I've finally done it. After spending most of each year since 1984 on some sort of educational campus, I've broken free. Twenty-five years after shuffling shyly into the kindergarten classroom, lunchbox tightly in hand, I've at last left school behind and joined The Real World (still clutching a lunchbox, though - sharing your cookies on the first day is a cheap but effective ploy to win friends. Oreo, anyone?).

I won't get into the specifics of my new job; suffice to say that it requires getting a pile of vaccinations and that if there's ever an Ebola, bird flu, or zombie outbreak, yours truly will be the first to hear about it. The important thing, though, is that I'm no longer a postdoc doing research at someone else's beck and call. I'm now an independent researcher able to chart my own course through the scientific waters and hoping said course won't take me into the path of a large iceberg.

I was going to devote this entry to a discussion of the things I was going to miss most about the campus environment - the protracted holiday break over Christmas, the foraging for free food, the fact that you could show up pantless to work and nobody would take much notice - but I realized that I'm not really going to miss the campus very much at all. Sure there are a few lab traditions it would have been nice to bring to my new home - shutting down at 4 p.m. on Friday for socializing over beers, taking a sunny afternoon off for a group BBQ - but after 13 straight years on campus, the list of things I won't miss eclipses the few things I will.

I won't, for example, miss the overcrowded buses in winter, each red-eyed, drippy-nosed rider harbouring more germs than the pole at the Lusty Beaver Cabaret. I won't miss the increasingly grim prospects for on-campus dining, a field whose entrants include roughly 20 permutations of the same establishment, each christened with a different name but all selling the same overpriced soggy sandwiches. And I certainly won't miss spending 95% of my lunch break standing in a queue of 100 people all waiting for said soggy sandwich.

I won't miss the constant battle for office space, even though the two years I spent sharing a converted walk-in freezer with 2-4 other people were some of my most productive. I won't miss evacuating the building for a fire alarm or bomb threat two or three times a week during exam season, when some student's Plan A of studying for the exam fails and they resort to their felonious Plan B. And I won't miss evacuating the building for a hazmat incident two or three times a year when that same student, now working in a lab, does something stupid and spills a noxious chemical. Which they wouldn't have done had they studied for that exam years before.

I won't miss overpriced parking and overpriced food, underfunded buildings and underestimated traffic. I won't miss getting older while the students stay the same age. I won't miss worrying about paycheques, worrying about benefits, worrying about tax status, and having to redo all my pay and benefits and forms every time my funding changes. And I won't miss those blue maintenance vans that'll run you down any chance they get.

Yes, you sacrifice a little freedom and a little whimsy when you join The Real World, but it's not the lifeless bureaucracy that some make it out to be. It's actually rather fun. I get to wear a little swipey security pass around my neck with my picture on it, people have parking spots with their names on little signs, and I've got a patch of real estate all to myself that's twice the size of my old freezer.  And plants! The Real World has plants! I've got whiteboards and a mesh chair and business cards and three computers and my own phone line and a door that locks and four whole windows in my office and a coffee table in my office and DID I MENTION THE PLANTS? My God, the plants! And a paycheque! And benefits! And vacation time! And massages! AND THERE ARE A HUNDRED PLACES TO EAT LUNCH! IT'S ALL SO WONDERFUL!

Okay. I've only been there a week and a half. Maybe in a year or two or 10, I'll have found something to gripe about. But for now, I'm pretty jazzed. I've spent 13 years at university and it's finally, finally paid off. I'm doing what I love to do in a place I always wanted to work surrounded by people who are equally excited about their research and I can't wait to see where it takes me.

So take heart, students and postdocs of the world - one day this, too, will be yours. Until then, toil away through those fire alarms and chemical spills, face the long lunch lines, and ride that bus and douse yourself in Purell afterwards. Then, when your training is complete, your free food instincts have been honed, and you have become a Well-Rounded Individual,  come join us in The Real World. We have cookies.

I can't help but feel sorry for the pig flu.

