river that I walk past most days – for all that its crabs are now stuffed full of microplastics (see “Crabs are being found in the Thames with stomachs full of plastic“).

We know that not all of you – our Australian and US readers for example – are able to make it to a show in London . We are working on this, but in the meantime, we did film all the stages this year, and we will put the talks online for subscribers as soon as we can.

For those of you within striking distance of London, please put 15-18 October next year into your diaries. We’ll be doing it all again – just with barrel-loads more new science.