It’s been called the most dangerous fault in the U.S. The Hayward Fault runs 40 miles, from San Pablo Bay to Fremont, through some of the most densely populated areas in the country. Every 140 years for the past two thousand the Hayward Fault has jolted the East Bay. Geologists have figured out the regular history of these quakes by carbon dating trenches along the fault. A lesser known cousin of the San Andreas the Hayward fault is a creeper. Basically, it moves, slowly, along the surface but deep inside… it’s locked until tension builds up and and it slips. It appears that it is time for the fault to slip again. The last major earthquake on the Hayward fault was 1868. Scientists believe that the temblor registered 7.0 in magnitude. Hayward and San Leandro were devastated. But if the quake were to happen today, it would be a much different story.

I met Mary Lou Zoback out at the Fremont Bart station, which sits right on top of the Hayward Fault. She pointed out cracks in the parking lot from the creeping fault. Zoback is a geophysicist who worked 28 years at the U.S. Geological Survey and who has done catastrophe modeling of risky residential buildings. Her company estimates that a 6.8 quake, or bigger, on the Hayward Fault could cause a disaster on par with Hurricane Katrina, causing 168 billion dollars in damage and leaving at least 200,000 homeless.

A number of public buildings in the east bay are undergoing retrofitting to make them more structurally sound. Area hospitals have until 2013 to meet seismic safety standards. There is a state inventory of public schools prone to collapse in a major quake, but no such list exists for private schools. And retrofitting standards for risky residences are confusing. I talked with Jim Cook, of Bay Area Retrofit. He says existing codes are unclear and there really is no specific licensing for seismic home retrofitters. Cook has been fighting local governments for years to improve seismic safety standards.

Homeowners can have their home evaluated but what if you are a renter? Many apartments and condos can collapse in earthquakes because they have parking or open commercial space on the first floor making this story weak or “soft.” According to the Association of Bay Area Governments Earthquake and Hazards Program, soft-story apartment buildings were responsible for about two-thirds of the 46,000 uninhabitable housing units in the 1991 Northridge earthquake. In the Bay Area, unreinforced masonry (older buildings constructed of brick, stone or cement blocks) continues to be a threat.

The thought of a big earthquake is scary enough, never mind the chaos that can happen in the aftermath. But the damage from a large earthquake has repercussions that can last for a very long time. We can still see the scars from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Downtown Santa Cruz is not yet fully rebuilt and retrofitting continues on the Bay Bridge. We can prevent a lot of damage up front by shoring up our buildings and creating a family disaster plan and an earthquake kit. The Hayward Earthquake Alliance has put together some really helpful information on how to prepare for a major quake.

Listen to the Hayward Fault Radio Report and view the recent QUEST TV segment on the fault online.

The Hoba meteorite in Namibia, Africa, the largest known
meteorite found; approximately the size of 2008 TC3 before
it burned up in our atmosphere.News Flash! Asteroid 2008 TC3, on a collision trajectory with Earth, made a meteoric atmospheric entry into the skies above Sudan, Central Africa Tuesday morning, October 7^th (local time-about 7:46 PM PDT). Entering the atmosphere at a speed of 12.8 kilometers per second, it exploded with the force of a low-level nuclear bomb…

Wait a moment… an asteroid you say? Hitting the Earth? Isn’t that supposed to spell some kind of disaster, such as Dino-slaughter? Isn’t that something we send people like Bruce Willis and Clint Eastwood to deal with before it becomes a problem down here on Earth?

Okay, so Asteroid 2008 TC3 wasn’t an Earth-killer, but rather a crowd-thriller. It wasn’t miles across-not even tens of meters across. It was, perhaps, a few meters in size, similar in volume to mid-size car. In fact, it didn’t even hit the Earth’s surface, but vaporized in the atmosphere.

Sounds a bit anticlimactic-and that’s not the half of it. It’s not even a rare event! Objects of this size are believed (and sometimes observed) to enter Earth’s atmosphere a few times each year. So what’s the blog deal?

The blog deal is this: this is the first time that an object this size has been detected approaching the Earth a significant period of time before actually impacting-in this case, about a day. 2008 TC3 was detected by the Mount Lemmon telescope in Arizona on Monday. The detection was reported to the Minor Planet Center, which collects such observations from observatories large and small (including Chabot Space & Science Center) in order to track and predict possible Earth impactors. In turn, the MPC alerted NASA of the impending impact.

Observers on the ground reported the fireball lit up the skies with the intensity of the Full Moon. A nearby airliner (not in danger, as the fireball exploded tens of kilometers above the ground, well above the airliner’s flight path) reported seeing a bright flash.

