QUEST Community Science Blog

Metronome: 45″ diameter, Acrylic on maple panel
Tiffany Bozic, 2007
Photo credit: ©Jack Dumbacher, 2007

For 154 years, The California Academy of Sciences has explored the world, gathering over 20 million specimens that are housed in the museum’s collections. The new California Academy of Sciences Artist in Residence (AiR) program is pioneering a new way of interpreting these specimens, and its work will be unveiled for the first time to the public on November 15, 2007.

The research division of the Academy, although largely unseen, has driven the mission and public face of the Natural History Museum since its inception. Collections from the departments in this arm of the museum, along with collections from the Academy’s library and archives, will serve as the focus of the residency. The Natural History Museum contains eight departments that are organized by taxonomic discipline: Anthropology, Aquatic Biology, Botany, Entomology, Herpetology, Ichthyology, Invertebrate Zoology & Geology, and Ornithology & Mammalogy.

For the AiR program, the artist will explore the collections with an assigned mentor from a selected department, culminating in a final exhibit and associated programming. The hope is to blur the lines between the arts and sciences. Through partnership and collaboration, artists from multiple disciplines will be challenged to experience and interpret the collections in new and meaningful ways. By creating space for artists to inspire dialogue about the issues facing the Earth and the sciences today the AiR program is creating another way for the Academy to further its mission to explain, explore, and protect the natural world.

The pilot AiR program opens on November 15, 2007. Its first exhibit, From the Depths: Inspiring Art and Science, has been a year in the making. It is a contemporary art exhibit created from the collaboration between Oakland based artist Tiffany Bozic and Dr. Rich Mooi, curator of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology.

Inspired by John James Audubon and Ernst Haeckel, but delving more deeply into the imaginary and darker aspects of the natural world, Bozic questions the theme of survival in her pieces for From the Depths. Bozic views the making of art as a kind of therapeutic process — a way to make sense of the world, of her relationship to life as it unfolds, of its power over us, and perhaps most importantly, of our power over it.

As a mentor, Mooi is a perfect complement to Bozic’s musings. To Mooi, science and art are two faces of the same coin. Both fields are driven by inspiration taken from ideas that develop out of close observation of nature. This sense has evolved over Mooi’s long career of specialty research in the evolution of echinoderms, the spiny-skinned animals that include sand dollars, sea urchins, and sea stars, along with his long history of drawing scientific illustrations in nature. Mooi’s intersecting interests in art and the sciences have led him to spearhead the Academy’s annual search for a biological illustration summer intern and have also interested him in mentoring Bozic.

Along with Bozic’s paintings, the From the Depths: Inspiring Art and Science exhibit includes photographs by local photographer Billy O’Callaghan — documenting the evolution of the residency, preserved specimens from the Invertebrate Zoology collection, and artfully designed tanks with live fish and invertebrates.

If you are interested in learning more about AiR and want to be added to the email list about this developing program, contact Lindsay Irving at lirving@calacademy.org or learn more about From the Depths by visiting http://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/air/.

Cat Aboudara is the Special Projects Manager at California Academy of Sciences and works in the public programs division. The Academy is a wonderful fit for her because of her curiosity about the natural world and her experience in working with native California wildlife.

latitude: 37.7819, longitude: -122.404

Gay Pride Parade in BrazilA big federal study is underway to identify the specific DNA changes that contribute to being a homosexual. Note that scientists are not investigating whether or not being gay is genetic. The evidence is already pretty strong at this point that there is a genetic component to being gay. What they are looking for are the specific changes.

For example, one study showed that if one identical twin was gay, then the other was 50% of the time. If the two brothers were fraternal twins, then the odds dropped down to 22%. And if one brother was adopted, the odds were only 11%.

Another more comprehensive study gave similar results with both twins in an identical twin pair being gay around 32% of the time as compared to 13% of the time for fraternal twins. Lots of other studies have been done that show the same trend even if they don’t have the exact same numbers.

