QUEST Community Science Blog

The coast between Pacifica and Montara is unsurpassed in scenic beauty. Carved out of the steep cliff sides, Route 1 hugs the coastline for much of the distance between these two towns. In one part, the road crosses the aptly named Devil’s Slide region, a steep, unstable geological formation. This section of road has a long history of closure due to rockslides and land slippage. One of the longest road closures happened in 1995. It lasted 158 days, and cost almost $3 million to repair. It was closed again recently due to another major slide. Following many years of public input and careful evaluation of alternatives, Devil’s Slide will be by-passed by two inland tunnels, providing a safe, dependable highway between Pacifica and Montara.

For those working on California’s first tunnel in 43 years, it’s an opportunity of a lifetime.

You may listen to the “Devil’s Slide” Radio report online, and view geotagged photos from this story on the KQED QUEST - Devil’s Slide photo set.

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

Double star Albireo, at the head of Cygnus the Swan.
Credit: Conrad Jung, through Chabot’s 8-inch telescope, Leah.I occasionally get an email or a phone call from someone wanting to know what that strange, dazzling light was they saw in the sky that looked too unusual to be a star, or a planet, and was certainly not an airplane…

Whenever this happens, I think back to a night in my youth when the same sort of thing happened to me. I was in my early teens, living under the relatively “dark” skies of Alamo, in the shadow of Las Trampas Regional Park. I walked outside and looked up to the sky to see a dazzling light, one that I swore I’d never seen before.

Its sheer brightness was enough to make me do a double take, but the way it flickered and flashed in every color or the rainbow– red, blue, green, maybe a glint of yellow– made me wonder if I were seeing a supernova, and if I should run inside and report it to someone.

As it turned out, it was the star Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major, to the left of Orion– and though it’s a member of a winter constellation, you can still see it, low in the southwestern sky after dusk. Sirius is the brightest star in our sky–after the Sun of course– with enough intensity in its light for the color-sensing “cone” cells in our eyes’ retinas to register. The prismatic flashing of different colors you can see in Sirius is caused by its light being refracted in Earth’s atmosphere and the various colors being split apart, like light passing through a prism.

Though there are some other stars bright enough to show their true colors to our human eyes– such as “red giant” stars like Antares, Betelgeuse, and Arcturas– most stars are only detected by our more sensitive “rod” cells, which paint pictures in our brains in shades of gray. The fact of the matter is that the night sky is full of color– it’s just too subtle for our eyes to perceive.
Telescopes, even small ones, can bring out the colors in objects in space, collecting enough light to stimulate our color vision or to allow a camera to capture a color image. The subtle colors of the night sky begin to reveal themselves, from the blue-whites and yellows and oranges of stars to the pinks of clouds of hydrogen gas (nebulas) to the soft blue-greens in distant planets like Uranus and Neptune.

You can check out our colorful universe as seen though Chabot Space & Science Center’s large telescopes at http://www.chabotspace.org/vsc/observatory/astrophotos.asp, or come up on a public viewing night on Friday or Saturday to look through the telescopes with your own eyes.

There’s a whole universe waiting to be noticed every time you step outside at night. It was Sirius that got me hooked on star gazing–after the surprise of its brightness and the colors in its light had passed. Before it disappears into the twilight of spring and summer, take a look to the southwest after dusk and see what you think…

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

The Orientation Center for the Blind, in Albany, educates adults who are becoming blind. How do you prepare someone for their journey into darkness? What are the current causes of adult blindness? Our QUEST story follows Regina, who is becoming blind, as she develops skills such as walking with a white cane and talks about her fears of becoming blind and how she has been preparing psychologically. We also talk with specialists about what causes adult blindness and how to prepare someone to live in the dark.

Nanotechnology Takes Off and Journey into Darkness (episode #106), airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

You may also view the entire Journey into Darkness story online.

Gabriela Quirós is a Segment Producer for KQED-TV, and is the producer for this story.