In a sense, this event was kind of a dress rehearsal for the international system of predicting, and possibly defending against, impacts on Earth by much larger asteroids and comets. We already know of thousands of Near Earth Objects (NEOs-asteroids and comets that cross Earth’s orbit and are large enough to cause a catastrophe should they strike the Earth). It is also expected that there are many thousands more that we haven’t yet detected, being small enough to “fly under the radar” of our NEO detecting network.

Early detection and sustained tracking of NEOs is key to the protection plan against impact disaster. If we can accurately predict an impact far enough in advance, we could potentially send a spacecraft to it and gently “nudge” it off course and deflect the eventual impact.

So ends the existence of another chunk of rock that had, up to that point, been serenely orbiting the Sun for billions of years…

Proposition 7 is one of the green propositions – in more ways than one.

The amount of cash that’s being spent on this so-called Big Solar initiative is prodigious. It is one of the most expensive measures on the ballot. On one side you have a little more than $5 million to pass the proposition, all from Peter Sperling, the son of the man who created the online college, The University of Phoenix. And on the other side, three utility companies have pitched in well over $27 million to defeat it.

Interestingly, the companies that stand to profit from this initiative – the many small companies that make up most of the solar and wind energy industry – are actually against the bill.

PG&E and Southern California Edison are the two biggest donors, chipping in more than $13 million apiece. To see a list of spenders, for and against proposition 7, click here.

For more on the debate, check out this discussion from KQED’s Forum.

Listen to the Big Solar on the Ballot radio report online.

The CCHT twin house facility in Ottawa, CanadaTwo weeks ago in this blog I tried to answer the question, Do compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) save energy overall? Even though CFLs contribute a lot less heat to a house in the winter, compared to incandescents, CFLs still save energy overall, even in places like Anchorage, Alaska. Thanks to the folks at the Canada Centre for Housing Technology (CCHT) who did the research to answer that question.

The Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others recommend that we set our thermostats at 68°F in the winter and 78°F in the summer. Some people are comfortable at home with these temperatures and some or not. So how can we save energy and still be comfortable?

Besides recommending that people replace their incandescent bulbs with CFLs, we at Home Energy also encourage people to turn their thermostats down when they are away from home during the winter, and to set them up when they are away from home in the summer. Both actions are supposed to save energy. But do they? It’s not really that clear. For example, if you set your thermostat at 60°F before you leave for work in the morning, and then set it at 68°F in the afternoon when you get back, does your furnace use more energy raising the temperature of your house from 60°F to 68°F, than it saves by having the temperature at 60°F all day?

Once again the Canadians have come up with an answer. Marianne Armstrong and her colleagues at CCHT used the twin house research facility to show that thermostat set backs in the winter and thermostat set forwards in the summer really do save energy.

In the research house where they set the thermostat back to 64°F at night and during work hours, from 72°F, it saved more than 10% on heating costs compared to the house that was set at 77°F all day and night. A 61°F setback saved more than 13%.

In the summer, a set forward to 77°F at night and during work hours from 72°F saved 11% on cooling costs. Now for the big winner: Setting the thermostat up to 75°F all day and all night saved 23% of cooling costs compared to the house set at 72°F. That’s a savings of about 8% for every degree adjustment.

If you lower your thermostat a few degrees when you are away from home this winter, or when you are asleep, you’ll save energy and money. If you set your thermostat up a few degrees when you are away from home or asleep this Indian Summer, you’ll save energy and money. And you won’t be uncomfortable.

Mary Collins School teacher Blythe Shelley touching
a leopard shark at the Aquarium of the BayThat was the question put to a group of Bay Area teachers-all participants in Watershed Week, The Bay Institute’s annual back-to-school teacher-training institute, facilitated by our Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed (STRAW) Project. At the Aquarium of the Bay, these teachers-turned-students got to see, touch, and learn about some of the creatures that live under that Bay-including the Bay’s sharks. They also learned about the Aquarium’s shark tagging program, which aims to help us better understand these amazing and elusive animals.

So, how do the Bay’s leopard sharks, soupfin sharks, sevengill sharks, spiny dogfish, and other shark species differ from “non-shark” fishes? Here are a few key distinctions:

#1. You could say that sharks don’t have a bad bone in their bodies. In fact, sharks don’t have any bones in their bodies. Sharks-along with their relatives skates, rays, and ratfish-belong to a diverse class of fish that have cartilaginous skeletons, unlike the bony skeletons of other fish.

#2. Body shape. If you look at most fish head on, they have a generally oval shape. Sharks, in contrast, tend to be more triangular with a wide, flat under-surface. Their broad pectoral fins give them lift as they move through the water, not unlike the wings of an airplane. This hydrodynamic shape is key to keeping sharks afloat (you’ll see why as we move on to difference #3).

