Helen FieldsScience Writer

Last weekend I wrote a blog post for ScienceNOW about whether “test tube” babies are healthy. Answer: Basically, yes, but the oldest one is only 31, so there’s no way to know about health effects that show up later in life. And there are definitely differences between babies conceived in vitro and babies conceived the natural way. The differences are epigenetic, which means they’re not differences in the genes themselves – they’re related to how the genes get expressed.

This is related to a shift in how people think about biology. For decades after DNA was discovered, everyone was really worked up about the genetic code, and how genes are a blueprint for everything. But the truth is, of course, much more complicated. Just because you have a gene doesn’t mean that it’s being expressed. It might be turned off entirely, or only weakly expressed, or only expressed in some cells and not others. Epigenetics is about looking at differences in how genes are expressed (turned into proteins).

You can understand the blog post even if that doesn’t make sense

Fun fact: They aren’t test tube babies, they’re actually petri dish babies.

Another fun fact: The picture with my story is of an egg being fertilized by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) (“icksee”). While in vitro fertilization was developed to get around female infertility, ICSI is for male infertility. As long as the guy is still making some sperm, you can fish them out and inject one right into the egg.

On Thursday, I met up with Brandi Murphy, one of the technicians on my icebreaker trip in the Bering Sea last year. Brandi works for the University of California – San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She’s at their Nimitz Marine Facility, or, as I would call it, “the place where they keep the boats.” Since I was in town for a conference, she offered to give me a tour.

It turns out Brandi doesn’t normally do the kind of stuff she was doing last spring on the Healy. On that cruise, she was collecting water; normally, she does marine seismic stuff. Basically, she knows how to tow an air gun behind a boat, make it go boom, and record the sounds that bounce back on a bunch of hydrophones. Here’s the 800-meter cable o’ hydrophones:

“Cable” is really not a good enough word for this. It’s a flexible tube filled with silicon oil. The orange bits are hydrophones – there are 48 spaced along the cable – and the blue bits are floats that keep it hanging at the right level in the water. Wires carry the data from the hydrophones, and computers along the cable process it before sending it back to the ship.

So this high-tech tube trails behind a research vessel and records the sounds from the air guns bouncing off the bottom of the sea. They actually go about 1,000 meters below the bottom, so scientists can use this to map the rocks below the surface.

Next, we poked around the New Horizon, one of Scripp’s research vessels. It’s a whole lot smaller than the Healy, which is my point of reference for all ships. For example, the Healy has two gyms with lots of exercise equipment. The New Horizon has a stairmaster in a workroom and this:

And now, something Brandi thinks you should know if you’re ever on a ship. The lifeboat is supposed to be released by a little pressure-sensitive mechanism. But if that happens, the boat is already underwater and things are pretty bad. So if you should ever find yourself needing a lifeboat, release the latch she’s pointing at or cut the rope below it.

Then find the black thing coming out of the end and pull it to make the raft inflate.

Finally, Brandi took me to look at FLIP. That’s for “Floating Instrument Platform.” It isn’t a boat; it has to get towed out to sea. See the big long thing sticking out front, kinda looks like submarine? That’s part of FLIP. It’s filled with air right now. When it gets out to sea, they fill it with water and the whole thing turns – it takes half an hour – until it’s floating upright in the water.

Everything turns 90 degrees. The walls become floors. And people live aboard, so everything has to either be capable of moving 90 degrees or be duplicated at 90 degrees.

Walking around on the platform is like being in an Escher print. Look up while standing on the deck and you’ll see an unclimbable ladder:

Inside, we saw a bunk on wheels and this sink, in a bathroom:

And here’s a door outside:

The whole thing was both disorienting and totally cool. This video shows what it looks like when it’s flipped.

Brandi is also a knitter – she was working on beautiful burgundy-colored cardigan on the cruise last year. Here’s her knitting blog, which is mostly about spinning these days, but let’s not hold that against her.

Check it out – a blog about the excavations at La Brea tar pits, by one of the paleontologists working on it. (I was there the other day.)

I stuck around in Los Angeles for an extra night to see the Getty Center. It’s an art museum. It’s on a hill. It didn’t rock my world, maybe because of the sporadic rain, or maybe because nothing could measure up to the La Brea tar pits. I was also vaguely irritated that the introductory film didn’t tell you anything about Mr. Getty, other than that he liked art and thought everybody should be able to see it for free. I was interested in such questions as: Who was he? Why did he put his museum here? Was he alive when the museum opened? How did he make his money? (Oil, which I was probably supposed to know already, but still.)

Anyway. It’s got a heck of a location. You pay $15 to park in a garage by the freeway and take a tram up the hill. It’s a nice effect – transporting you up and out of the world, as the cars on the freeway below get smaller and smaller.

