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Racing from one scientific event to the next, I was invited last night to give a talk at the Department of Physics at the Humboldt-University here in Berlin, more specifically at the Insitute for Statistical Physics and Nonlinear Dynamics. Earlier this year, Professor Igor Sokolov there had been alerted by Professor Joseph Klafter to our work on spontaneous behavior in Drosophila. Apart from some technical difficulties with their presentation laptop running only Office 2000, the talk went fine and it was really great to get some feedback from people who actually are experts in the mathematical tools we used. There were some really sharp minded individuals at the talk who asked great questions and very quickly grasped all the concepts and got to the heart of the matter. I love it when that happens! 
Right after my own talk I attended a presentaion by someone using similar mathematics and who had actually been one of the reviewers of our paper, as I had found out later, totally by accident. Dirk Brockman talked about his latest data on the scaling laws of travel in humans. A fascinating talk by yet another of the great European scientists who took a job at US universities! He will start his associate professorship at Northwestern University this summer.
As soon as the talk was over, I darted right to the next event, the award ceremony for the Georg-von-Holtzbrinck-Prize for Science Journalism. As I soon realized, I was way underdressed for the event, but I figure scientists can get away with that. The prize is apparently one of the most coveted in science journalism in Germany and the Holtzbrinck publishing group in Stuttgart is a major player in the international science media, owning, among others, the nature publishing group and Scientific American. Earlier this year they bought the German version of Facebook, StudiVZ. The event itself featured a number of prominent German scientists, journalists and also some politicians and representatives from some of the embassies in Berlin. It traditionally begins with a podium discussion, this year it was on the "logic of emotions". It went off to a rather slow start but eventually got pretty interesting and entertaining. The subsequent speeches and the award ceremonies themselves were short and actually quite entertaining. The awardees were Christian Schwägerl and Kristin Raabe.
Predictably, the highlight of the event was the fabulous buffet afterwards in the restaurant "Heat" of the nearby Radisson Hotel. 
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