Broke Your CFL? Don’t Panic!

The typical dose of mercury in a CFL is about the size
of a pen tip (circled in red), and these doses
have been getting smaller and smaller.
(Photo provided by EPA.)Australia has already begun to phase out the incandescent light bulb, and the energy legislation recently signed by President Bush has begun that process in the United States. Every time I turn around, it seems, someone is handing me a brand new compact fluorescent light (CFL) to advance the cause of energy efficiency and help save the planet. CFLs are becoming ubiquitous in households all over California. We taught them in the pages of Home Energy all the time. And that’s a good thing, right?

Brandy Bridges, of Ellsworth, Maine may not think so. A cleaning company quoted her a price of $2,000 to clean her house after she broke a CFL.

The benefits of CFLs are many–they use about 75% less energy than incandescents and last up to ten times longer. Replacing a 75W incandescent with an 18W CFL will save you about $46 in electricity costs over the life of the bulb, and that is at current electricity prices, which no doubt will go up, making today’s CFLs an even better deal. Energy Star CFLs (www.energystar.gov/cfls) won’t flicker, give warmer light, and there are a variety of them, from the ubiquitous A-line bulb, to candelabras.

But, and it’s a big but, CFLs won’t give light without mercury. The average CFL on the shelf at your local hardware store has about 4 mg of mercury in it. Mercury vapor is harmful to humans, and there is enough mercury accumulated in some of the fish we eat to make this Californian think twice about ordering salmon for dinner.

Thankfully, there are ways to clean up a broken CFL that don’t involve an overly frightened and/or greedy cleaning company (www.epa.gov/CFLcleanup), and recycling centers are available, if not yet ubiquitous (that word again!) (www.lamprecycle.org).

Even if the worst happens and you break a CFL bulb, the EPA estimates that at most only 6.8% of the 4 mg of mercury will be released, or about 0.27 mg, since most of it is in the glass, electrodes, and in the phosphor coating on the inside of the glass. Incinerating a bulb will potentially release more mercury vapor, if there are no pollution controls on the incinerator.

But even if the CFL released all of it’s mercury–according to Richard Benware, a graduate student at Cornell who researched CFLs last summer for EPA’s Energy Star program–it would still be a better choice than an incandescent, because over its lifetime, the 15W CFL will have prevented the release of 5.67 mg of mercury from an average power plant.

Of course, recycling is best, and that is still a problem. Alan Meier, Home Energy’s senior executive editor, admits to turning part of his garage into a “temporary hazardous waste holding facility” to hold his family’s used CFLs, since the nearest CFL recycling center is 13 miles away from his home in Berkeley, through “one of the worst traffic jams in the United States.” There is help in finding those recycling centers, near and far (www.earth911.org). But we need to put the same effort used in making CFLs ubiquitous into making disposing of them in a clean safe manner just as ubiquitously easy.

You know what I mean.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

latitude 37.8686, longitude -122.267

In the North Bay, a new nursery is lending Mother Nature a hand.

On a recent foggy morning, I drove up to the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge to tour their native plant nursery with biologist Giselle Block and nursery manager Leia Giambastiani. The Refuge hugs the northern reaches of the Bay (If you’ve driven across Highway 37, you’ve seen some of it). Historically this was part of one of the most extensive wetland systems on the West Coast. Here at the Bay’s ecologically rich fringes, habitats shaded one to the next, from open water, to mudflat, to tidal marsh, to upland. During extreme high tides, marsh inhabitants like salt marsh harvest mouse and California clapper rail–both now endangered–sought refuge in the marsh-upland transition zone, where native plants provided cover from predation.

Over the past 150 years, the marsh-upland transition zone has, so to speak, gone the way of the wetlands. Now, with plans to restore 100,000 acres of the Bay’s lost wetlands in the coming decades, scientists also are turning their attention to the critical habitat just above tide line. These days, as a result of our radical re-engineering of the Bay landscape, the transition zone is often on man made levees.

