Here's a recent photo from "Music and Games Galore", part of The Tech Museum's new adults-only monthly event, "After Hours".

Please vote on your favorite caption by Friday, September 2. The winning entry will receive (2) free tickets to their upcoming After Hours event, "DNA With A Twist", on Wednesday, September 7. The winner will also receive a QUEST prize package.

UPDATE: The contest is now closed. Congrats to Arlene, the winner of the contest, with her submission: "Just a little further now, all that Yoga gotta to pay off. All TECH considered."

Here's a recent photo from "Music and Games Galore", part of The Tech Museum's new adults-only monthly event, "After Hours". Put your creative hats on and participate in our photo caption contest with The Tech Museum. Submit only (1) caption for this photo in the comments section below by Friday, August 26. Then we'll take all the submissions and have you vote on which one you like best. The winning entry will receive (2) free tickets to their upcoming After Hours event, "DNA With A Twist", on Wednesday, September 7. The winner will also receive a QUEST prize package.

Hard economic times and changing social trends have some museums undergoing a 21st century re-design. The focus is on creating more visitor-centered exhibits using new media tools and more input from the public. Some technology and history museums in the Bay Area are helping to lead the way, as you will hear in our radio piece.

When the public is invited in to help design exhibits, it can create faster turnover and more affordable exhibits. The Tech Museum in San Jose, for example, held a competition in Second Life. The public was asked to design exhibits on the theme of art, music and film. Entries came from as far away as England and China. Winners were awarded five thousand dollars each and asked to translate their designs into a real life gallery space. That exhibit is now on display at the Tech.  According to the Tech's Director, Peter Friess, the exhibit could have taken three years to design. Instead, it took six months. Museum directors are hoping that asking the public to help generate, share and update content will also create more loyalty and drive up ticket sales.

Some people cringe at the idea of asking the public to design museum exhibits. They point to the unlimited number of cat videos on You Tube and ask, "is this really what we want to do to museums?" The museum directors I spoke with say that there is still a role for the curator in this new model, but as more of an educated facilitator than an autocratic, removed taste-setter. Nina Simon, a participatory exhibit designer who writes a blog called Museum 2.0 thinks about this question a lot and has some interesting ideas.

While the participatory, hands-on movement has been around for awhile, these museums are picking up on a cultural shift – and it's not just Bay Area history and technology museums. The Smithsonian American Art Museum was the first to offer an alternate-reality game. The director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore thinks the mission of museums may be expanding to include social services. The Brooklyn Museum created a temporary exhibit, "Click," using crowd sourcing and the Museum of Minnesota created a permanent exhibition based on nominations from the public. I wonder what Web 3.0 will bring?

Listen to the Museum 2.0 radio report online.

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This month marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. If Darwin were alive today, I think he would be very pleased.

He would undoubtedly be very excited about everything we've learned about biology since his time. Like the rest of us, he would be awed by the beauty, grandeur, and complexity of life on Earth.

He would also be pleased that his ideas about natural selection and evolution are to date the only scientific explanation for all of this. His ideas pervade every aspect of modern biology from medicine to genomics to ecology.

His theories dominate because they are supported by mountains of evidence (Read Why Evolution is True to find out more about the data that supports evolution. You can click here for a review of the book.). The evidence in support of evolution is so overwhelming that there is no real debate about it among biologists.

Of course, like any scientific theory, not every "t" is crossed nor every "i" dotted. But that is more of a reflection on how science works rather than the theory itself.

A scientist gathers some data and then proposes a hypothesis to explain that data. Then the scientist does some experiments to test the hypothesis. The new data either supports the hypothesis, requires that the scientist modify the hypothesis to fit the new data, or requires the scientist to come up with a new hypothesis that better explains the data. Then scientists repeat this process over and over again until the hypotheses can be unified into a theory.

This has gone on for 150 years or so for evolution and if anything, evolution is stronger than it was before. Sure, every now and then a hypothesis within the theory needs to be modified but the theory remains as strong as ever.

In fact, no point of contention has yet been raised that is the straw that will break evolution's back. And there is nothing obvious on the horizon that will.

Darwin would also probably not be surprised that his theory remains controversial because it seems to fly in the face of a Creator. Which is of course nonsense. Despite worries about how Earth being the center of the Universe would cast doubts on the Creator, Christianity survived Copernicus and Galileo. And it will survive Darwin as well.

I heard this interesting interview on NPR over the weekend with Richard Dawkins about his book, The God Delusion. In the interview, Dawkins states that it seems unlikely to him that God would create a Universe that could be explained by natural causes. I disagree.

