One of the world's biggest scientific meetings has opened in the town of Anaheim in southern California. The conference is the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS (triple-A, S) for short.

The meeting's theme this year is "Challenges for a New Century". Over the next few days, more than 5,000 scientists and policy makers from the US and around the world will gather to discuss a multitude of topics from biological warfare to cosmology.

The AAAS was founded in 1848 to allow scientists of many different disciplines to come together and discuss the issues of the day.

Many of these early members, such as Thomas Edison, went on to become the major scientific minds of the 20th Century. This weekend, it is the challenges of the 21st Century that are under discussion in Anaheim.

Exciting presentations

United States Vice President, Al Gore, will be addressing the meeting on Sunday, and according to programme director Dr Michael Strauss, there is an exciting range of presentations to stimulate the appetites of politicians, scientists and the general public alike.

"We are looking at issues ranging from diseases in the ocean that affect ocean life and affect human life, to how children raised in risky urban environments fare in those environments, to how diet and the environment can affect or promote breast cancer," he said.

"And we have a two day seminar on bacterial genome research and the use of bacteria in biological warfare."

The goal of the conference is not just to reveal the latest developments, but to look at how these advances will affect people's lives world-wide.

Fusion of ideas

Bringing together physicists, medical researchers and social scientists also allows a cross fertilisation of scientific ideas in the hope that progress in one field may lead to new insights in others.

AAAS Chief Executive Officer Dr Richard Nicholson believes this will be vital as the world enters a new millennium.

"I see a greater role for science and technology in the future than in the past, and the AAAS, because it represents all the fields of science, plays a very special role, I think, in making the bridge between the scientific community on the one hand and the public and the policy communities on the other."