The story is about a bunch of European veterinarians who wanted to figure out the best suture pattern for closing up a turkey. (Skin staples won. Ew.)

My story also ran on Wired Science.

First of all, in case you don’t have your Hilton genealogy straight (some other guests and I discussed this, and they weren’t sure, either), Barron Hilton is Paris Hilton’s grandfather. He’s the one who thinks Paris has disgraced the family name. Conrad Hilton was the one who started the whole Hilton hotel thing, and he was Barron Hilton’s father. Putting Barron Hilton’s name on the exhibit continues a Smithsonian tradition, which seems to have picked up in the last decade or so, of putting the name of extremely rich people on the names of exhibits. Thus the Sant Ocean Hall and the Behring Everything.

Of course, extremely rich people are used to this sort of thing; their names are everywhere. Thus, Barron Hilton appears below August Busch III on this list of “Team Members”:

That’s the capsule that Steve Fossett used to become the first person to make a round-the-world non-stop solo flight in a balloon.

You have to be careful when you see something like “round-the-world non-stop solo flight in a balloon” – it’s easy to skim past the qualifiers. Other people had flown around the world non-stop before. An Air Force plane did it in 1949, with in-flight refueling. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager did it without refueling in 1986. Another team had even managed to fly around the world non-stop in a balloon before – Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones, in 1999. (Read my story about the Piccard family.) Fossett’s record was that he was the first one to do it by himself. That was in 2002.

Moral: There are a *lot* of records to be set, so listen closely to the qualifiers.

Since I mentioned the Piccard/Jones flight, the red Tylenol-like thing in the bottom of this picture is the capsule from their balloon flight:

Anyway. Back to the gallery at hand. I honestly didn’t spend that much time looking at the exhibit, because I was distracted by things like this:

Holy cow, it was good food. I’m talking about things like “Individual Truffle Macaroni and Cheese” and Kobe beef sliders. And the desserts! Wow. I must think this kind of event is a curator’s nightmare – I saw lots of beers and wine glasses and food plates on top of display cases – but on the other hand, nobody was, like, throwing their mashed vegetables onto the wing of the bright red plane once owned by Amelia Earhart. At least, not that I saw.

Speaking of Amelia Earhart, I learned that in addition to writing about her adventures in books and for National Geographic, she was the aviation editor for Cosmopolitan magazine. Yow. Can you even get your head around that concept today? “77 Sex Positions in 77 Days…On a Plane!” “The Surprising Thing That Turns Men Off…On a Plane!” (I gather Cosmo was different in the 20’s.)

The new gallery also features the plane that made the first non-stop cross-country flight, a nearly 27-hour slog from Long Island to San Diego. This was in 1923. The thing that most impressed me was not the plane, which is, you know, kind of plane-like, but a newspaper clipping reproduced next to it. It was from the LA Times and quoted a telegram from Ezra Meeker of New York City, who wrote to the pilots:

Congratulations on your wonderful flight, which beats my time made seventy-one years ago by ox team at two miles an hour, five months on the way. Happy to see in my ninety-third year so great a transformation in methods of travel. Ready to go with you next time.

I find it kind of mindblowing that only 71 years before, Ezra Meeker was crossing the country by ox team. And in 1923, it took 27 hours and Air Force training to do it. And now, 88 years later, I can just buy a ticket and go to San Diego whenever I want. Crazy.

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My mom contributed to the spread of snack food science by bringing back a packet of oreos from Spain this fall. In the interests of science, I had to buy oreos at CVS – and then not eat them all before I got around to making a comparison. (Curse those tasty cookies.)

On the left, the American oreo; on the right, the Spanish one.

It’s easier to tell in person, but the American one is definitely bigger, although it’s not as big a size difference as ship vs shore oreos. The American one is also a slightly lighter shade of brown. The Spanish ones are a bit more squished, but that could be because the packet sunbathed in my kitchen for a couple of months before I got around to opening it for this experiment. And the American ones taste better. That’s probably thanks to some ingredient that the EU doesn’t allow.