Once reconnected to the Bay, tidal marshes can do a lot of the work of restoring themselves, as seeds and nutrients travel in on the tides. But the transition zone is not so lucky. Without sources nearby, many seeds don’t have a way to get there. Even if they manage the journey, native plants face stiff competition on levees from weedy invaders. Here’s where the Refuge’s nursery comes in, raising from seed native plants such as yarrow (Achillea millefolium), blue wildrye (Elymus glaucus), seaside woolly sunflower (Eriophyllum staechadifolium), and western goldenrod (Euthamia occidentalis), then marshaling volunteers to help remove invasives and plant the natives. In 2007–just its second year–the nursery propagated over 4,000 plants.

What makes this restoration work particularly exciting is that it is truly science in action, an ongoing experiment still working to answer a variety of questions: what’s the best way to get rid of invasives? (Different projects around the Bay have experimented with using a plastic sheeting to “cook” the weed seeds–solarization–and using concentrated salt water from salt ponds to poison them–salinization). Which native plants fare best on the levees, a relatively harsh environment with soils that may differ from natural transition zones? Should the new plantings be left to do their thing, or do survival rates significantly improve with mulching or fertilizer?

And what happens when, as a result of climate change and sea level rise, you run out of levee? Giselle Block points out that no doubt there will be new levees in new places. By working now to create habitat, there will be local sources for seeding new transitions zones, and–hopefully–there will still be clapper rails and salt marsh harvest mice to seek refuge there.

The Refuge and The Bay Institute are partnering to develop more opportunities for volunteers to assist with propagation of native plants at the nursery, invasive removal, and restoration plantings. For more information, contact Leia Giambastiani (707-769-4200, giambastiani@bay.org).

Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”

latitude: 38.1528, longitude: -122.492

Is acceptance of evolution a prerequisite for being a biologist?

Darrow and Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.A biologist who works on zebrafish was recently fired from Wood’s Hole in Massachusetts. His lawsuit claims that he was fired because he told his bosses that he believes in Creationism.

As a new member of the faculty at Fallwell’s Liberty University, he may just be making some noise to put evolution back into the news. But he does raise a bigger question. Can a biologist do meaningful research in the absence of evolution?

Certainly not if he or she is working on anything to do with the origin of life or some other aspect of evolutionary biology. This is because Creationism isn’t really a science and so can’t be studied scientifically. Basically God made the Earth. What’s the experiment? Looking for His signature somewhere?

But does every aspect of biology need to keep evolution in mind? Is there no research that can be done otherwise?

Imagine a scenario where someone thinks that the world was created 7000 years ago. God created all life using the same universal code. God also made it so that all the different living organisms look interrelated at the DNA level. In other words it only looks like genes have changed over time in a way consistent with the evolution of fish into amphibians into reptiles, etc.

To be even the least bit reasonable, that someone would need to say that in those 7000 years, changes to DNA have happened that led to antibiotic resistant bacteria, moths of different colors, etc. Maybe changes caused some of us to get lighter skin or become able to drink milk. Maybe even a new species or two evolved.

I want to be clear here that this scenario seems a bit far fetched, Rube Goldberg-ish, and untestable to me. It ignores all of the fossil evidence and lots of other evidence I won’t go into. But if someone were to approach biology with this as the backdrop, it certainly seems that he or she could still do biology research.

For example, the biologist could study how a specific gene works in people. He or she could even compare it to how it works in frogs or chickens. Just at the end there would be no discussion about how the gene evolved.

The biologist would point out the differences and investigate the mechanisms of these differences. From this research we could learn under what conditions the gene works and what proteins regulate its activity. We might learn why messing it up causes a disease and learn how to treat the disease. Another scientist could even then look at the research and comment on how it looks through an evolutionary lens.

Is there no benefit to be gained from such research? Is science losing smart, careful scientists who could truly contribute to biology?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. My gut tells me that if a person can arbitrarily ignore science that they don’t agree with, they can’t really be a good scientist. They may decide to ignore other data they don’t agree with or that might impact on a different belief system. What do you think?

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

A volcanic eruption on the surface of Io
taken by the Voyager spacecraft. Credit: NASA/VoyagerPlanets hog a lot of press, inside and outside the Solar System, but there’s a lot to be said for those “second class” worlds that are the satellites of the planets–some of which would be true planets (fascinating ones, too) if it weren’t for the fact that they orbit another planet instead of the Sun.

