The first astronaut on Mars might have been extracting DNA from her own cheek on Howard Street on Monday. More than 100 scientifically savvy girls from Bay Area high schools attended a daylong seminar for would-be female scientists at the California Academy of Sciences. They participated in scientific experiments -- withdrawing saliva from their cheeks, for example, then using pipettes and centrifuges to extract its whitish threads of DNA, the carrier of the body’s heredity code. They also listened to grown-up female scientists’ reminiscences -- and jokes -- about how they made it as researchers. More...
