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.

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.)

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!

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.

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.