Spent the weekend at the AAAS annual conference in San Diego, my first time there. It was an interesting experience, especially because I registered as a freelance reporter, and it was my first time with a Press badge! I got access to the newsroom (with free coffee – I guess journalists drink a lot of it given the rate at which it kept running out…).

It was also clearly a science conference that was aimed at the media rather than just at scientists – the talks actually tried to give you a broader view of why the science mattered, and the speakers I saw summarized their broad findings rather than focusing on the nitty-gritty details. Of course, that led to some funny talks where, like a lot of research, the summary was just that the research was still inconclusive 🙂

Overall, was a lot of fun, I definitely plan to go back. It wasn’t a fount of story ideas so much as a way to get the highlights of what was going on in all kinds of different fields (after it all, it technically covers all of science). It’s also really huge, so I only saw a small fraction of the talks, but thankfully I knew people at the others, and was able to get a good idea of what was interesting and what wasn’t.
It was certainly a busy time though, especially since I also went to an NASW internship fair, which was also a really good (if intense) experience. But now I’m back with lots of work to catch up on, but I just thought I’d write an update about AAAS before getting back to other work.

Updated:I forgot to mention some “celebrity” sightings at AAAS 🙂 Apart from randomly seeing the science writer Carl Zimmer (whose blog I keep referring to) walking around, I also listened to a talk about the TV show Heroes by its creators, including Tim Kring (they showed videos of the show, then told us how at some point they planned to have superpowers based on actual science, and then jettisoned any semblance of reality every time the narrative required it).

But the funniest was seeing the actor/director/producer Ron Howard (of Apollo 13 and Beautiful Mind fame) and the actor/current White House representative for something-or-other Kal Penn (forever Kumar from the Harold and Kumar movies, though he was on Van Wilder before that and then later on the tv show House) speak at some session announcing a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the USC school of media studies.

The idea seemed vaguely interesting, but the session was nothing but PR-speak, with absolutely no concrete information on what the partnership would actually do. Kal Penn was reasonably funny, though it wasn’t clear if there was any point (not that anyone really cared), and Ron Howard told us that his great revelation came when he made Apollo 13 and realized people were “hungry for science” – which really just translated to, “people want at least a semblance of plausibility in their movies…”

But still, who would have thought – I went to a large science conference and attended talks by…Ron Howard and Kal Penn 🙂