Nanotechnology is the science of manipulating things atom-by-atom to produce the smallest human-made objects. It is among the hottest new research fields in the world, and the Bay Area is a center for its study. Within 15 years, experts predict, it will drive progress in virtually every field, from computing to medicine, manufacturing, energy and the environment. Simply put, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. How small is that? A human hair is 80,000 nanometers thick. Scientists at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, private start-up companies in Silicon Valley, and other institutions are working on astounding projects only a few nanometers in size. Among them: finding cancer tumors without scalpels, designing clothes that won’t stain, building super-efficient solar panels as thick as a sheet of paper, and detecting airborne anthrax or other biological or chemical substances that terrorists may inject into subways, office buildings or Congress. Is it safe to be fiddling around with things so small we can barely measure them? And just as the internet drove our economy in the past 20 years, will the super-small be the Bay Area’s next big thing?

Nanotechnology Takes Off and Journey into Darkness (episode #106), airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

You may also view the entire Nanotechnology Takes Off story online.

Josh Rosen is Series Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

Much like bumper cars, galaxies fly about the center
and smash into one another. As a demonstration,
the large blue galaxyon the left, nicknamed
the guitar galaxy,is torn apart as it collides
with another member of the cluster.*In the last two posts, I talked about solar systems and galaxies, you know, the really small stuff. Personally, I’m interested in the cosmological behemoths: clusters of galaxies. In fact, I studied these behemoths for five years in graduate school.

As the name would imply, a cluster of galaxies is a large system of galaxies, much like a solar system is a system of planets and a galaxy is a system of stars. In the largest clusters, there are thousands of galaxies, each trapped by the enormous gravity of the entire cluster. The largest cluster members are among the very first galaxies to have formed in the universe. Living in the rich cluster environment, they’ve had a lot of time to grow through collisions with other cluster galaxies, and are also among the largest galaxies in the universe.

There are probably around 1,000 known galaxy clusters. All of the known clusters have been discovered using well-established techniques, such as just taking pictures through a telescope. However, we’ve only managed to search a small bit of the universe, and we believe there are hundreds of thousands still out there, waiting to be discovered.

For three summers, I searched for new clusters using two California telescopes: the BIMA array in Hat Creek and the OVRO array near Bishop. With all those massive clusters, you’d think it would be a breeze to find them. For better or for worse, I was using a fairly new technique which hadn’t really been developed to the point of routine use and I came up empty-handed.

This new technique targets a unique signature of galaxy clusters, the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, or as it is more affectionately known, the SZ effect. The SZ effect describes how a galaxy cluster appears silhouetted against the glow of the big bang known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. I’ll cover this in a later post, but if you are anxious for more details, feel free to ask.

Construction at the South PoleNow, technology has advanced so far that there are several telescopes dedicated entirely to looking for clusters of galaxies using the SZ effect. One of these is the new South Pole Telescope, located at the very bottom of the planet and just commissioned this year. Using this telescope, scientists from eight different institutions (including my old boss at UC-Berkeley) will outdo my 5-year doctoral thesis project every two and a half minutes. By late 2008, they will have studied 20,000 times more universe and should find more than 10,000 new clusters. Maybe I should have worked harder in graduate school…

Standing seven stories tall with a diameter of over 30 feet, the telescope weighs almost 600,000 pounds. It was constructed in much nicer climates and then flown down to the South Pole one piece at a time on an old military cargo plane. By the time the last nut and bolt arrived at the site, the plane had made over 50 round trip flights.

The telescope was pieced together at the South Pole during the Austral summer, running from December till February at a balmy -30 to -40 degrees Fahrenheit. With a population of 18 scientists for this project and 240 people from other projects, summer is the busy time at the South Pole. However, all of the sane people flee before the sun sets for six months of darkness, leaving only “winter-overs” behind for the cold season (I just looked at the weather and it’s currently -83.9 degrees). This year, there will be 54 winter-overs, two of whom will be running the South Pole Telescope as it searches for new clusters.

After the telescope construction was completed, the last of the summer crew worked like mad to test the instrument before they had to head back home. This in itself is nearly as much work as constructing the telescope in the bitter cold. For example, the camera operates at a temperature of 0.25 Kelvin - any warmer and the sensors don’t work. You have to keep an eye on every wire and every cable just to get the camera to be this cold. Then they went through several stages of calibrating the instrument, making sure they could reproduce what they saw when testing the camera in the lab in Berkeley.

As time was running out, they still hadn’t actually looked at anything on the sky. They begged and gnashed their teeth for more time. With a little luck from the weather and a soft-hearted commander from the Air National Guard, they got one extra day to observe their first astronomical objects, starting with the planets in our solar system. Now, the next step is to find some of those elusive clusters.