My understanding is that Christianity is based on faith. If a Creator made the Universe in such a way that scientists could show the Earth was 10,000 years old, then of course a Creator exists. That is the only possibility. So where is the faith in that? How would it be different than the Creator greeting each person and welcoming him or her to the Creator's Universe?

To me it makes sense that a Creator would make a world that was or could be formed naturally. In which case it doesn't really matter scientifically whether life arose on Earth through a Creator or by chance. Both ways require evolution. Thank you Charles Darwin for giving us this great framework within which we can understand life here on Earth.

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Having extra copies of certain genes helps fish live in Antarctica

What I like is learning how these beasts have adapted to their incredibly harsh environment. More specifically, what changes have happened in their DNA that allow them to live where no other animal could.

In this blog I'll focus on those poor fish living in the waters off Antarctica. These waters are icy cold and the fish aren't warm blooded. Which means their body temperature is the same as the water around them.

Most biological processes do terribly under these conditions. Proteins don't fold right, enzymes work incredibly slowly, fats glob up. It is astonishing that these fish survive at all.

Scientists figured out back in the 70's that these fish evolved a special antifreeze protein to keep their blood from freezing. Since then they've done other experiments that show other adaptations to the cold too.

In a new study, scientists from the University of Illinois and the Chinese Academy of Sciences decided to take a look at as many genes and as much of the DNA of these fish as they could. What they found was that lots of genes are turned up in these fish compared to relatives that live in warmer waters. And that many of these genes are turned on higher because the Antarctic fish have extra copies of them.

The genes they found that were different made sense. For example, there are a bunch of genes that make proteins called chaperones. Chaperones help other proteins fold up right. In this cold, proteins need all the help they can get!

Also they found that there were more of the proteins that scavenge reactive oxygen species (ROS) in these fish. This makes sense because colder water has more oxygen.

O2 is a pretty nasty molecule that tends to create even nastier chemicals (ROS) that beat up on DNA and proteins. We all have proteins whose job it is to defuse these chemicals. These fish make more of these proteins.

A few years ago it would have been surprising to find that the way these genes made more proteins was by duplicating themselves. Not anymore.

As we look closely at the DNA of various creatures, we are finding that gene duplications (and deletions) happen a lot. Even in people.

For example, people from cultures that eat a lot of starch have extra amylase genes. (This gene makes amylase, a protein that helps breakdown starch.) Some people are resistant to HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) because they have extra copies of the CCL3L1 gene. And so on.

Our DNA is much less stable than we thought. Which is one way we can better adapt to our surroundings. I can't wait to see what they learn about those tubeworms!

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Last blog I talked about some studies that link homosexuality and genes. The most powerful studies are those that compare identical twins to fraternal twins. These studies show that both twins in an identical pair are more likely to be gay than are both twins in a fraternal pair. Since identical twins have the same DNA, this suggests that something genetic is going on.

But no study showed that if one identical twin was gay, then the other one was always gay as well. We'd expect both twins in an identical twin pair to share a purely genetic trait 100% of the time. Because they don't, the environment definitely plays a role. But not like you might think.

By environment I don't mean certain family situations (although these sorts of factors probably contribute as well). What I am referring to are environmental factors that can affect brain development. Factors like viruses, hormones, or maybe even antibodies.

We know, for example, that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay. Even if he doesn't live with the older brothers.

This suggests that something biological is going on. It is as if the mother's body remembers how many sons she has had. One way this might happen is through her immune system.

Perhaps when a mother has a son, she makes antibodies to something having to do with carrying a male child. The more sons she has, the more antibodies she makes. At some point, she makes enough antibodies to affect brain development and the younger son is now gay.

Of course, not every youngest son is gay– he is just more likely to be homosexual. Other factors have been reported to increase the chances that someone is gay too. These include being left handed, having a counter-clockwise hair whorl and maybe even different finger lengths. All of these traits are associated with differences in brain development.

There are apparently many paths to a homosexual brain. This isn't surprising as human sexuality is much too complex to be due to a single gene or environmental factor. Most likely, it is the result of many factors all working together.

Some gay men may have inherited genes that made environmental factors more likely to affect their sexuality. And some gay men may have been exposed to multiple environmental effects that affected their sexuality despite their genes.

I think you can appreciate how these kinds of complex interactions can make finding "gay" genes incredibly complicated. And why it is hard to pinpoint the environmental effects that contribute to becoming homosexual as well.

Dr. Barry Starr is a Geneticist-in-Residence at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA.

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