The importance of childhood exposure to science on career choices

Just a wee short note (aka ultra-micro-tome, which I just learned is an actual device for cutting really thin samples for a scanning electron microscope) - that's what passes for researcher humour after spending the morning reading about epitaxial morphology in Austromegabalanus psittacus (aka big barnacle) et al. And yes that is English. Mostly.
(If you look closely, the divers are the little specks being eaten by the barnacles ;-)

My Swedish colleague is just leaving to go on a 1-year contract at ESTEC in Noordwijk Holland in the Advanced Concepts Team. I discovered they have a biomimetics section - check out http://www.bionics2space.org/.

I can finally add "watched The Six Million Dollar Man" to my resume!
Of course, when I'm rich and famous I will hire a translator for you so you can understand what balbutio, er sorry, that's Latin for "I speak obscurely".

My first full conversational sentence in German to a colleague today - "Man sagt auf Englisch dass, sprechen mit selbst ist das erste Zeichen der Geisteskrankheit."