These results strongly suggest genes are involved because identical twins share the exact same DNA. If both twins in an identical twin pair have some trait in common more often than do fraternal twins, then odds are that genetics plays a role.

These twin studies show that being gay is at least partly genetic. So the new study is really just looking to explain explain the older results.

That said, I am torn about whether I want this study to succeed or not. If it is successful, that’ll shut up all those people who maintain that sexual preference is purely the result of personal choice. In my opinion, quieting those folks is a good thing. But finding the gay gene(s) may have unintended consequences. Some people may see being gay as akin to a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia. As something to be minimized through carrier screening, embryo selection, or even abortion.

Scary, but I have heard people say things like this. Just the other day someone asked a friend of mine if homosexuality was genetic. They weren’t merely being curious. They were hopeful that there was a gay gene so that homosexuality could be eliminated from the human population at some point. Yikes!

And that was here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Who knows what they are saying in Wyoming or Texas. Do we want to find the gene(s) responsible for homosexuality? Or are some things better left unknown? Comment below.

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

latitude 37.3316, longitude -121.89

Carcass of a Blue Whale, Balaenoptera musculus
Credit: analog chainsawWhen zoologists speak about superlatives among animals, blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) often play a key role at the high end of the scale of organisms. With good reason, too: they are not only the largest baleen whales, but also the largest mammals ever to have lived — no mammoth, rhino or hippo, extinct or living comes close. Blue whales are also in the contest for largest backboned animal ever, measuring up against some of the largest dinosaurs. When blue whales and their close relatives open their mouths to feed, some scientists calculate they can even engulf a volume of water the size of a school bus. And, here in California, we are lucky enough to have blue whales right off our coast.

Blue whales often frequent the coast of southern California, especially to feed in the nutrient-rich waters of the Southern California Bight. Unfortunately, this feeding preference puts this population of blue whales (numbering perhaps in the few thousands) directly in the same area where many shipping lanes converge, near Long Beach and San Diego. This situation is all the more crucial for blue whales, whose population size is a mere shadow of its former self. For most of the twentieth century, blue whales teetered on the brink of extinction, as industrial whaling in the 1940s-1960s reduced blue whale populations in both the North and South Pacific Ocean. Cetologists (scientists who study cetaceans) still are trying to understand the exact magnitude of this decimation, and its effects on the genetic viability of the species, as well as potential ecological outcomes.

Inevitably, as the population recovers, we’ll be seeing more of what happened a few weeks ago, near Ventura: a blue carcass, 78 feet long, washed up on the beach, within throwing distance of a county park. Early clues seem to indicate that the whale died from ship strike, although it will probably be some time before the final word is in. Disposing of such a carcass, however, is no trivial issue — check out this video of what the Oregon State Highway patrol did to resolve one sperm whale standing (and its disastrous aftermath). Let">check out this video of what the Oregon State Highway patrol did to resolve one sperm whale standing (and its disastrous aftermath). Let" />#8217;s hope Ventura County officials forgo the dynamite solution, in this case.

Nick Pyenson is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the department of integrative biology and the museum of paleontology.

latitude 34.0837, longitude -119.061

Not long ago, the peripheral canal was idea non grata among environmentalists, symbolizing the tug of war between northern and southern California for the state’s precious water resources. Now, the canal is back. They may call it a “conveyance,” but state lawmakers are once again considering a $5 billion plan to build a pipeline around the Delta, sending Sierra water directly to the State water project. But the controversy remains.

You may listen to the “The Return of the Canal” 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: 38.070292, longitude: -121.638157

Joseph Grinell (center) and team, in 1908Last time, I wrote briefly about the history of grizzly bears in California and how there are no grizzlies in California anymore (an irony, given the animal’s image on many of our state’s symbols). The story of the grizzly’s demise in California is the same narrative for many other large mammals throughout the world over the last few centuries: habitat loss, plus human hunting, does a number on mammal populations, especially mammals that have very large individual geographic ranges (bears, lions, elephants). Grizzly bears can still be seen in their native habitat, but the contraction of their range of the past 200 years limits these places to remote, unsettled tracts in Canada and the northwestern US states.

