What's New On ScienceBlogs.de, July 3-9

Feast your eyes on the top stories of the past week at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de:

Wrapping Up Lindau
Last Friday the Nobel Laureates Meeting at Lindau finished with a nice trip to the Isle of Mainau and a lovely farewell ceremony. Beatrice shows us many images of that beautiful day. During the trip we became eye-witness to a new kind of speed dating, which we'll call Nobeldating! These dates lasted during the whole meeting: Different groups of young researchers and somewhere in the center a Nobel laureate. (See the picture of Nobelist Douglas Osheroff, surrounded by young acolytes.)

And our field studies have shown that physicists not only love to do water drop experiments, but also that games such as table soccer or Bollywood singing are very popular. The Lindau Blog is not finished yet; there are some more stories to tell and five more specially produced video interviews will be published soon.

Link: sevenload.com

Nuclear Power—Conversion of the Renunciation?
Germany is currently the only one among the G8 countries with a plan for stopping the use of nuclear power for energy production. But this decision is now again fiercely debated. And a recent small nuclear accident in France—at the Tricastin nuclear power plant, where 30,000 liters of radioactive uran-containing solution leaked out—provides new material for the discussion.

Tobias outlined the climate debate under the headline: 'Fashionable or Rational?'

"An obvious alternative to conventional coal-fired power plants is nuclear power and I have the impression that this alternative is currently favored by politics. This puts climate activists in a huge dilemma. Indeed, the biggest shouters 'CO2 is bad' are also the biggest critics of nuclear power plants.

Christian started again a special search for per-reviewed articles on the topic of anthropogenic climate change. He made a find with a study from the year 2004. Professor Oreskes of the University of California at San Diego has analyzed 923 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers for Science magazine. Christian cited it:

"The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen."

ScienceBlogs Goes Twitter
"Twitter is fast, Twitter is sexy and Twitter connects people. The micro-blogging service Twitter is the ultimate tool." So writes Marc, who has started a scienceblogs.de Tweet. Just some days before, Florian started a Twitter account himself and immediately compiled a list of astronomy tweets for us. Searching for ScienceBlogs at Twitter now, you may also find PZ Myers. Hopefully the text message communications will last long and be joined by others.

That's all for now. Note that links in this article are to blog posts in German—but their authors are usually happy to respond to comments in English. Danke!

This newsletter is compiled by ScienceBlogs.de managing editor Beatrice Lugger.