All That Matters

I haven’t been very active on this blog, as I’ve been quite busy settling into my new position at Nature Communications, which is more stimulating than I imagined it to be, but also time-consuming. In future I do plan to continue to blog from time to time. However, the web address for this blog is changing. I managed to get the domain name heber.org and have moved this blog to http://allthatmatters.heber.org/

The old address will still be valid for a little while, but please remember to update your bookmarks. More importantly, please also update any RSS subscription you may have to http://allthatmatters.heber.org/feed/

Thanks a lot!

It has now been more than seven years that I left active research and joined Nature Materials as an editor in March 2005. I still remember my first day as an editor, and one of the very first papers that I handled. A brush made from carbon nanotubes that made it to the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest brush ever made.

Since then, time just flew by. I learned a lot of new science, published exciting research, and most of all, made many new friends. But for me, the time has come to take up new challenges and to broaden my experience in science publishing even further. I am therefore very happy to be able to announce that I will join Nature Communications in October as the Managing Editor (physical sciences). There I will lead a great team of editors across the entire spectrum of the physical sciences.

Nature Communications is a successful online journal that publishes across all areas of the biological, physical and chemical sciences. In particular its open access option has proved to be very popular. Working further on the development of the journal is a tremendous opportunity that I very much look forward to. The team is expanding rapidly, and if you are working in physics or materials science and are interested in a career as an editor, why not join me at the journal, as there is a job opening.

So thanks for your interest and reading this far on this more personal blog post. It is sad for me to leave Nature Materials after such a long time at the journal, with such great colleagues. At the same time, I hope to see you all again as authors, reviewers and readers at Nature Communications!

Hong Kong’s airport. Photo by “countries in colors” via flickr.

Conferences are a crucial part of science, because they offer scientists a platform to discuss their latest research results, exchange ideas for future research, and initiate scientific collaborations.

The benefit to attending conferences, along with reduced travel costs, has led to an ever increasing amount of travelling, with sometimes crazy implications. At a large international conference in Singapore earlier this year I met a European researcher who flew in for one day only. And so did a colleague of his from Japan. Another researcher once told me he travels to 27 meetings a year, which is perhaps not even that unusual. Such trips may not be limited to conferences, administrative trips can be even more frequent. Some Chinese professors fly from the provinces to Beijing for grant reviews and other administrative business about every two weeks, if not more often. I suppose it is the same elsewhere, although Japanese and European researchers have the advantage that in most cases they can use trains.

Of course, these are just personal anecdotes. So let’s consider the travelling involved for a larger international conference attended by about 5,000 researchers, as they exist for pretty much all major research fields. Let’s further assume that on average the participants live about 2,500 kilometres (1,500 miles) away from the conference.  That’s 25 million kilometres flown in total. An airplane uses about 3 litres of fuel to fly a passenger for 100 kilometres. This means that 750,000 litres of fuel (200,000 US gallons) will be consumed to fly researchers to the conference alone. To move those 750,000 litres around by the way would require about 30 large tank trucks. And in terms of CO₂ emissions, well, it’s an estimated 2825 tons.  […]