How has habitat change affected the distribution of mammals over this time? What kind of role has climate change played? Researchers at the UC Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) are actively working to understand these questions, and others, through the Grinnell Resurvey Project. In the early part of last century, Joseph Grinnell, the founding director the MVZ, was one of the first naturalists to create systematic collections of living vertebrates with precise natural history data (taking weight measurements, identifying the sex of the individual animal, or recording the day and place of collection). Grinnell and his students recorded this information for large parts of California (and other western states), creating an archive of natural history data (in the form of field notes) that is unrivaled in its breadth, content, and precision. Since Grinnell’s time, the landscape and climate of California has changed in many ways, and many people (politicians, economists, and scientists alike) are eager to know how animal communities have changed as well.

Using Grinnell’s data as a baseline, MVZ researchers now are in the process of retracing his footsteps through California, and undertaking new surveys of the exact same places that Grinnell sampled. In doing so, researchers are recording new data about the presence, abundance and kind of species that now live in these habitats. By comparing what’s found now with what was there 100 years ago, researchers will be able to see how the composition of mammal communities has changed over this period. Detailed records of climate change in the same places over the last 100 years can also be added to the analyses, to show how concomitant changes in rain or temperature might also have affected mammal communities.

All of the science in the project hinges on the foresight of Joseph Grinnell, who, at a time when ecology not even a real discipline, understood how the value of natural history collections can well outlast its creators. Read more about some early results from the Grinnell Resurvey Projects here:

http://alumni.berkeley.edu/calmag/200605/yosemite.asp

Nick Pyenson is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the department of integrative biology and the museum of paleontology.

latitude: 37.8642, longitude: -122.286

The Very Large Array radio telescope
facility in New Mexico, the tool used to find a cosmic supervoid.
Credit: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)There’s been some excitement in the world of cosmology in recent weeks surrounding the discovery of a really, really big “hole” in space–not a black hole, which is a small and matter-dense object, but a vast gulf of emptiness far larger than any other similar voids yet found.

You might say, don’t scientists tell us that space in general is pretty much empty, no matter where you look between the stars and planets, or between the galaxies? What’s the big deal with finding yet more emptiness out there?
Well, everything is relative. Take a place like the Milky Way Galaxy, for instance. A galaxy is a region of space crowded with matter in the form of gaseous nebulas, dust, stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets–a bustling “city” of material. Never mind that the huge gaps between the stars are nearly empty space; the point is that a galaxy is a relatively matter-rich zone.

Not so with cosmic voids. Scientists have known of voids for some time. As astronomers have surveyed the universe and pinned down the locations and distances of large numbers of galaxies, a structure to their arrangement has emerged. Galaxies stick together, by gravity, in groups called galaxy clusters, which in turn form larger groupings called superclusters. These clusters and superclusters in turn are arranged in vast membrane-like “sheets” and filaments, like the walls of soap bubbles or sponge cake. Between the sheets and filaments, similar to soap bubbles and sponge cake, are large regions void of material.

The recent and startling discovery, which has caused all the excitement, is of a void that might be as big as a billion light years across! This particular void was discovered by astronomers using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope facility in New Mexico. (The VLA was made somewhat famous in the movie Contact when it received a phone call from an Extra Terrestrial.)

How can we get our heads around the concept of a billion-light-year “bubble” of nothing? Well, we try to get our heads around it with an analogy, such as this: A galaxy the size of the Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years across, sitting on the edge of this billion-light-year void is comparable in scale to a human standing next to the 10-mile-wide Grand Canyon–and feeling very, very small…

This newly discovered king of voids is nowhere near the Milky Way–it’s somewhere between 6 and 10 billion light years away. There is a nearby void, called the Local Void, which is partially bounded by the filament of galaxies which the Milky Way is a part of. However, the Local Void is small in comparison to this newly discovered and more distant, gargantuan cousin.