I'm passionate about infectious diseases and, ever since "Swine '09: Bacon Bites Back" burst onto the scene amidst a storm of headlines, press briefings and concerned Tweets, I've been consuming news of all things pandemic with insatiable interest, watching with great curiosity as scientists uncover new knowledge about this novel virus on a near daily basis. I wake up every morning and check the case count, cheer when a new batch of genome sequences is released, and chase down all the interviews and press briefings from CDC officials that I can. To use a timely Canadian analogy, I'm pretty much flying the pig flu playoff flag from my car window.

I can appreciate, however, that not everyone shares my rabid interest in swine flu. After all, I am the girl who opted to study microbiology after seeing Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak. I'd secretly hoped that one day my job would take me to Africa, where I'd sport a blue biohazard suit and run nimbly through the jungle, trapping haemorrhagic monkeys with a big butterfly net and, after a flash of brilliant insight, saving civilization from perishing due to systemic visceral organ necrosis.  

Most people just want to grow up and have a nice house and fast car, not a biolibrary of primate nasal swabs and fecal samples.

But now we're a week and a half into l'affaire du cochon and I'm realizing that my cuddly-wuddly loveable pig flu - one of the most interesting diseases to register on the scientific radar in recent years - is getting a bad rap. The media focus, with few exceptions, has been on the spread of the disease and its potential impact, and much of what makes swine flu and the pandemic so fascinating has been largely ignored.

Thus, in an effort to improve public perception of influenza A/H1N1, I'd like to present Three Fascinating and Scientific Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Pig Flu.

1. The movement of money is helping to predict the spread of pig flu. For many years, mathematical modeling has been used to simulate and predict the spread of disease in a population. In order to develop a model, however, researchers need data on how humans move at the local and national level. Models based on things like highway systems and population centres are often used, but a group at Northwestern University has modeled H1N1's spread using data gathered from tracking currency. By using data from the wheresgeorge.com bill tracker, they developed a description of human traffic (Lévy flights, superdiffusive random walks, and bi-fractional diffusion equations, oh my!) and have used that in their pig flu projections. Or porkjections.

Their disease models, which are based on the worst-case scenario of no public health intervention, are available at http://rocs.northwestern.edu/projects/swine_flu/. You will doubtless be happy to know that even if we sat back and did nothing, by month's end the U.S. would still only have registered about 2,000 cases of H1N1, about the same number of cases of Beaver Fever they expect to see.

2. This is the first "open-source" outbreak. In early 2003 when SARS broke out, there was a three-week gap between when the virus responsible for it was identified and when its genome was sequenced and made available to researchers. Since then, genome sequencing technology has improved to the point where only three days after the first WHO report of H1N1, 40 viral genome sequences had been completed and released. As of today, over 180 complete H1N1 genome sequences from the current outbreak have been made available. With all of this data, many types of evolutionary analyses are now possible. Keen researchers are exploring these genome sequences and are sharing the results with the community through collaborative wikis and blogs. Other scientists are further blogging and Twittering these sites in a spirit of data sharing and openness that is heartening to see.

A team comprising researchers from Edinburgh, Oxford, and Hong Kong, for example, is publishing its analyses at http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/groups/influenza/, where they've reported all sorts of fascinating findings. By using the open-source genome sequence data, they've estimated that the pig flu virus first appeared in September, 2008, and have been able to calculate a statistic that indicates that at the moment, H1N1 isn't spreading very efficiently - only enough to keep itself going at current infection levels.

3. Why the flu is more fatal in Mexico is un gran misterio. To date, there have been 26 confirmed cases where people have succumbed to swine flu, 25 of whom were in Mexico and one of whom was a Mexican who had crossed the border into the U.S. Why haven't any of the other cases been fatal? That remains one of the most fascinating aspects of the outbreak.

The explanation that jumps to the forefront of most peoples' minds is that the Mexican strains must be more virulent than those seen globally. While this is, of course, a possibility, the open-source evolutionary analyses indicate the available Mexican strains aren't too far removed genetically from isolates found in Auckland, New York and Ohio.