Then you wander around, marveling at the giant white buildings. It’s a very white complex. It was very bright on a cloudy day – I can’t imagine what it would be like when the sun is out. The buildings are mostly covered in travertine, the kind of rock in the Colisseum. It’s the stuff that forms the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, in Yellowstone.

The museum has lovely gardens. This cactus garden even comes with a view of Los Angeles.

My lunch was both tasty and surprisingly affordable for a museum cafe. This ridiculous quantity of local vegetables (beets and a kale & kohlrabi dish) and a cup of cauliflower-potato curry soup were well under $10.

There were lots of school groups….ok, maybe you can’t tell in this picture, but those people are kids:

The highlight of the museum for me was a temporary exhibit of drawings by Rembrandt and his students. The drawings were displayed in pairs, with a Rembrandt drawing on the left and a student drawing on the right – often with the same or similar subjects. Then for each one, there was an explanation of why the Rembrandt drawing was better. They pointed out how he used the heaviness of the line, or how specific he was about the light, or how he used hatching. It was really helpful for figuring out what made him so good.

But the drawings were borrowed from all over and photography wasn’t allowed, so you’ll just have to go to Los Angeles by the end of February to see it yourself…or check out the online exhibit here.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I’ve been hearing about the La Brea tar pits forever, so I was pretty darn excited when a friend suggested we go see them while I was in Los Angeles. The tar pits were – are – naturally-occurring tar seeps in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. Animals would wander up, see the tasty water, walk in to take a drink, get sucked in by the tar, and die. Which means there’s a truly incredible number of bones down there. And a museum to show them: the Page Museum.

First of all, let’s get straight what kind of animals we’re seeing:

Definitely no dinosaurs. You got that? No. Dinosaurs. They must get this question a lot – the sign is right at the desk where you buy the tickets. The dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, but Los Angeles was under water until about 100,000 years ago. Animals fell into the tar pits pretty recently, when there were already people in the area. (Ok, I think people turned up sometime during the period they refer to – between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago.)

So, this museum is mostly about prehistoric mammals, like American lions and short-faced bears and dwarf pronghorns, all of which used to roam Los Angeles. Most of what the museum has is bones, which, if you like bones, is awesome. My friend and I spent most of the time wandering around talking about evolution (she did her PhD thesis on it, it still confuses me) and talking about comparative anatomy (quite easy to do when you have so many bones to look at).

For example, we talked a lot about elbows and knees:

This is the front part of a California sabertooth. They don’t call them sabertooth tigers anymore, because they aren’t particularly closely related to tigers.

In mammals, anyway, elbows and knees all seemed to bend the same way – elbows point backward when they bend, knees point forward when they bend. These are elbows, at the bottom left. They bend like ours. But mammals vary a lot in where they put these joints.

Cats and dogs keep elbows where we do – in the middle of the leg. Arm. Whatever. But horses keep them way up by the shoulder:

Sorry, there are a lot of bones in that picture. The horse leg is in the foreground. It’s standing on its toes, or fingers; its heel – or the heel of its hand – is about halfway up the leg; and the elbow is up by its ribcage, just below the shoulder

This may not seem particularly earth-shattering, but it kept us entertained the whole time at the museum, figuring out which bones on different animals corresponded.

There were lots of mammoths in the museum, including this 12-foot-tall Columbian Mammoth, the most common mammoth in North America at that time:

So, I asked, why did all these go extinct? Humans killed them, right? My friend (who prefers to be anonymous on the internet, sorry to be all cloak-and-dagger) said, actually, nobody knows. There was climate change, and it looks like there was an asteroid impact and giant forest fires, and maybe human hunters helped, too. But nobody knows for sure.

The museum is arranged around a lovely green atrium, with this lovely great blue heron:

Ok, that’s a fake great blue heron. A sign explained that they’re trying to discourage a real great blue heron from using the pond as his cafeteria (see the orange koi?), so the decoy is there to make him think somebody’s already claimed it. And if you do see a real one, you’re supposed to tell the staff so they can shoo him off.

And if you go outside, the tar pits are still there, burbling away in the park that contains the Page Museum and the L.A. County Museum of Art.

They really do burble – little bubbles of methane gas come up to the surface and pop. Note that they are fenced off, so you don’t turn into a fossil yourself. And excavations are still going on – in 2006, the art museum started digging to build an underground garage and came across 16 new areas of fossil deposits. They brought up 23 big crates of asphalt (absolutely stuffed with bones), which are now being excavated in the park.

UPDATE, later: I forgot to say, the tar pits smell like tar! Ok, maybe that’s not surprising, but it’s cool.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Yesterday I went to a session at the AAAS meeting about the links between music, language, and the brain. I was particularly impressed by a study on Musical Intonation Therapy. Sometimes people who have had their speech knocked out by a stroke can still sing; this therapy is based on that idea. Patients are trained to speak by singing.

