This weekend I had the good fortune to be invited to the first METHECO conference.  I'm tangentially involved with the METHECO project, in that I help to isolate methanotrophic bacteria from grassland soil, but I was still surprised when my boss invited me to come along.  We started the conference at the Netherlands Center for Limnology (ten-point word for the day, means the study of inland waters) and after two presentations and a word of welcome we moved to our conference site - a conference center in the woods about 13 miles away from Amsterdam.  The schedule is quite nice - we have an hour for breakfast, listen to a few talks, get lunch, go for a walk, hear some more talks, quick break, more talks, dinner, then free time.  The talks all involve the microbial diversity of methanotrophic bacteria in different soil types, and we've made quite a bit of progress - the next step involves combining the data to form a picture of methane oxidation as a whole, and what bacteria are involved.

The conference center is located near a "nature reserve" in the Netherlands - but everything is so crowded here that cows wander the heath and we can see skyscrapers in the distance.  The land is flat, and on the drive out I saw more freshwater than I've seen my entire time here so far.  The countryside is quite nice - most houses have a driveway that goes over a canal, and while it is densely populated a lot of the population lives in smaller towns that are like self-contained suburbs - each with a small village church and market.  Great weather has certainly helped to give me a favorable impression of the country.  Dutch is also close enough to German that I can read the signs fairly well, but all bets are off when they start talking.  Cows and dairy products also play a main role here - I'll post a picture of the giant cows when I get back to a faster internet connection.

It's been great to actually attend my first conference and see how collaborations in science start - it's a lot like herding cats, and it takes a while to make a decision, but that decision tends to be what is best for the group.  I also like the culture of constructive criticism - the more questions and comments a presentation spawns, the better it is considered to be.  I'm also fortunate enough to have been involved on a project of this scale - it's the first attempt to characterize methane oxidation as a whole, rather than just looking at the individual parts.  All in all, I've had a great time so far, and it's been a good way to meet other (mostly youngish) researchers and get a bigger picture of where my small part fits into the project as a whole.

I managed to find a cheap flight to Rome earlier this month, and went over the weekend.  Sadly, we only had two days there - which is not nearly enough - but in even that short time I fell in love with the city.  Regardless of the weather, it's one of the most beautiful I've seen, and every step you take brings you past something you've seen, read about, or studied before.  For some pictures check out the Rome Gallery.  I think that it would take a good month to see everything that the city has to offer, but two days was at least enough to hit (some of) the highlights.  Our flight from Germany was good, and we got into Rome late in the evening.  After some confusion around the train station we managed to find our hotel - but the doors were locked.  A few panic-filled seconds later we found a buzzer and managed to get in.  The room itself was pretty basic - a bed, two nightstands, and a bathroom with a sliding panel door - but it was cheap and centrally located, so my two big concerns were met. 

After a good night's (brief) sleep we hit the ground running at around 8:30, stopping by the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore on our way to the Piazza Venezia.  The church was gorgeous on the inside, a very nice Romanesque church (what a change after all the gothic cathedrals in Germany!) and it was surprisingly well-used - I think there were more people praying and giving confession than there were visiting.  From there, we planned to head straight to the Roman Forum, but we managed to get distracted again - this time by the ruins of Trajan's Markets and Forum.  After spending a good hour or so there (in the sunshine, no less), we tried to reach the Roman Forum again, after stopping for some Roman pizza, which is way better and cheaper than I had imagined, only to be distracted by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Vittorio Emanuele Monument on the Piazza Venezia.  Getting distracted in Rome is hardly a bad thing tho - the entire city is just dripping with history and the only hard choice we had to make all weekend was what not to see. 

All in all, I felt safe in the city - there were video cameras everywhere, and armed police, so it's clear that they take protection seriously, although the massive presence could get just a bit unnerving at times - esp. the police with automatic rifles.

So at around 1:00 we finally made it to where we wanted to start the day - the Roman Forum.  For me, seeing it was almost too good to be true - I've been fascinated by Roman history for a while, and to see the ruins (and they are some pretty ruined ruins) that used to be the capital of the world for so many years was fantastic.  Just wandering around and noticing the small details - game boards carved into the steps to a temple, the columns that used to support the mint, the place where Julius Caesar was cremated - really made the history come alive and provide some context for all that I had studied (so that's what the street might have looked like).  It did take a lot of imagination to reconstruct, but the pieces were all still (mostly) there, and wandering around in the sun made it all the more enjoyable.  Here I had my first run-in with Roman water fountains - there are springs that feed the ctiy, so these pop up all over the place.  To work these, you have to plug the water flowing out the bottom with your hand, which then forces the water to shoot out of a tiny hole in the top, resulting in lots of messy fun, but also free water. Since it was winter, there weren't too many visitors, which meant that we had some space to get up close and really wander.

