Freedom of The Press

We would like to apologise for being offline for 24 hours or so - so much material has been posted on this website that blogspot decided we were a computer generated spammer and shut us out of our own website before they decided we really were human after all.

In the meantime, we would like to know if there is any statistically significant correlation between height and an interest in science journalism.

Seen here at the Sydney Convention Centre is Imelda Visaya Abaňo, a SciDev.Net contributor from Manila in the Philippines, Christina Scott, the Africa news editor for SciDev.Net, who is suffering from a bad case of hat hair, and Padma Tata, who co-ordinates the Asian subcontinent for SciDev.Net. They're all within spitting distance of five feet tall (what is the metric equivalent?).

In other words, they're all normal and you tall people at this conference (like Meelis Suld of Estonian Radio and Vladimir Voloshin, editor in chief for the Russian gay magazine Kvir) who towers over us, are the human equivalent of gas-guzzling global-warming-causing SUVs.

At least, that's what the evidence says.

And evidence, as Dr Ian McGowan, co-principal investigator of the Microbicide Trials Network, is what is going to get us through the AIDS epidemic. Of course, his sample sizes are a little bit bigger than ours. So there's only one conclusion to be drawn: further research needs to be done.