ASHG IN NEW ORLEANS ﾻ Just over a year after Hurricane Katrina began forcing many conferences scheduled for New Orleans to relocate, the American Society of Human Genetics expects the Society?s annual meeting there, from October 9-13, to draw numbers comparable to previous years. Health officials will speak on identifying Katrina victims, and members can participate in outreach efforts to repair science education in New Orleans schools. For more, see http://www.ashg.org/.

PROTECTING ANIMAL SCIENCE ﾻ In August, correspondent Stephen Pincock reported that some believe that researchers are winning the battle against animal rights activists. Discussion of these issues will continue at The American Association for Laboratory Animal Science?s annual meeting, from October 15-19 in Salt Lake City. For more on the meeting, see "Biting back at animal activists".

TALKING TRANSMITTERS ﾻ On page 40 of this issue, Nobel laureate Paul Greengard and Per Svennigson describe the involvement of a single signaling protein-DARPP-32-in numerous neuropsychiatric disorders, If you are in Atlanta for the Society for Neuroscience meeting, hear Greengard speak on the subject on October 16. For the meeting?s full schedule, visit http://www.sfn.org.

QUOTABLE SCIENCE ﾻ "I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design or indeed of design of any kind, in the details," Charles Darwin once said. Uncover the origins of this quotation, and many others, in the Yale Book of Quotations, published this month by Yale University Press.