Panoramic view of the South Pole Telescope

As I sit and re-read this posting, I realize that I left out one crucial ingredient - Why the South Pole??? Well, although it is a crazy place to work, there are quite a few advantages of building a telescope there rather than some tropical paradise like Tahiti.

Any ideas what makes all the effort in such a harsh climate worth the hassle?

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.

* Credit & Copyright: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT), Hawaiian Starlight, CFHT Most of the galaxies in this image are part of the massive cluster Abell1185.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Energy Star program has promoted programmable thermostats since 1995, estimating that consumers will save 10%-30% on their heating and cooling energy bills. Consumers who can accurately predict when they will be home, and who find it difficult to remember to set up their thermostat in the summer or set back their thermostat in the winter manually, can save energy with a programmable thermostat.

With sales of programmable thermostats doubling in the last ten years, and with more than 25 million programmable thermostats installed in homes, the potential energy savings are enormous. But it appears that those savings have remained largely unrealized.

Now Energy Star plans to stop certifying programmable thermostats. The results of this decision may be far-reaching. For example, programs such as Energy Star Homes, which recognizes homes that are especially energy efficient, will no longer be able to award points for programmable thermostats. Why stop certifying? Energy Star examined several studies covering a wide geography and a variety of climates, that compared the energy use of homes with programmable thermostats to the energy use of homes without them. It found that there was no statistical difference in savings between the two groups.

Jill Abelson, a communications manager at EPA, offers some insight. Her research shows that consumers find programmable thermostats too complicated, or they override the default savings mode on the thermostats. Once the default setting has been overridden, they forget to return to it.

The California Energy Commission (CEC) has included programmable thermostats as a requirement in the California Title 24 building standards since the early 1980s. The commission is currently considering a requirement for programmable communicating thermostats in the next update of the standards.

Communicating thermostats connect the home to the power grid and can automatically set up thermostats a preprogrammed amount in the summer when the utility signals a critical peak emergency or pricing event. This will allow California utilities to reduce demand during peak demand periods, relieve the strain on overworked power grids, and reduce the use of expensive “peaker” power plants, which only start up during power shortages and tend to be older, dirtier power plants.

But how will consumers respond to losing some control over their thermostats? At least, having the utility turn up your thermostat during hot summer days when you are not home will save you some money.

To many people, this handing over control seems a little too big brother-ish. What do you think? And given the reality that soon you will have a thermostat in your home that connects you to the utility, are there other ways you can:

• help the state meet it’s energy needs?
• keep it’s energy prices at current levels or lower them?
• and minimize the use of dirty peaker plants -

… while you maintain your autonomy?

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.

It’s been a fairly dry winter so far in California. One group who could really use some rain is a team of scientists trying to unlock the secrets of how storms work. What they find out has critical implications for people living in flood-prone areas like Sacramento, where information is the best defense. A new network of high-tech weather sensors is making the streams, tributaries and dams of the American River the country’s most closely-monitored water system.
You may listen the “Watching for Floods on the American River” Radio report online.

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

This past week I stopped into one of my favorite (indoor) places on the Estuary: the San Francisco Bay Model in Sausalito. Built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s, the model was used up until 2000 to simulate the effects of changes to the Estuary. It let engineers study the impacts of dredging, filling, and water diversions before projects were implemented in the real world. (Nowadays, high speed computers do the job.)

About the size of two football fields, it is one of the largest tidal hydraulic models in the world and a great place to get a giants’ eye view of the Bay-Delta’s workings. Each time I visit, as I stand on the Alameda shoreline and look out across that watery expanse to a tiny Golden Gate Bridge, I suppress a secret, fleeting urge to climb onto the model and go wading around this miniature landscape as if I were Godzilla.

I start my tour by turning left past the Oakland Airport, skirting around the South Bay, and walking up the Peninsula to the Golden Gate Bridge. As I stand in what would be San Francisco, the Central Bay is to my right. To my left, a large pool of water, a “Tide Hut,” and a set of loud pumps (admittedly not quite as melodic as crashing waves), stand in for the ocean.

I circumnavigate the Pacific.

Strolling north along the Marin shoreline, I find myself in my own neck of the woods and pass tributary creeks whose names I know: Corte Madera Creek, San Rafael Creek (my home watershed), Galinas Greek, Novato Creek. That is one of the coolest things about the model: In our daily lives we get to know the bits of the Bay we glimpse out our windows or pass on our commutes, but it is easy to forget that what we see is part of a vast estuary—the largest on the west coast of the Americas. The model lets us see how our “Bay bits” fit into the much larger whole.