A short distance away from the forum lies the Colosseum, which I found to be slightly dissapointing.  The outside is still fairly well preserved, but the inside is mostly rows of sloping cement and some bricks - the seats didn't survive erosion, earthquakes, time, and pillaging popes (most of the marble got stolen to build papal fountains, palaces, and St. Peter's Basilica) so it was much harder to imagine how it used to be.  Granted, a lot of this dissapointment stems from the fact that I've seen the arena in Verona, which is still in almost perfect condition - all of the seats, aisles, and arches are still there, and you can wander at your leisure without nearly as many tourists. 

Leaving the Colosseum, we walked through the ruins of the Circus Maximus to the Tiber, where we say the evidence of a major flood - trash in the trees and a crashed barge on the steps.  From here it was on to more pizza and then some coffee for a quick break.  The coffee in Rome is more like a strong espresso and very tasty, and sitting down for a while proved nice after all that walking.  After about an hour just relaxing here, we went to the Pantheon just as it was getting dark.  The Pantheon is just about the coolest church I've ever seen - it's basically a massive dome with a hole in the center and an altar with a few pews at one end.  The open space is a nice change from the vaulted Romanesque and Gothic churches where you don't really feel like you can just wander freely.  It had started to rain a bit by this point, but that was just fine with us - the rain came through the hole in the roof and they had to rope off part of the floor to prevent us from slipping on the wet Roman marble. 

By this point we were quite hungry, so we headed off to dinner at 7:30, a normal time for us but apparently farrrrr too early for Roman standards - we were the only ones in the restaurant!  The ambience was nice, with cheap (and tasty!) house wine, a smoked pig's legs standing by the door that they would shave thin pieces off for an appetizer, and a location right off the Piazza Farnese.  The food was also excellent - I had Abbacchio, a sort of grilled lamb leg that they served with potatoes. Certainly puts the cafeteria food to shame.  We finished off the first day with some Gelato and a rather unpleasant walk through the rain (maybe we should have packed an umbrella) but made it back to the hotel and promplty crashed.

By the morning our jackets from last night still weren't dry, so we hit them pretty hard with the blow dryers until they were at least wearable.  After another quick breakfast at the hotel we caught a tram to the Vatican Museums, which are just ridiculous.  The popes essentially appropriated (stole) whatever they could find from Roman ruins (the bronze roof of the Pantheon was melted down to make cannons and the altar at St. Peter's) so their museum is appropriately well-stocked - there are endless rooms and hallways where they've piled scupltures that would be a centerpiece for other museums on top of each other.  In general, it's about as sumptuous as you would expect (the Borgia Popes doing a lot to maintain the luxury).  Gilded ceilings, paintings by Raphael, Sumerian reliefs, and mummies all mix together in a confusing and engrossing complex.  It would takes a few days or even a week to really go through this museum, so like most people we had to focus on a few highlights.

One of the highlights was, of course, the Sistine Chapel.  The ceiling, walls, and back altar were about as amazing as we had expected, but the room is just as chaotic as the rest of Rome - it is technically forbidden to take pictures, video, and even to talk, but these rules are widely ignored.  Every five minutes a grim and clearly pissed-off guard would come through and yell "Shhhhhhh! No foto!  No foto!", but this only had an effect for about 15 seconds.  I can understand why he clearly hates his job.  I will admit, however, to taking a discreet photo or two (no flash, of course).  After four hours in the museum our feet hurt and museum fatique was setting in rapidly, so we made a break for the exit and got some more pizza, fried mozzerella, and a calzone at a little hole-in-the-wall.

The quick lunch was just what we needed, and soon we were back on our feet and heading towards St. Peter's Basilica - the most impressive church I've ever walked into, and while not technically the largest, it still knocks you off of your feet with its sheer size.  Loaded with tombs, sculptures, relics (they have so many that the spear point supposedly used to stab Jesus while on the cross is used to decorate a statue of a pope!) and a suitably impressive high altar it demanded quite a bit of our time.  After we left the inside, we noticed that it wasn't raining at the moment and snuck back through the entrance line (bypassing the crowds at a moment when the Swiss guards were looking the other way) to climb the dome.

