Category: Various

Lately I have been getting a flood of spam comments. A lot were filtered by the anti-spam tools, but I was getting something like 20 comments to moderate per day. I decided to stop this by allowing comment writing only by logged-in users. So if you want to post a comment, please, remember to login first.

The first annual meeting of the COST action on plants and UV-B will take place on 6-9 February 2011 in Szeged, Hungary. Please, submit your abstracts as soon as possible, especially if you want to qualify for a reimbursement of travel expenses. The web site of the conference is already live, please register if you plan to participate. Payment of the registration fee can be done later.

I have been using Xmarks (earlier called Foxmarks) for a long time to synchronize bookmarks and saved passwords among all the computers I use. It is an incredibly useful piece of software, and a free service until now. The developers cannot keep it as a free service any longer, and have announced that the service will be closed. Many people commented in the Xmarks blog that they would be willing to pay an annual fee for the system to be maintained. If you use regularly more than one PC or Mac or both you should be using Xmarks. There is a pledge to pay USD 10 per year to keep the service. I have made the pledge, and hope other people also pledge so that the system can be maintained. Xmarks is much better than any of the free alternatives and the only one to allows syncing across the Mac/PC divide or between different browsers.

The demise of Xmarks would be really sad. Please pledge to pay, if you have use for Xmarks. There are just a few days.

Petra arrived in Helsinki one week ago and will stay for another two weeks. She gave an informal presentation about her PhD project, showing results from her experiments on the effect of a dynamic light regime on the rate of CO₂ assimilation in beech and spruce. She has been playing with our Walz GFS-3000 gas-exchange system and our RGB LED light sources. She is now doing more systematic measurements on beech seedlings.

Another bit of incredibly useful information from Rob Hyndman’s blog (I hope you are still checking it regularly). See his post Online mathematical resources and give WolframAlpha a try. I searched for x^2+y^3=6, vapour pressure of water at 30 C, temperature in Helsinki, January 1, 1955, distance Helsinki to Joensuu, and height Aconcagua. I tried two more searchs Finland coffee consumption and 4.3 lb to kg and I am even more impressed. Enjoy!

Both Fang and Matt had seminars today in the Plant Club series. Not many questions, but the public in this series is mostly interested in the molecular side of things.

The SenPEP is a partner in this action code-named “UV4Growth”. The action started officially functioning at the kick-off meeting at the COST office in Brussels. The meeting took place on 7 and 8 April 2010, so the action will end on 6 April 2014. The meeting in Brussels was a management committee (MC) meeting. There are two MC members for Finland, Minna Turunen and myself. I am also coordinating Finnish participation in this action. I am coordinator for WG3 and member of TG UV technology. I am also managing most of the e-mail lists. There will be small scientific meetings of WGs and TGs and also funds for visiting other laboratories within the action (mainly for PhD students and postdocs). There will be a larger meeting for the whole action in February 2011. The chair of the action is Marcel Jansen and the vice-chair Åke Strid. They were elected at the kick-off meeting.

Prof. Nigel Paul visited our group in Viikki last Thursday. He gave a very interesting talk about his views on UV-B research and the directions into which he thinks it should move. He contrasted the old viewpoint of seeing UV-B as mainly a source of damage to plants and the new viewpoint of considering UV-B mainly as an environmental signal regulating plant growth and performance. From that he moved on to describe how we can take advantage of the regulatory responses in the management of crops grown under plastic films. He showed some very interesting examples of results from his experiments.

During the discussion Tapani Koskela from the Finnish Meteorological Institute made some comments relating to the uncertainties inherent in forecasts of future UV-B levels. There was also discussion about possible roles of UV-B in the regulation of plant behaviour in their natural environment.

Over lunch and in the afternoon most of the SenPEP members had the opportunity to discuss their research with Nigel.

Titta had her doctoral defence yesterday, and she defended her thesis very successfully. Her opponent was Professor Nigel Paul from Lancaster University, who led the discussion very well, making the occasion  not only a very good examination but also a very interesting event for the audience.

In the karonkka, in the evening, the tone was very friendly and relaxed.

This is a great culmination for years of hard work, but it is also the start of a new stage in Titta’s academic career.

Congratulations Titta!