Rounding the northern edge of San Pablo Bay and continuing to stroll “upstream,” I pass the Carquinez Strait, and then the water opens out into the reaches of Suisun Bay. My tour ends at the Delta, where California’s two longest rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, come together amidst a complex tangle of sloughs, levees, and canals. A number of things strike me (apart from monster movie fantasies) every time I visit:

• How huge the Estuary is (even when shrunk to the size of a warehouse), and how the Bay is only part of the picture.
• How elaborately engineered is the “plumbing” of the Bay-Delta system, the hub for much of California’s freshwater supply.
• And, especially, how complex is the interplay of natural and human forces in this landscape: change one part and the effects can ripple outward. Godzilla (born 1954, the same year the Bay Model was authorized) is an artifact of the Atomic Age, a walking, fire-breathing reminder of the need to be thoughtful and maybe a little humble in our engineerings of nature. Even without a giant lizard wading around, the Bay Model makes it easy to see that.

Where are your favorite (indoor or outdoor) places to discover the Estuary? Post your comments below.
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.”

Benchley’s book and Spielberg’s classic film Jaws might well have been set off San Francisco, in that although shark attacks are rare events, the fear and publicity associated with sharks off central California is on most everyone’s mind.

The White shark (Carcharodon carcharias), also known as the Great White Shark, requires no hyperbole. It is the only shark species in California that presents a significant danger to humans. White sharks live worldwide in cool, coastal waters. Interactions between humans and sharks happen each year and within the “Red Triangle” (a 100 mile stretch of coast running from Bodega Head to the Farallon Islands to the south end of Monterey Bay) there have been 48 white shark attacks since 1952. With increasing use of the coast by swimmers, surfers, abalone divers, kayakers, and windsurfers, the risk of attack will increase unless users become aware of the natural and unnatural history of the White shark.

Research accomplished by scientists at the California Academy of Sciences, as well as by researchers from the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the University of California at Davis, has significantly increased our knowledge of white shark biology, allowing us to better predict their risk to human safety and to demonstrate the important ecological role that sharks play within our coastal waters.

Adult White sharks feed primarily on pinnipeds (seals and sea lions) and typically stalk their prey from behind and beneath before attacking — in most cases, neither pinniped nor people see the shark before it bites them. The initial bite is so rapid and so forceful (adult White sharks weigh as much as 1-3 tons) that the victim is often lifted from the water and then released, after which the shark typically waits for the victim to bleed to death before attempting to consume it.

White shark attacks upon humans typically occur nearshore in water 10-30 feet deep, placing swimmers, snorklers, surfers, kayakers, and scuba divers (when at the surface) at greatest risk. The appearance of a surfer on a short board, for example, might easily be mistaken by a hungry shark for a basking sea lion. White sharks can see color, have quite good vision, and rely on that sense to spot their prey. They do not appear to discriminate coloration in that they usually look skyward before an attack and only observe the surface silhouette of the victim.

White shark attacks have occurred during every month, but are most common in August, September and October. White shark attacks are not random. The Farallon Islands, Año Nuevo Island, Tomales Point and Bird Rock (Marin County) are particularly dangerous locations and should be avoided. In particular, those rocky headlands where pinnipeds congregate are the most likely locations for patrolling white sharks. One should never enter California waters alone in that the “buddy system” has saved the majority of attack victims. Although many water users drown each year, only 88 attacks and 8 fatalities are known to have occurred in California waters.

Biologists now understand the importance of White sharks in coastal ecosystems through their role as top level predators within food webs. They are protected by law in California and elsewhere in the world and, like so many other shark species, are endangered through overfishing, bycatch, and habitat destruction.

Guest blogger Dr. John E. McCosker is the Chair of Aquatic Biology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Cutting-edge microscopes at UC-San Francisco are helping scientists create three-dimensional images of cells, and may help lead to new medical breakthroughs, including a treatment for Type 1 diabetes.

Eco-Architecture and Elk Return to the Bay Area (episode #105), in which this short segment also appears, airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

You may also view the entire Super Microscope story online.

Gabriela Quirós is a Segment Producer for KQED-TV, and is the producer for this story.