Climbing the dome took a bit of a while (520ish steps) but the views it afforded were more than worth it.  The first stop is on top of the church, where you are relatively free to wander around, looking at all of the smaller domes and detail of the sculptures decorating the roof (they look small from the ground, but are about 10 feet tall and 3 feet thick), which leads you to a vantage point inside the dome - looking down at the nave and marveling at the fact that used mosaics to cover the inside of the dome - something you can barely see from the ground floor!  Although the church has stolen so much from the Pantheon, the Pantheon still beats it in one important respect - its dome is 3 feet wider.  Take that, papacy. 

From here we climbed between the inner and outer walls of the dome to the vantage point, where it promptly started to rain.  Just as we were about to head back down, the clouds broke and the low sun turned everything a yellow-orange-red color, which was truly stunning.  To top it all off, a double rainbow appeared for a while, more than making up for us getting soaked on the previous night.  We stayed up there for about 45 minutes just enjoying it - it was even pretty empty, considering the mass of people we'd had to fight through in the museums earlier.  After the climb down, we got to see sunset over the Vatican and in St. Peter's Square.

By this point our feet were dead, so we popped into a mediocre restaurant (the day can't be completely perfect...) for some pasta and then headed home.  After a quick night's sleep we made it to the bus and got to experience the joys of Roman traffic on the way to the airport, replete with honking, unannounced lane changes, and a general lack of regard for vehicular well-being.  The flight was ok, and after a few more hours in buses and trains I made it back to Marburg.

So I just found out this afternoon that I have been accepted to the Master of Science in Public Health program in Global Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health (Emory University).  Needless to say, I'm quite excited - Emory has a lot of great options, like a partnership with the CDC and a well-regarded medical school.  Still waiting to hear back from the University of Michigan (also an International Health Program), Columbia University (General Epidemiology), and the University of Washington (General Epidemiology), but these decisions should all be coming in fairly soon. 

This morning I attended a talk by Katey Walter from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.  Normally our Monday morning talks are reserved for graduate students presentations from within the MPI, so this talk was a welcome change of pace.  She opened with a video of her graduate students setting a methane flare from a frozen lake on fire - a sure way to get anyone's attention, and then proceeded to talk about how the melting of the permafrost (mostly due to climate change) can help to release the vast amounts of methane stored in the permafrost.  Methane is a bad thing to put into the atmosphere - as a greenhouse gas it is 27 times more potent than CO2 - and it is estimated that in the Siberian permafrost alone there is as much methane stored as is currently present in the entire atmosphere. 

So how does this whole process work?  Thermokarst lakes (pictured below) form when a fire or some other event causes the permafrost

to melt.  If the water formed by the melt is deeper than 2 meters, it won't freeze over in the winter.  This unfrozen water at the bottom of the lake then melts the permafrost around it, forming a "thaw bulb".  One the thaw bulb is formed, microbes (bacteria and archaea) can then use the carbon stored in the form of dead plants from the ice age (and possibly a rotting mammoth or two) to produce methane.  Of course, microbes don't do everything, and some methane is formed and released naturally.  But the magnitude of the gas seep can be enough to prevent the lake from freezing over in areas. 

But the crucial point is that we still have no idea how much methane gets released from these lakes every year - scientists are still trying to figure out how many lakes there are, and to complicate matters, different types of permafrost produce different amounts of methane.  Newer lakes tend to produce more methane than older lakes (as they melt the permafrost), so the contribution of lakes to the global methane budget could be quite large.  Katey will be working with Dr. Ralf Conrad here at the MPI to try to figure out exactly what role microbes play in this process, as well as to work out details of methanogenesis in these lake systems. 

While waiting for a centrifugation to finish, I stumbled across the Mechanical Turk feature from Amazon.  In short, it allows to complete tasks - ranging from picture identification to market research - for a (very) small payment (usually between $0.01 and $0.50).  Some of the tasks pay more - but they usually involve writing 3-4 500 page articles on a specific subject (i.e., auto insurance) that someone was clearly assigned as part of their real job and they are trying to "outsource."  It's also fairly common to see tasks where you supply 50 email addresses to a spam bot for the great reward of... $0.05.  So all in all, it's a pretty odd look at one aspect of the web-based economy - a sort of officially sanctioned black labor market.  Amazon clearly benefits the most here - they charge a processing fee to the posters of tasks, and pay your reward in the form of gift certificates.  This method allows to still charge full price for money you earned from people who also paid amazon - a win-win situation for them where I might end up with enough cash to buy a paperback at the end of the year (or decade). 