Some researchers suspect that pre-existing health factors in the Mexican population might have influenced the disease's outcome, while one leading theory suggests that the increased mortality has to do with the Mexican patients' delays in seeing a physician.

While no one can predict for certain what will happen with pig flu, all indications so far suggest that there's no need for panic. It is, nevertheless, an important reminder that pandemic influenza is a very real threat, with new viruses appearing on a regular basis.

For now, though, just relax, cover your mouth when you cough, and keep washing your hands. And cook yourself up a nice B.L.T. - pigs need all the good press they can right now.

It's the last day of school here at UBC (as I write this anyway. These posts go into a sort of editorial vortex from which they emerge - always unscathed - the next day.) Despite the fact that a gravid black cloud hangs over campus and threatens to soak all the students that have gathered at McInnes Field for the year-end block party, the atmosphere is still electric.

Impromptu barbecues have sprung up on any available grassy surface on campus, the usually long coffee shop lines have been replaced by snaking queues at the liquor store, and whereas UBC's grounds are typically dotted with purposeful-looking individuals doggedly trekking through the rain to the next class, today they're being lazily criss-crossed by roving groups of jubilant friends looking for the next party.

All this and it's only noon.

The end of the school year has always been one of my favourite times on campus. As an undergrad, the last day of classes marked the beginning of a summer's worth of freedom, pregnant with promise. Even now, as someone for whom that promise is just another day of meetings and repeated visits to the coffee machine, it still carries with it a palpable air of excitement.

Sure, part of that is due to the fact that come tomorrow lunch lines will be 90% shorter, the no-longer-overcrowded bus won't smell so much like hot, wet dog-umbrella when it rains, and driving across campus won't mean stopping for ten minutes to let Moses lead his Exodus across the crosswalk.

Mostly, though, it's because once the undergrads have left for their summer jobs, for their hometowns, and for their European backpacking adventures, the faculty and staff that are left behind pull a Tom Cruise in Risky Business. With no one to answer to, it's pants-less lip-synching from now 'til September, baby.

Although to undergrads it might seem as if they're here to serve us, with our ceaseless demands for essays, mandatory lab attendance, and tricky exam questions, for faculty members it's quite the opposite. Although our own research is a huge component of what we do, our teaching and our service to the university community is of equal, if not greater, importance.

Thus when summer rolls around and we find ourselves free from teaching obligations, from office hours, and from constantly striving to give the impression of Nobel-worthy genius, it's like coming home on a Friday to find a note from your parents saying they're gone for the weekend and there's beer in the fridge.

Gone are the monthly symposia, the weekly seminars, and the near-daily meetings in dusty, dimly-lit cubbies. In their place, extended barbecue lunches with the lab, conference travel to exotic destinations, and meetings that progress from sunny patio to sunny patio. Our department even brings in an ice cream truck once every summer to dispense free treats outside the building (an event which proves that no matter how old you are, the instinct to beat a hasty path to the sidewalk when you hear the first few notes of "Turkey in the Straw" never, ever diminishes.)

After a few months of relaxation, though, one starts to miss the vibrant hum of a campus filled with students. Thus when mid-August brings the first stirrings of student life, we are reminded that the few weeks before the first day of classes are just as exciting as this, the last day.

Of course, the excitement quickly fades upon realizing - while standing in a 50 person-deep Tim Horton's line - that although the students remain the same age, we get older and older and that the dog-umbrella smell is only a rainfall away.

Nonetheless, have a great summer undergrads, and if you happen to wander back onto campus before September, don't be surprised if you see me singing Bob Seger into my free ice cream.

I'd like to dedicate this week's column to the memory of SpaceBat, a tiny bat with lofty dreams. The little Chiropter attached himself to the space shuttle Discovery's fuel tank on March 15th in batkind's third attempt to send one of their own into space (the first attempts, involving a 1996 Endeavour launch and a 1998 Columbia launch, failed when the fledgling bat-stronauts did not have The Right Stuff and flew away when the engines started to rumble.)

