I went to the synchrotron press conference this morning expecting it to be mildly interesting and found out that, wow, they can do crazy stuff with these really bright x-rays. One guy had all these bug models that combined *two* crazy pieces of technology: the synchrotron, which zapped amber and made 3-d images, and a 3-D printer that turned the computer version into a plastic model that you can hold and scare people with. (The real bugs are teeny; the models are the size of your hand and off-white.)

Another person talked about a new project that’s just starting, on figuring out how to read scrolls without unrolling them. Turns out the x-ray technology isn’t the problem – it’s the insane quantities of computer power you need to put the image together.

Anyway, totally cool. Read all about it! (Oh, and for more about the Archimedes Palimpsest, that project has a great website.)

Friend and fellow science writer Erik asked, astutely, if we’d be looking at Munch’s art if it weren’t for the Scream being so famous. I think a curator at a major art museum probably wouldn’t have been allowed to mount a big Munch exhibit if it weren’t for the Scream. Without the Scream, he might not have been famous enough to get tagged with a stereotype. But I still think he was pretty great and worth devoting an exhibit to.

I think the later work won Erik over, too – the first few rooms were less Munch-y, as he messed around with Impressionism and other stuff that didn’t really suit him. It reminded me of something I read recently about genius being the ability to be most like yourself. I really like Munch after he settled down and started making Munch-like art. His earlier stuff – eh.

Check out the Art Institute’s website for the exhibit. These are some of my favorites. Makes me want to go back to Oslo and see the Munch Museum again!

Here’s a Washington Post article about it. (Kari Lydersen was at the same press conference and got a different version of that quote. Hm. She’s probably right, but I’m sticking with the version in my notebook. Maybe he said it differently in his science talk.)

Then this afternoon I went to a session called “The Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice,” so I knew I was in for a good time. Jean-Claude Gascard summarized all the data. Guess what: There’s less ice. He had graph after graph showing that there’s less ice every year, and it’s thinner than it used to be, too. He’s from the Universite Pierre et  Marie Curie in Paris. His very nice French accent didn’t make the news sound any better.

The talk after his, by Paul Wassman of the University of Tromsø (yay Norway), was even more depressing. He was talking about how the Arctic may have reached a point of no return with warming. Someone asked if that’s it, if people have lost the battle. “Yes, it looks not good,” he said.

Maybe next year the climate people will follow the example of the fisheries people and start telling us good news about carbon.

The thing I was at before Gore’s talk was my orientation to be a mentor to a student who wants to go into science writing. It didn’t occur to me that I’m experienced enough to be a mentor, but they asked me to do it, so here I am: mentoring. I guess I have been doing this for almost seven years now. Yikes.

You could tell this was kind of a struggle sometimes. I went to part of the scientific session (the blog post was written after the press conference) and Greenpeace guy John Hocevar said, “I’ve been trying to stick to good news but I can’t quite do it.” He hung in there for a while, but then he got to tuna: “Truthfully, the tuna news is mostly bad.” Oh well. He still wrung some good news out of it. And there really are fish success stories.

…What? So there are apparently four levels. I think they’re all subterranean (it’s a little unclear how the topography works here). I am almost certain they are stacked on top of each other. So, *I* would think a clever naming scheme might be to assign them numbers. Perhaps in order. I’d take either order – top to bottom or bottom to top. ‘Cause, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t learn any sequences that went “blue, green, gold, purple.”

Waaaait a second. I swear I’ve gone to sessions on a bronze level somewhere, too. But that’s not on the sign! What is with this hotel?

Here’s a thought of the day about conferences: Wear your nametags, people. Wear them high. Wear them with pride. Wear them turned the right direction. A nametag is not only the ticket that gets you into sessions. It is also an aid to the poor sad memory-impaired people who totally know you but just can’t place you right now and are enthusiastically greeting you without the slightest clue of who you might be. Uh, not that I know anyone like that.

(Me. It was me.)