October summary; registration closure and a brief glimpse of dystopia

On the 13th of this month, I switched on my laptop only to discover there was no internet access. I reached for my phone to use mobile data- no signal there either.

It turned out to be a major outage affecting my broadband and mobile provider, Vodafone. Although it lasted only a few hours, it offered a brief glimpse into a dystopian scenario: a global outage triggered by a cyberattack or a huge coronal mass ejection. It was a stark reminder of just how dependent we’ve become on electronics in our daily lives.

Fortunately, the internet returned just in time for us to close registrations for Flotation '25, having reached full capacity at Cape Town’s Vineyard Hotel. This will be the largest MEI Conference in our long history, and we extend heartfelt thanks to the global community for their incredible response and continued support. If you missed out this time, stay connected with us here for updates, highlights, and news about future MEI conferences.

We are particularly excited about leaving for Cape Town in two weeks' time, as there will be a new member of the team with us, Amanda's son, Will, who will be serving his "apprenticeship" with MEI with a view to joining us in a few years time. So look out for Will if you are at the conference- you may recognise him as he was also at Flotation '07 eighteen years ago.

As soon as the dust settles on Flotation '25 we will be working on our next two conferences at the Vineyard, April's Physical Separation '26 and Mineral Processing Circuits '26. If you would like to submit abstracts to these conferences, the official deadline is tomorrow, but there is some latitude as we will not be drafting the programmes until later next month.