Whether it was an injury that kept him from flying away, a desire to visit the ISS to experience zero-G flight, or simply the lack of self-preservation instinct attendant with having a .38cc brain, something kept SpaceBat - officially known as "Interim Problem Report 119V-0080" - on that tank through ignition and launch. The little guy even managed to clear the tower, though his fate after that point is unknown.

While in my heart of hearts I had hoped that SpaceBat at least made it out of the troposphere (I like to picture him soaring high above commercial air traffic to the tune of "Wind Beneath my Wings"), the reality of the shuttle launch is that he probably only held on for a few seconds past the tower before he lost his grip. After a mere moment of free-fall, little IPR 119V-0080 would have tumbled into the solid rocket booster's exhaust plume and expired in a blazing hot trail of spent rocket fuel. 

As my shuttle-savvy friend bluntly put it, "In all probability, Squeaky McSpaceBat's body was charred to almost beyond recognition, then swept up with all the rest of the miscellaneous debris that falls on the pad post-launch. But it's way cooler if he made it to space, so I'm going with that."

SpaceBat's ignominious transformation into CrispyBat was a rare occurrence - a science story that received widespread media coverage. This in a month where science journalists wondered "whither science news?" and found that the answer is no longer in the pages of newspapers or magazines.

As Geoff Brumfiel writes in the March 18th edition of Nature News, newspapers are slashing their science sections. As a result, only the most titillating of tales make it to the printed page. Given the past fortnight's publication record, I can only surmise that if you want to make the science pages, your best bet is to market yourself as an ill-fated, Christian, space-bound bat that refuses to comment on its belief in evolution.

This is a shame, as science is verily FULL of interesting news items. A brief glance over the last week's worth of scientific press releases turns up enough to fill a paper or two, in fact.

In a major triumph for Obama's repeal on the stem cell research ban, researchers at Georgetown University have managed to turn cells from adult testes into embryonic-like stem cells that can be differentiated into any cell type, even neurons, giving rise to the possibility that one day entire organs can be generated from nut cells. The possibility exists that an entire nation of ball-people could be grown too, which I could only imagine would spell the end of anniversary cards, instruction manuals, and quiche.

Meanwhile, Nebraskan doctors identified an unusual specimen - the fastidiously clean pothead. Evidently, chronic use of the chronic can lead not only to a predisposition to eating a whole box of Corn Pops in one sitting, but also to a severe vomiting syndrome whose symptoms are only relieved by repeated hot showers. While your stoner roomie might still steal all your breakfast cereal, at least that Big Lebowski marathon isn't going to get in his way of bathing anymore.

So if the newspapers aren't reporting the dawn of the era of ball-people and fresh-smelling potheads, who is?

According to the Nature article, the bulk of science communication is now being done over the web. Scientists are blogging, research institutes are twittering, and sites like eurekalert.org are collating the press releases that feed the science media machine. SpaceBat, for example, probably appeared in a couple hundred newspapers but, in the days since his fiery, furry demise, has spawned over 25,000 Google hits, a tribute website, and a YouTube tribute video with nearly 120,000 views.

The medium has its advantages and its disadvantages. It's instant, globally accessible and lends itself to additional content, be it links to relevant websites, animations, podcast comments from the researchers, or lovingly-scored bat tribute videos. On the other hand, users need to seek it out, putting the onus of scientific literacy on the consumer ("Dude, put down the bong and the Xbox controller. Check this out. Scientists have just confirmed the liquid-liquid phase transition in silicon."). Beyond that, user-created content lacks the editorial polish of traditional journalism (hey, editor - I put that bit in for you ;) (Aw shucks - ed.).

While it remains to be seen what impact the medium shift in science journalism has upon our nation's scientific literacy, the outpouring of love and media coverage for SpaceBat gives me hope that my generation and the ones after it will be active participants in the online exploration of science. Science coverage is evolving, and that's something even an ill-fated, Christian, space-bound bat can believe in.