With almost 180,000 phds awarded in the US each year, and ten times that number of graduate students (in all disciplines), the number of posters presented at academic professional meetings is astounding: perhaps 250,000. A single large academic meeting might have 5-10,000 posters. Every poster is a snapshot of the most current work in progress. Each poster takes about a week of work to design and show. That means more than 4000 person years of effort goes into the production of these posters every year: and most are simply thrown away (a few adorn lab and dorm room walls)