The thing that helped Jessica Torrey get over her homesickness during the first few months of her postdoc at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Erlangen, Germany, was beer. More specifically, it was a regular gathering at a beer hall: She took a 30-minute train ride to Nürnberg to attend a weekly stammtisch, a regular gathering in which locals and foreigners meet over drinks and practice their English and German. “At first, it was a conscious effort to seek out other people,” Torrey says. “I had to show up at a bar and hope that there would be friendly people, … but it turned out that was one of the groups where I made the most friends.”
Continue reading The Ups and Downs of Doing a Postdoc in Europe
Scientists have estimated that fewer than 3,500 breeding Neanderthal females lived in Europe at any one time between about 38,000 and 70,000 years ago — using a faster and potentially much cheaper method than sequencing whole genomes.