I’d like to point out a few things about these little worlds of which you may not be aware.

I have to start with Earth’s own satellite–the Moon (or Luna, by the Latin name). Whether or not large moons are common around Earth-sized planets, they really are not common in our Solar System. Earth has one very sizable moon, a quarter the diameter of Earth itself, whereas none of the other terrestrial planets really do. Mars’ two moons are pint-sized–roughly comparable to Mount Diablo in size. And that’s it. (I can avoid talking about Pluto’s moon, Charon, since Pluto isn’t an official planet… please don’t throw the rotten fruit!)

Mars’ satellites–14-mile Phobos and 6-mile Deimos–are possibly asteroids captured from the Asteroid Belt, which neighbors Mars. Many of Jupiter’s current count of 63 moons are also probably absconded asteroids.

It’s Jupiter where the satellite worlds truly begin, Luna notwithstanding. As I mentioned, some moons would be planets if only they orbited the Sun directly. Jupiter’s largest moon (the Solar System’s largest, for that matter) is Ganymede, with a diameter that exceeds that of Mercury.

Another of Jupiter’s four large “Galilean” moons, Io, is the most volcanically active object known in the Solar System. Europa has probable oceans of water hidden under its fractured icy crust –oceans, I said, perhaps as deep as 30 miles! Think of the possibilities with that much liquid water! The heating that powers Io’s volcanoes and keeps Europa’s oceans thawed comes from tidal stressing by Jupiter’s powerful gravity–another interesting planet-moon interaction.

One oddity about many of the moons of the Solar System–including our own–is that they are gravitationally locked to their parent planet. That is, like our Moon, they always keep the same side facing their planet. What this also means is that, as the moon orbits its planet, the same face always leads “forward,” in its direction of travel, the other side always trailing aft–in some cases producing amusing results. For example, Saturn’s Iapetus is half bright white and half dark, its face that leads the way in its orbit around Saturn collecting ice particles in much the way that the wind-ward side of a house collects snow, which piles up on that side.

Saturn’s Titan is definitely a world unto itself, with a cold nitrogen atmosphere much thicker than even Earth’s, clouds and haze of methane and ethane, as well as precipitation, runoff, lakes, and even seas of these compounds.

Then there are the ice volcanoes of Enceladus (Saturn) and Triton (Neptune), the great ice chasm of Tethys (Saturn), and… much more than I can even list in this blog!

And don’t forget the one thing moons have that their planets don’t: location! Imagine the view you’d have from the moon of a gas giant planet: a view of the gas giant– magnificent clouded Jupiter, stunning ringed Saturn, blue-green Uranus and Neptune. You don’t find views like these from a planet… at least, not in our Solar System.

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

latitude: 37.8148, longitude: -122.178

For decades, California has gotten waivers in order to enact air quality standards more strict than federal law demands. But this time, for the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency said no. And the reason was that California hadn’t given a compelling reason why it should have authority to regulate the tailpipe emissions that cause global warming. State leaders from the Governor to the Attorney General to the Air Resources Board immediately vowed to go to court to get that authority. Meanwhile, Amy Standen went looking for answers about what other options the state can pursue. Turns out, Professor Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, has a lot of ideas about that.

You may listen to the “Cutting Tailpine Emissions” radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

latitude: 37.7631, longitude: -122.439

Listen! You can hear the sounds of the ocean, but is it getting quieter?

Last week while snorkeling in Roatan, Hondoruas, I came face to face with a Conch. Not a shiny shell in a gift shop, but a moving creature, shuffling along the sea floor, munching on grasses and just being a mollusk. I was in awe. My crew was still digesting the Conch Soup from the previous night and would soon tap our feet to a Garifuna performance complete with Conch Shell blowing. And haven’t we all picked one up off of someone’s coffee table and listened to sounds of the ocean? I am sure I am not the only one who associates the Conch Shell, and so many shells, with jewelry, lamps, ash trays, picture frames, instruments, Bo Derek, and at times, dinner. But this, this was a living creature, using the shell for what it was created for; a home.