One cool aspect is that none of these tasks are able to be automated - a real, live person has to sit down and do them.  While easy, each one serves as a kind of "Mini-Turing Test" and it would be great to see if some computer scientist out there could use this system as a way to test out any AI or advanced program of that sort (all the while increasing their funding!).  Another cool use of the system would be for psychological surveys - you'd reach a huge audience, and with the ability to reject sub-standard or clearly inappropriate responses without having to pay them a dime it would probably save money too.  Instead of $5.00 per person, they could do $0.50 and still attract an audience - all the while increasing the sample size so that results might actually be relevant (undergraduate psych majors, this is clearly directed at you). 

Speaking of work, it continues to go smoothly - I'm learning how to extract nucleic acids from soil and preparing for the METHECO conference in Heteren, NL at the end of the month.  This new soil extraction will tie in nicely to the conference, which will focus on the metagenomics of methanotrophs in different soil environements (fancy way to say get DNA from soil, use it to see what lives where).

So for the first time since 1987 (according the ever-reliable middle-aged German man I struck up a conversation with), the Lahn has frozen over.  And by frozen over, I mean that it's a good 10 inches thick, and strong enough to support the weight of a good 200-300 people.  A lot of families and students were out on the river today, which the DLRG (Deutsche Lebensrettungs Gruppe, think lifeguards for the river who can also do cool rescues) has thoughtfully marked with signs indicating if it is safe or not.  Some were just skating around, some walking, a few (like me) taking pictures, and some hockey players.  A few groups brought tables, chairs, and hot chocolate with, and made a little gathering point on the ice. 

Apart from the sheer coolness factor of this (now) rare event, it has even made the Germans happy!  I should note that seeing Germans smile to each other on the street is kind of rare, but it seems the cold weather brings out the German warmth and Gemuetlichkeit - it seems that everyone was smiling and striking up conversations with strangers.  Getting to walk on the river also gave me a nice new view of the city - there are a lot of cool houses that butt up right against the river, and when it's frozen you can just walk right up and look at the old Fachwerk houses - which from up close look even more like they are about to fall in!

The cold weather (lows are around 8 degrees Fahrenheit, highs around 25 degrees Fahrenheit) should stay until at least the end of this coming week, so I'll be heading back out to the river pretty often.  As soon as the light is right and it's not so hazy I'll come back with some cool pictures of the city from a new angle.

So if you had not yet had the honor of eating in a bakery found in a German-speaking country (we'll even count some parts of Switzerland) then I can only recommend that you rectify this situation as soon as finances and work schedules allow - they make the French and Italian versions look like they need major work and the American versions (with the notable exceptions of Krispy Kreme and Dunkin' Donuts) look like amateurs.  So why are they so good?  I was confused about this myself until I picked up a brochure advertising an internship opportunity at a bakery while eating a cinnamon roll that they improved by adding apples and removing the icing.  In this brochure I learned that bakers must apprentice under a Master Baker (yes they actually have those still) for three years before earning a general license!  To put that in perspective, some nurses in the US only require nine months of training.

You would think that after three years of apprenticeship they would be ready to go off and bake, but they still need to learn about what seems like everything related to bread (farming, hygeine, history of baking, chemistry) and then take a rigorous test to get their "Meisterbrief" which then certifies them as a "Master Baker".  Should they decide to make pastries instead of bread they then have to do this all over again and study confectionaries.  So consider the secret of German baking revealed - programs of study longer than some of those in our medical profession, combined with a teutonic love of bread. 

One of the other upsides to living in Germany is the fact that all professions, even those that we would consider manual labor in the US also conform to this standard - you can be sure that any carpenter or electrician will be a master of his/her craft that has chosen their profession out of interest and not as an easier second choice.  This mentality is reinforced by a German belief that how you do what you do is more important than what you do - an incompetent banker is held in far lower regard than an exemplary technician for Deutsche Telekom, and I think that this system is one that the US would do well to adopt - make sure that every worker is good at what they do and respected for it.