My mailbox has an automated spam filter, but often some smarter messages seep through and end in there; since, however, I already receive hundreds of emails a day, I am not too happy to entertain myself with ones I do not need: so I have developed a sort of instinct to automatically ignore messages which are likely to be spam. Wrong!

My brain is indeed a neural network, but its defect is I trust it too much. Minutes ago I received a message I was about to ignore without even opening it: the red flags were the unknown, uncommon name of the sender (a Becky Meisels), and the words "Gates Foundation" in the subject. Fortunately, I just stepped on it by hitting randomly the "previous" button in my mail browser. It turns out this was not a spam message, but a true invitation by the Gates Foundation.

The World Malaria Day is April 25th, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is hosting a blogger-exclusive teleconference two days before, to "highlight exciting malaria projects being conducted
through the Grand Challenges Explorations initiative (GCE), one of which is being conducted by an astrophysicist."  So she "thought I and my readers could be interested in hearing about the intersection of biology and physics".

The event will feature talks by Regina Rabinovich (director of the Infectious Diseases Development of the Global Health Program of the Foundation), Andrew Serazin, also in the team, and three GCE grant recipients: Prof. Marka from Columbia University, Prof. Foy from Colorado State University, and Prof. Rathod from Washington University.

More information about the event is here.

Apparently, the message is not sent to a worldwide distribution list, but targets bloggers which might have an interest in reporting about the event. I am thus invited to participate in the videoconference, and asked to extend the invitation to a colleague. I am not sure I will participate, although I might connect shortly just out of curiosity. In that case, I might have something to report here about the event; fellow bloggers on this site should let me know if they plan to do the same thing -I am not particularly qualified to discuss health issues.

Anyway, the first reader here who can convince me he or she should follow this event wins a ticket. Beware, I will be a tough judge!