In certain circumstances, a body can skeletonize in ten to fourteen days.

There is a magnet on my fridge that my girlfriend bought me. It says, “I like poetry, long walks on the beach and poking dead things with a stick." It’s so funny to me because it’s true! Many beach walks with my grandfather growing up involved poking dead crabs, jellyfish, and a random seagull or two and when he wasn’t looking putting them in my orange bucket. I also learned and practiced massage from an early age on. Working on muscles and pressure points intrigued me about the inner workings of the human body. I loved the cadaver show that came to San Francisco a few years back because I could visually see what my hands had felt over countless years doing massage.

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A few minor tweaks to genetic testing companies' websites could make their offerings more transparent to the public and the FDA.

The last couple of blogs I have been talking about direct to consumer (DTC) genetic tests. I talked about how the FDA has begun looking into them and why the FDA isn’t happy with what it sees.

In this blog I thought I'd propose a couple of different ways these DTC companies can present their data that might mollify the FDA. These changes will also let consumers know what they're really getting and whether they want it at all.
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What to do when all your friends are at Burning Man? Here are six fun activities to inspire the Maker in you.

You may have noticed a few strange occurrences this week: rush hour seems lighter, there are no lines at the grocery store and you can suddenly find parking in San Francisco. As many of us know, this is the week of Burning Man.  The city has cleared out and headed to Black Rock Desert in Nevada to show off their creativity, display feats of engineering and adorn themselves in furry costumes.
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The water flowing past Big Break Regional Shoreline through the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers drains half of California's watershed, and creates the largest estuarine environment on Pacific shores.For our latest Science Hike, we visited Big Break Regional Shoreline in Oakley, California. This area is often referred to as the "Inland Coast." However, wishful thinking aside, the name Big Break has little to do with roaring surf. The name "Big Break" hearkens back to a levee failure in 1928, which allowed the San Joaquin River to reintroduce itself to part of its former range - right over an asparagus farm.

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Backyard chickens (credit: Meredith Hall)Yesterday, I along with every other Oakland hipster visited the Eat Real Festival in Jack London Square. There were dozens of food carts—tacos, steamed buns, hot dogs, ice cream, the best Cuban sandwich I’ve ever eaten—and chickens. Yep. There was an urban homesteading exhibit, with animals and experts, and my friend Angela was smitten with the chickens. She wanted to take a few home. Think of all those fresh eggs! However, her husband Malcolm was against the idea—having grown up on a ranch in Mexico, he knew firsthand that chickens are a lot of work. But as I thought about the salmonella-laced headlines that have tumbled across my doorstep and my computer screen over the past few weeks, I thought having my own backyard chickens might not be a bad idea.
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Cows at Fiscalini Farms in Modesto, California.

Three years ago, we visited a Central Valley dairy that was taking an innovative approach to its waste problem. Instead of collecting thousands of pounds of cow manure in open holding ponds, Joseph Gallo Farms uses it in a renewable energy technology known as a methane digester.

Methane gas is a natural byproduct of cow digestion. It's produced as bacteria inside their stomach break down food.  That process continues on the back end (so to speak) as cow manure decomposes.

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Planet Jupiter. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon-Miller (GSFC),
I. de Pater, M. Wong (UC Berkeley)It may sound like a very large political movement of some kind, or a counter-insurgency in some part of the world, but the Jupiter Opposition I'm speaking of is an astronomical event: the time when Earth passes between the Sun and Jupiter, making the Earth-Jupiter distance its smallest and placing Jupiter at the point in the sky exactly opposite from the Sun—hence the name, "opposition."

Opposition is the best time to see a planet like Jupiter: it's at its largest visual size, it's nowhere near the glare of the Sun, and it's in the sky all night long. Score on three counts—how many things in life work out so that the best of all worlds occur at the same time?

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Artist's rendering of exoplanets around a star. (credit: NASA)
Reported for KQEDnews.org.

A team of researchers, led by NASA scientists in Mountain View, announced on Thursday the discovery of at least two Saturn-sized planets outside of our solar system orbiting the same Sun-like star.

News of these extra-solar planets or ‘exoplanets’ marks the first major discovery from the $600 million Kepler mission which launched in March 2009 on a quest to find planets similar to Earth in their composition and size that could possibly sustain life. Read the rest of this entry »

Probably less than a hundred albino redwoods exist in the entire world. There may only be a few dozen. They’re all found in California, from Humboldt County down to Monterrey County.Parasitic, mutant albino redwood trees. Sounds like the premise of a really great-- or truly awful-- sci-fi movie. But sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

December, 1896. A wagon-load of Christmas trees slowly bounces down the wet streets of San Francisco.  Nothing unusual, except that among the saplings sent down from Sonoma County to brighten the holiday festivities, a reporter from the San Francisco Call newspaper notices a group of curious "everwhites:"

"The bark and wood are not different from the common redwood, but one distinct dissimilarity marking the freakish tree.  Wherever there is green in the redwood there is white in this one – that is to say, the young shoots and the leaves are white, with something of a waxen hue perceptible."  According to the newspaper report, a Mr. Orr, who had sent the trees down from Sonoma County, said, "There is only one white redwood to be found in all of the forests up the coast, and that grows on Rule Ranch, near Cazadero."

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A view of Stanford's campus, taken from Hoover Tower. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

Originally reported for KQEDnews.org.

In 1888, when famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted drafted his master plan for Stanford University in Palo Alto, he drew the academic buildings along an east-west axis to efficiently make use of heat and light from the sun.

Now, more than 100 years later, a new generation of eco-centric builders and designers are embarking on a $250 million project to raise, retrofit and re-power buildings across the 8,000-acre campus, in the hopes of slashing Stanford’s greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels in just 10 years.

The plan tackles energy demand in existing and new buildings, while also laying the groundwork for a new energy supply loop that powers, heats and cools the 125 biggest buildings on the main campus. Read the rest of this entry »