#3. Besides bones, sharks lack the air-filled swim bladders that most fish use for buoyancy (If sharks are airplanes, does that mean bony fish are hot air balloons?) Instead, sharks keep afloat with the help of a large, low-density liver, their unique body designs, and the physics of forward motion. If a shark stops swimming it won’t necessarily drown-only some sharks need to swim to breath-but it will sink!

#4. While most fish have gills tucked behind a bony flap called an operculum, sharks exhale water through gill slits located behind their head. Five gill slits are typical, but some sharks -like the sevengill shark found in the Bay-have more. Most sharks use ram ventilation to breath, swimming constantly with their mouths open to keep water flowing over their gills. Bottom dwelling sharks, whose mouths may be buried in the sand, inhale water through an opening on the top of their head called a spiracle and pump water past their gills.

#5. A shark’s skin is covered with tiny dermal denticles that differ from scales on most fish. As their name indicates, they bear a physiological similarity to teeth. Their unique structure helps reduce drag as the shark moves through the water-in fact, sharkskin helped inspire the high-tech swimsuits we saw at the Summer Olympics.

#6. Most fish spawn by releasing large numbers of unfertilized eggs and sperm into the water. Sharks, in contrast, reproduce via internal fertilization. Depending on the species, they then lay a much smaller number of fertilized eggs, or carry the eggs inside until they hatch, giving birth to live pups.

Old Adobe Elementary teacher Juliet James examining shark teethSadly, these unique creatures are declining all over the world due to overfishing, pollution, loss of habitat from coastal development, and climate change. And that’s bad news not just for sharks but also for their ecosystems. Like lions and wolves, most sharks sit atop the food chain as apex predators; thus their disappearance can trigger a cascade of disruption up and down the chain.

All the more reason for us to study up.

Ball Python (Python regius)The majority of staff were “all hands on deck” this past Saturday and Sunday at the California Academy of Sciences. Yet, we were vastly outnumbered. Fifteen thousand people perused the new building while thousands more enjoyed the festivities in the park.

Two of us, with animal handling experience, were rotating handling of a a four foot Ball Python and a six and half foot Red tailed Boa Constrictor to give guests a chance to get up close and personal with nature.

However, not everyone loves snakes. I had stickers in my pocket for those kids who were too shy or scared to come and see the snake I had in my hands. But the majority of kids would approach unabashed and when I was on the floor with the Ball Python, I was often surrounded by “shorter” guests. As I was going through the Piazza, I was approached by a woman, her daughter, and with trepidation her husband. They were visiting from England and the woman and her daughter were enjoying petting the snake and were asking questions about it. The woman asked her husband to join in and I looked up to see the fear palatable on his face.

My mom, who was bitten as a child has a large fear of snakes, so I could read the fear easily on the man’s face. I asked him about it and he said one of the reasons he loved England was its lack of snakes. Talking to him, I explained my mom’s fear and why the snake I was holding was a great snake for him to pet if he would like to. At full growth, the Ball Python only reaches four feet. The Ball Python gets its name for hiding it head into the ball of its body when threatened, so a chance of being bitten by a Ball Python that is used to being handled is slight. This particular snake, was incredibly docile and had been handled for over ten years. He approached visibly shaking to pet the snake’s body. Tears were rolling down his face, it was apparent that he was facing a life long fear. His daughter and wife were beaming at the exchange. It felt wonderful allowing someone to face a fear in such a safe and positive way.

Stories of moments have been shared amongst staff since opening weekend. All of these stories relate small moments exchanged between staff and guests. Some are funny, some touching. This is just my own story. The majority of Academy staff volunteered to work a ten- to fifteen-hour day each day in order to be part of the opening weekend. Staff coped with long days, tired feet, and answers repeated over a hundred times with a smile. They continue to replay opening with stories like this with each other. It is great to be open and I am looking forward to many more stories and shared moments.

I’m not a gambling man but I suppose living in the Bay Area is a gamble in and of itself, given that the likelihood of an earthquake here of magnitude 6.7 or greater in the next 30 years is 67 percent. As our QUEST TV segment on the Hayward Fault, produced by Amy Miller, and an upcoming QUEST radio segment produced by Andrea Kissack attest, the greatest seismic risk posed to Bay Area residents is the Hayward fault, which last ruptured 150 years ago. The fact that the fault ruptures on average every 140 years, offers a sober reminder of the seismic risk that people working and residing in the East Bay face every day, including Amy and Andrea, as well as several other QUEST colleagues who reside in Berkeley and Oakland. As Mary Lou Zoback stated during the interview, a major earthquake along the Hayward fault would be economically much more catastrophic than Hurricane Katrina, coupled with the difficulty of coordinating relief services in communities like Fremont, where more than 100 languages are spoken.

