Dr Richard Greenwood's most recent blog posting,
A meeting of minds – LPSC 2012, is a report from the 43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference taking place in The Woodlands, Texas.
Science can sometimes be a bit of a lonely pursuit. Sitting at a machine analysing endless samples, producing heaps of numbers, which then have to be processed and evaluated. After that comes the paper-writing stage. Hour upon hour of word processing, bashing out a manuscript to send to journals called something like: The Journal of Inexplicable Minutia or Geocomica et Comatosa Inactiva. Even when the paper is submitted, the job is still far from over. Back comes the manuscript mauled by two or three, often anonymous, reviewers. Then it’s another slog dealing with a seemingly endless list of changes and edits. And, at last, the paper is accepted and the process starts all over again.