A new year begins. What will the future will be like, not this year, but 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now? Will dogs have human rights? Will robots do all the house chores and care for babies? Will unicorns and mermaids appear in our labs? Will marriage change? Perhaps science fiction novels have the answer. What do others think?

The photos in this post are from Early 2007. I felt really lucky to be able to make these. Rebeca is now doing her PhD in Ecology, then she was doing her Masters.

In Viejo San Juan it is really difficult to do any work in January because a crazy festival takes place all day and night long. I spent two weeks there in a short workshop on water usage by plants. Despite the distracting festivities going on around me most of the time, I did manage to learn about the various mechanisms plants adopt at different scales to deal with its surroundings and reproduce and grow. I won't write about that here but trust me, it's fascinating. Something else I enjoyed from the workshop were discussions about the Earth's energy and water fluxes.

What I did in addition to that small but significant amount of learning was going out in those hot nights with a large group of graduate students from Cambridge and Viejo San Juan to the streets festival. We danced all night long. We swam at night, under a new moon, in waters where microorganisms glowed in the dark as they slid over our skin. There we even choreographed an aquatic ballet. It was great.

And Rebeca and I made a few photos, just playing around with the camera and light. It was great.