So we know – or should know – the seismic risks of living in one of the most vibrant, diverse places in the U.S. Short of leaving the region, what can we do?

Well, one of the most illuminating things about working on this story for me was learning a bit about retrofitting one’s home to make it withstand the lateral and vertical forces that accompany a strong earthquake. In short, you need to build shear walls – made of reinforced plywood and shear transfer ties – and bolt them to the walls in the foundation of your house. Suprisingly, there are no official codes as to what constitutes a proper seismic retrofit of a residential unit in California, nor is there a dearth of licensed contractors who will offer quotes and purport to retrofit your home but without any standards in place, homeowners are often at a loss to evaluate the quality of the retrofit which can easily exceed ten thousand dollars, depending on the size of the home and its location. Still, homeowners can avail themselves of a few retrofit resources online, such as Plan Set A, a guideline for retrofitting one’s home that has been approved by building departments of several Bay Area municipalities such as Oakland and Hayward. Also on the Association of Bay Area Government’s web site is a set of schematics illustrating shear wall construction. If you are interested in retrofitting your home, you should get quotes from several contractors, consult your city’s building department to inquire about permits and possibly consult a structural engineer to perform a building analysis on your home.

If you’re like me, though, and don’t own a home but want to prepare for “the big one,” it’s imperative to get an earthquake survival kit. The sells earthquake survival kits but why not make your own, provided that it has water, first aid supplies, a flashlight, food rations and other essentials for you to survive 72 hours while waiting for emergency help. If you want to make your own kit, try the USGS, the city and county of San Francisco, or helpful suggestions from the San Francisco Chronicle and LA Times.

Living in earthquake country, it pays to be vigilant. I applaud the 1868 Hayward Earthquake Alliance, a consortium of agencies that are raising awareness of the risk posed by the Hayward fault with a series of events aimed at educating the public about the importance of preparedness, including a city-wide drill in San Francisco on October 21st, the 140th anniversary of the 1868 Hayward earthquake. We may not be able to predict when exactly the next earthquake on the Hayward fault may occur but we can start planning today to mitigate its effects.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Hayward fault, check out our this link to the USGS Google Earth tour over the fault.

Editor’s Note: Guest blogging for Producer Joan Johnson is QUEST team member and sailing fanatic Sandy Schonning.

The real physics of sailing are so deep and so complex, people
are still debating it.

It was another average Tuesday. I was sitting at my desk, looking at my calendar. Another day of budget meetings, returning emails, reviewing contracts, yawn. The usual buzz of production was going on around me, a crew going out to do a story about… sailing. Ah sailing, my favorite topic. My husband and I had recently moved both ourselves and our Tayana 37 up the coast from Long Beach. Okay, a well-qualified captain had actually moved the boat to San Francisco for us… but since Polaris had gotten here, we had become a bit obsessed about Bay sailing. Sailing in So Cal had not prepared us for the currents, tides and winds of the Bay, so we tried to get out there as much as possible.

Okay, back to Tuesday morning. The buzz moved over to my desk… the shoot was supposed to show a group of beginners on a sailing lesson, but the family that was booked for this purpose had suddenly cancelled that morning. Could I fill in? I considered my clothes… skirt, heels, not really sailing clothes. And moving all those meetings… but a day on the Bay… the beautiful, sunny, windy Bay. Plus, sailing with an instructor, there is always something to learn about sailing, how could I pass this up? Okay when are we leaving? No wait, what am I going to wear… isn’t there a West Marine near the sailing school. Can we stop to get me pants and a pair of shoes? Yes, that’s how much I really wanted to go out that day, I bought new clothes to do it.

It was a great day on the Bay. Stan, our instructor from the sailing school, was great at explaining the physics behind why a boat sails. At the direction of the producers, I asked every sailing question I could think of. Who has the right-of-way, what is this line for, what do we do when the wind blows harder? Okay, I knew many of the answers, but I babbled on anyway. Was I having fun? In much of the segment, I have the goofiest grin on my face. I wish I had a job that took me sailing every day…

Anyway, it was over too quickly - and then it was back to my meetings. But I’ll tell you the biggest surprise of the whole experience: I though the physics behind sailing were pretty simple - a little Bernoulli Principle, a little lift generation. But what I learned made my head spin. It turns out that most of the simple explanations of sailing physics are ‘helpful models’ that make sailing understandable to sailors. The real physics of sailing are so deep and so complex, people are still debating it. If you’d like to see what I mean, check out Arvel Gentry’s website. Gentry was an aerodynamicist for 40 years, is an avid sailor, and an America’s Cup boat designer. His technical papers will give you an idea of what’s really going on:

http://www.arvelgentry.com

Love is in the airI love you. Because you smell different than I do. Not quite Titanic or Casablanca or even Olivia Newton-John in Grease. But smells may be part of the reason why we fall in love with a certain person. At least that is what a new study argues.