The study of shells, both amateur and professional, is called Conchology. There are millions of Conchology practitioners, or collectors, who feel drawn to collect shells. They are inspired by their spirals, blown away by their beauty, and drawn to keep them in their desire to connect with the earth. Many study shells scientifically and their findings can lead to conservation awareness, medical advances and my favorite, biomimicry ideas. I do not aim to deny anyone these experiences, but do wish to know how to collect shells, and all items from nature, responsibly.

As a conservation teacher, I have often talked to kids about picking flowers, etc. At times I will teach the ditty, “One for the butterflies, one for the bees, one for the beetles and one for me,” honoring the deep need to be close to nature, while teaching that other creatures need these treasures for survival. Therefore, we share.

Tips for collection shells might be:

• Adhere to the environmental regulations of the state and country you are in (for California, go to www.dfg.ca.gov/fish/fishing)
• Put things back where you found them as you look
• Take only shells with nobody home
• Be aware of your source and their conservation practices before you buy
• Join a club that practices responsible collection

Other ideas would be appreciated.

On the boat on the way back from the snorkeling, one woman could not resist. She had a shiny, pink Conch Shell on her lap. The guide attempted to explain why tourists are not allowed to take the shells directly from the ocean. As the woman protested, a hermit crab popped out of the shell and gave the woman a surprising poke. Over the edge and into the sea went the shell and its guest. When we listen to the ocean, it sometimes speaks for itself.

Amy Gotliffe is Conservation Manager at The Oakland Zoo.

latitude 37.7502, longitude -122.148

Several billion years ago, our solar system was nothing more than a nondescript cloud of gas. There was no sun, no planets– just a lot of hydrogen, a bit of helium, and trace amounts of the carbon, oxygen and the other elements that we take for granted here on Earth. How is it that the Earth came look so different from that original cloud?

You may remember from the brief description of the planets in my last post that the composition of the inner planets is actually quite different from that of the outer planets. The inner planets are dense and rocky while the outer planets are composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.

It is not a coincidence that the composition of the outer planets so closely resembles the original solar system. As that primordial cloud of hydrogen and helium began to collapse, specific climate patterns began to settle across the solar system. Those climate patterns are almost entirely responsible for the ways in which each planet formed.

It should come as no surprise that the regions of the solar system closest to the sun became the hottest and the regions furthest from the sun the coldest. Like climate on Earth, winds permeate the solar system, and material is thrown off the surface of the Sun and into space. This material is ejected at a rate equal in mass to the Transamerica Pyramid building every second! This stream of particles is called the solar wind. Although you cannot see the solar wind, you may have noticed it indirectly– the solar wind is responsible for such lovely phenomena as aurora and comet tails.

The temperature differences also helped create the solar system we see now. High temperatures closer to the sun boiled the hydrogen and helium off the forming inner planets, like steam rising from a pot of water. At present, what little hydrogen is left on the inner planets is locked up in compounds like water and methane. After the boiling, storms of solar wind swept away the stray particles, pushing them into the outer reaches of the solar system.

The outer planets were much cooler and much more massive, and captured a lot of that stray helium and hydrogen. The hydrogen and helium on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune did not boil at a temperature high enough to escape the planets’ gravity and remain even today. Because of this capture of the original gases in the solar system, the outer planets look a lot like the original gas cloud that spawned all of us. But given that we need the atmosphere we have, we are probably better off here on Earth. It has all worked out for the best.

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

A Nebraska weatherization crew member
blows in dense-pack cellulose insulation into an attic.
(Photo by Pete Davis.)I am just back from the National Weatherization Training Conference in Orlando, Florida. The Weatherization Assistance Program is funded by the Department of Energy and other government agencies and serves low-income households in the United States. Weatherization professionals– the ones meeting in Orlando– are state workers and private contractors who spend a lot of time creeping around in crawlspaces and attics looking for ways to make the poorest homes in the nation more efficient and healthy to live in. People who are afraid of spiders, snakes, and rat droppings need not apply.

