Stay at home

It's conference season again. The summer break is over and people all over the globe are leaping on planes and heading off to exotic, and not so exotic, locations to flit through windowless conference centres in anonymous air conditioned airport hotels, to give or watch or sleep through ever more elaborate PowerPoint presentations in darkened lecture halls. It's fun. It's traditional. But is it necessary? And is it good for us or the planet?

The terror threat might have given pause to some of us. But not for long. In the immediate aftermath of the London bombs, Rubin and colleagues found that …