We’ve known for awhile that animals find their “true love” partly through smells. One of the things they are sensing is whether the potential mate has a different set of MHC genes.

MHC genes are a big part of our immune system. These genes are used to create the huge number of antibodies that we each make to battle bacteria, viruses, etc. Everyone has a different set of these antibodies.

The more varied your MHC genes are, the more invaders your immune system can recognize and defeat. So two parents with very different MHC genes will have kids with immune systems that can recognize (and so defeat) lots of different kinds of bacteria and viruses. Parents with similar MHC genes will have kids with less varied immune systems. (This is a big reason why inbred animals are so sickly.)

Animals can tell about a potential mate’s MHC genes through smell. And people might be able to do this as well.

Lots of experiments have been done where men or women sniff the sweaty t-shirts of members of the opposite sex to see which t-shirt smells better. If the potential mates are of the same ethnic group, the sniffers tend to prefer mates with very dissimilar MHC genes. If the potential mates were of different ethnic groups, the sniffers preferred mates with somewhat but not wildly dissimilar MHC genes.

The new study looked at a group of 30 European American couples from Utah and 30 Yoruba couples from Nigeria. Thankfully there was no sweat smelling involved. Instead the researchers compared the DNA between the spouses of each couple in many different places throughout their genome.

What they found was that for the Utah couples, the DNA around the MHC genes was much less alike than the DNA almost everywhere else. This did not appear to be the case for the Yoruba couples. This suggests that at least for these 30 couples from Utah, having a very different set of MHC genes may have been part of picking a spouse.

Why the difference between the Utahans and the Yorubans? It is hard to say without more data but one possibility has to do with how much of a role social factors play in picking a spouse in each society. Perhaps the European Americans are freer to choose a mate. If this is the case, then they might be more likely to follow some sort of biological imperative.

Another possibility is that this smell test is only a big deal if the potential mates are all very similar to start with. The Utah couples all had pretty similar DNA to each other to begin with. The Yoruba couples’ DNA was less alike.

Of course, this is a total of 60 couples and so is in no way exhaustive and may be proven wrong tomorrow. But it adds to a growing pile of evidence that suggests how mate selection works at the biological level. And it shows the wide range of things we can learn about ourselves by studying our DNA in great detail. Maybe it even gives perfume companies some ideas too.

For these notes, I thought I’d focus on something that didn’t make it into the sea lions radio broadcast: the necropsy.

Each year the Marine Mammal Center treats somewhere between 600-1000 animals, including California sea lions, Pacific harbor seals, Northern elephant seals, and steller sea lions. About half of them are treated successfully at the center and released into the Pacific. The other half either die naturally or have to be euthanized.

Most of them end up at the center’s hospital after passersby spot the animals on the beach and sense something’s wrong. (The Marine Mammal center responds to calls anywhere between Mendocino and San Louis Obispo Counties — some 600 miles of coastline.) Some problems are human-caused, like boat-propeller injuries or ingested fishing nets and hooks. Other times, it’s cancer, domoic acid poisoning, or increasingly these days, leptospirosis. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell exactly what happened — hence the need for necropsies.

On the day that Quest intern Jennifer Skene and I visited the center, veterinarian Nicola Pussini performed two necropsies, both on sea lions. One animal seemed to have died from a tumor underneath his fin; the other was a suspected domoic acid intoxication.

Each necropsy takes about an hour and a half. First Pussini measures the animal, then he slices it open and inspects every part, from tongue to tail. He inspects the teeth, pulls out all the organs, checks to see how much fat the animal has. The data, along with tissue samples, are archived and shared with other research institutions. This is the kind of basic research that Marine Mammal Center staff cite when people ask why they devote so many resources (most of it from private donations) to animals whose populations are neither threatened nor endangered.

I should mention that I didn’t exactly see this entire process firsthand. Let’s just say that after my first strong whiff of sea lion intestine, I felt a compelling need to go check on things outside the necropsy room. Luckily for me, Jennifer has the stomach of a true scientist and managed to both hold the microphone and take photos. Luckily for you, we’re sparing you her gorier shots.

Watch the Sea Lion Rescue audio slide show online.