I wrote a blog post for ScienceNOW about a study on whether (and how) this therapy works. I was amazed by the video I describe in the beginning of the story. Unfortunately, the researcher doesn’t have permission from patients to spread video widely, just to show it in presentations.

The researcher said a stumbling block for using this therapy is that people are embarrassed to sing. I think that’s sad – not just because it seems to be a useful therapy, but also because I wish singing was more routine in our culture. Once the therapists – and patients – get over that, the therapy seems to work well.

There was lots of neat stuff in the session. Here’s someone else’s story about how learning an instrument helps with language skills, and here’s a BBC story about the stroke research – be sure to listen to the audio file. (It’s linked a few lines below the picture.)

It’s kind of lame being in a conference center all day, but I can’t really complain when the way to the press room has views like this:

I started the AAAS meeting right Friday morning by going to a session on the science of superheroes. A couple of scientists were joined by two writers from the TV show Heroes and one of the screenwriters on the movie Watchmen. I was really interested in what they had to say about their work, both as a person who likes science and as a writer. They talked about scientific accuracy and how they do what they do. The upshot was: They care about science, but ultimately the character and the narrative are what they care about most.

I wrote about the science of superheroes for ScienceNOW and also did an interview for their podcast with a scientist who has written about physics in comic books.

I’d watched season 1 of Heroes, so I was able to give a little background about the show in my blog post. But then I had a great quote about Watchmen, but no idea what the guy was talking about. So I put out a call on facebook for any friend who knew Watchmen really well. I had five or six offers of help within 10 minutes. Thanks for the help, crowd!

Every year during the AAAS meeting, there’s an evening reception where some big science journalism awards are presented. This year, the reception was Friday night at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park.

I caught the first shuttle bus to the museum. When they opened the doors and let in the flood of science writers, a guy was standing near the entrance telling us there was food on the second floor. I thought, this guy knows what he’s talking about, and asked him what exhibit I must not miss. He told me to go see the fossils on the second floor. Fossils and food? Clearly that’s where I needed to be.

First: I was impressed that all the signs are in both English and Spanish.

Way to reach out to your population, San Diego. I am delighted to report that the Spanish for “Extinct giant sea cow” is “Vaca marina gigante extinta.”

All the fossils in the museum’s fossil exhibit are local. So as you go through the exhibit, it goes back in time, telling you what San Diego was like in that era and what kinds of critters walked or swam here. This is a walrus from the Pliocene, when San Diego was under water.

It’s head-down, sucking up clams like it would in real life. (The label says modern Arctic walruses feed this way, too.)

The fossil section continued backward, to a section on San Diego’s Eocene rainforest, with funky-looking mammals in the trees. All along, there were cool interactive things – and physical things to do, not just computer screens to poke at. This one lets you sift sand for tiny fossils:

You tilt the sifter thingy back and forth and back and forth until the sediment all runs through the grate and some fragments of bone appear.

Nerd moment: I saw this and said, “Ohmygod, K-T boundary.” The rock above the pale stripe in the middle is Tertiary (T) and the rock below it is Cretaceous (K – from the German “Kreide” for chalk). That pale stripe is the remnants of the event that killed the dinosaurs.

So, below the line, dinosaurs; above the line, no dinosaurs, and a lot more mammals. There’s also lots of neat stuff in the K-T boundary that point toward an asteroid impact as the thing that killed the dinosaurs, like a high concentration of iridium, an element that is a lot more common in asteroids and comets than it is on Earth.

I sat down to eat some tasty, tasty dinner with two strangers who turned out to be highly entertaining. After a while, someone else came and sat with us – and I realized he was the guy who’d told me to go look at the fossils. He turns out to be the museum’s executive director, a job he’s had for 18 years. One of our first questions was why the pendulum wasn’t going. “It should be,” he said.

(It turns out you actually start it by standing outside with a long stick, but this is more fun.)

He also showed off this totally cool globe-shaped screen thing – you can choose from a bunch of different programs, like a plate tectonics one, and it shows you how the planet changed over time. I think in this picture, it’s showing how glaciers advanced and receded during the last ice age (and, correspondingly, how sea levels changed all over the world).

He was clearly proud of his museum’s cool exhibits.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

For something I’m writing, I needed to double-check that you can buy meteorites (or pieces of meteorites) on eBay. Of course, I turned to Google. Look at the shopping results:

–> Note that they’re all used meteorites. What do you think the listing says? “Condition: Lightly melted on entry”?

Ok, I checked, and the actual eBay listings don’t seem to describe them as used. But still, it made me laugh.