State agencies set guidelines on what retrofit measures contractors can perform and how much money they can spend on each home. Contractors in West Virginia work about 50% of the time on mobile homes. The usual retrofits includes attic insulation and duct sealing. Mobile home walls are usually not thick enough to make the time and effort needed to add wall insulation worth the investment. If standing in front of a window inside a home feels like standing in front of an open freezer, maybe new windows are called for, although the measurement of window leakage is a little more sophisticated than that. In some parts of California, however, the best return on investment (ROI) may be from replacing an old furnace and refrigerator. It all depends on the climate and the condition of the home.

One Colorado contractor says, “I don’t like spending $2,000 on a $1 home, but someone may be living there for another thirty years.” And the work of a weatherization agency or contractor is never ending. There is always another home with back drafting furnaces that lead to dangerous levels of Carbon Monoxide inside, or mold run amok in another mobile home, or another elderly couple ready to freeze to death in the next hard winter.

If I sound like I admire these people and the work they do and in fact consider them heroes, it’s because I do. For every dollar they spend they save an average of two dollars. In my experience, the weatherization community is also the most diverse segment of the green building movement. Some weatherization professionals may be partial to fried food and domestic beers, and some may even vote Republican, but they were doing green building and renovation before it was given a color.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

latitude 37.8686, longitude -122.267

This November, San Francisco became the first city in the country to outlaw plastic check out bags at large supermarkets, arguing that the bags are dangerous to marine life and hard to recycle. But some studies say paper bags can be just as harmful for the environment. So why target plastic?

You may listen to the “paper or Plastic?” radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

latitude: 37.773, longitude: -122.439

Which is bigger, an electron or an atom?

If you’re reading this science blog, you probably know the right answer. And that would make you a little more informed than the average American, according to a recent National Science Foundation report.

Getting kids grounded in science at a young age can go a long way to fostering understanding of science as an adult. But according to research led by the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, we Californians aren’t exactly paving the way to a future rich with science literacy. Not to quote too many reports here, but the folks at LHS found that 80 percent of elementary school teachers in California spend little or no time on science at all.

At the same time, an Education Department survey of parents found that the vast majority of them consider science education important. Yet the No Child Left Behind Act has focused study in elementary grades on reading and math, at the expense of science. Complicating matters is the fact that many elementary school teachers say they feel unprepared to teach science, and there’s little opportunity for them to up their skills.

For someone like me who works for a science museum, this state of affairs isn’t exactly news. But I began to reflect on it in a different way after discussing the LHS report with a group of colleagues from other science education organizations at a recent QUEST partner meeting.

If kids aren’t getting science in their classrooms, this means a huge percentage of them must learn about the natural world in other ways. Many kids get very little exposure, either in school or out, to hands-on learning or experiences in nature.

The vast majority of the science they’re familiar with they’ve picked up from TV. There’s a legion of youngsters who’ve seen enough shows to become experts on Brazilian rainforests and exotic savannah animals, but they know little of the California poppies and red-tailed hawks that populate nearby parks. And while CSI seems to have made many people more familiar with DNA, it doesn’t always present science in the most accurate light.

I began to see the role of science museums, educational outreach departments, and other like-minded organizations in a new way: We’re filling a gap left behind by pressures for testing and shortages of resources in public schools.

Why does it matter if kids know about science anyway? Our livelihoods depend on it. Growing fields like biotechnology and green building, which will provide today’s students with lucrative jobs in the future, require solid scientific understanding. The commercial sector has already begun to see this: The pharmaceutical company Merck, for example, founded the Merck Institute for Science Education in 1993. While I’m sure some Merck employees are thinking about the future of young people, the institute is no doubt ultimately concerned with the future of Merck, which depends on the “intellectual capital” emerging from our school systems. Even former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has noted that science education is vital to our economy.

And on a more poetic, perhaps less pragmatic note, understanding and appreciating the nature we see around us is just a pleasant, life-affirming way to engage with the world.

So if you’re a parent, take an afternoon to bring your kid to a nearby zoo or museum or park. Your small effort may help bridge a big gap in your child’s education.

Robin Marks is a journalist and science writer who current serves as a Multimedia Projects Developer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA.

latitude: 37.8037, longitude: -122.449