Here’s a side view where you can see the difference in height:

And there you go. Oreo science.

That, my friends, is what a two-and-a-half-year-old apple core looks like. It’s mostly replaced by fungus. I like thinking about how this whole ecosystem of decomposition was sitting quietly on top of my fridge, taking apart this apple core, which really had a lot of nutrition left in it – flesh, seeds, skin, stem – while I was off gallivanting around the Bering Sea, working in Berlin, singing in various concerts, and spending a lot of time sitting at my desk and working.

Now it’s off to the landfill.

Usually when I read about some new genome sequence, I get a big “eh” feeling. As in, “eh, big string of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, who cares.” But this is a really cool disease, and super important economically, and it turns out the genome itself is interesting, too.

The organism that causes late blight has a ginormous genome, with a ton of repeating sequences of DNA. Those big repeaty areas include lots of copies of the nasty genes that help it attack plants, like genes that cause cell death and stuff. So maybe there’s some way that the bug is using those extra copies to overcome the plants’ defenses. Cool, huh?

Chad Nussbaum, the guy at the Broad Institute whose group did the sequencing, said this genome was really hard because of all the repeats – and it helped them figure out stuff they can use later. “Every genome teaches you something new,” he told me. “They’re all strange in their own little ways.”

Best thing I found while working on this story: PotatoPro, a news source for the potato processing industry with headlines like “Sultry Sally has re-launched its low fat potato chip with even less fat” and “Man dies after falling into potato harvester.”

It’s a döner im Brot. It’s kind of a variation on a gyro – mystery meat shaved off a rotating hunk o’ broily goodness, stuffed in bread with sauce, slaw, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, and deliciousness. So much deliciousness. And if there’s not enough carbohydrates in the bread, you can add fries and a soda. Incidentally, Coke tastes so much better here, because it’s sweetened with sugar instead of corn syrup. Mmmm. Suuugarrrrr.

Anyway, this is actually the first döner I’ve had on this trip…and you can probably tell it’s in a mall food court. You’re supposed to buy them from sketchy stands. I’ll do better next time. I was in the mall! It was almost 7:00! I was hungry! I’m sorry! It won’t happen again!

An interesting point about this work is how old-school it is. They’re looking for genes, but not using super-newfangled proteomics or whatever techniques – instead, they look for them by doing lots of mating plants together and looking for crossovers, like I learned about in intro biology in approximately 1994. Ok, yeah, computers do all the calculations now. But if they were teaching it in intro biology in 1994, believe me, it was basic.

Then when they find the gene, they don’t put it into another plant with viruses or fancy-schmancy genetic transformations – they do it with breeding. Sure, they use molecular techniques to make sure they’re getting the right genes in the offspring (this speeds things wayyyy up). But basically it’s good, old-fashioned plant sex.

Neat, huh? Made me want to learn more about the world of rice research.

There it is, my friends. This is the value of life overseas: learning that, whatever ails your digestive system, what you really need is pretzel sticks and coke. Two doctors did ask me if I was drinking coke and seemed a little surprised that I wasn’t. I look forward to trying the local folk remedy this afternoon.

I wish I still remembered all the fascinating things I learned about vanilla…but I wrote it 10 months ago, so the details have gotten a bit muddied. I heard a lot of tales about sketchiness in the vanilla trade, but they were way outside of the scope of this short piece, so I didn’t try to confirm them. I did come away from the whole thing with the impression that the only way I was going to be sure any vanilla extract I used didn’t contain any artificial flavorings was to make it myself. Vanilla beans aren’t as expensive as you’d think, if you buy them on the internet, and they’re so much better than the sad, dry, crusty ones they sell in jars at the grocery store.

Wow, check it out: chocolate sardines. Don’t worry, there’s no actual sardines inside those wrappers. I hope. If anyone’s in France around Easter, I want some – you hear me?