But more than this “big empty” being just a really large version of other known empties, the sheer size of this one has taken astronomers and cosmologists a bit by surprise. Its discovery even has some experts worrying that our understanding of the formation of the universe may need some serious revision to account for the existence of this superhole.
It’s a bit too early to say anything for certain about the implications of this find, other than the absolute certainty that scientists have quite a bit of theoretical and observational work ahead of them…

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

latitude: 37.8148, longitude: -122.178

Look! Up in the night sky! It’s a bird! It’s a bloodsucker! No, it is a beneficial friend, the bat!

Bats have been around for about 50 million years and are among the earth’s oldest animals: they also are some of the most misunderstood. Because they are nocturnal and strange looking, people have associated bats with evil things for centuries. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, bats play a very important role in the economic and environmental health of the world.

In rain forests and deserts, bats are some of the most important pollinators of plants. Without bat pollinators, the wild varieties of many foods we eat: avocados, bananas, cashews, mangoes and peaches couldn’t grow.

Fruit eating bats spread seeds as they fly and digest. As natural insect controls, they can’t be beat. One bat can eat up to 600 mosquitoes in one hour!

There are nearly 1000 species of bats worldwide, most of which live in tropical regions, like our very own Flying Foxes at The Oakland Zoo. Forty three species live in the US. In fact, almost a quarter of the world’s mammals are bats! Bats are the only mammal that can fly and are in a special order called Chiroptera, which means “Hand wing.” Bat wings are actually membranes of skin that stretch between their hands and legs. Bats give birth to helpless young and are breast fed milk by their mothers.

The nine Bay Area counties are a veritable haven for bats. To join the ranks of bat-watchers, head to a favorite outdoor spot at sunset anytime between May and October. Visit Sunol Regional Wilderness, Tilden Regional Park, or Foothills Open Space Preserve. Stroll the campuses at Berkeley or Stanford, or the beach at Bolinas, Pescadero, or Fort Funston. Sit beside one of the lakes in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park or find an open spot in downtown Martinez. The shadows you see in flight may be any of 14 species found in the Bay Area–from the ubiquitous little brown, big brown, or Mexican free-tailed bats, to the diminutive western pipistrelles and sparrow-sized hoary bats.

Over the past 150 years, as development has altered the California landscape, bats have faced the loss of roosting sites and the destruction of woodlands and waterways where they feed. Like birds, bats have been devastated by the use of pesticides that kill off their prey, contaminate water sources, and accumulate in their body tissues. Our beneficial friends are in trouble! You can help California bats by putting up bat houses, or joining a conservation group like Bat Conservation International www.batcon.org.

Check out http://flyingfur.typepad.com for more bat blogging.

*Editor’s note: This is not to be confused with “Bay Area Bites,” KQED’s award-winning food and wine blog, which is going strong.

Amy Gotliffe is Conservation Manager at The Oakland Zoo.

latitude: 37.7502, longitude: -122.148

Dave Barker of the Exploratorium
gets some batting tipsWhen I think of baseball and science, I always remember poor Sammy Sosa. In 2003, he was suspended from seven games with the Chicago Cubs for using a bat that had cork in it–an illegal move, according to Major League Baseball rules. I certainly don’t feel sorry for him for cheating (though he claims it was accidental), or for having to warm the bench for a while. But I do pity him for making a maneuver that probably never would have helped him anyway.

The idea behind “corking” a bat is that the bat will be lighter and the batter will be able to swing it faster, hopefully imparting more power to the ball. If you watch QUEST’s TV feature on the physics of baseball, you’ll see my Exploratorium colleague David Barker learning from the CalBears batting coach that getting the bat going fast is a key to whacking the ball as far as possible. In fact, today’s players use bats that are lighter and shorter than the ones swung decades ago, for just this reason.

Unfortunately for Sammy Sosa (and others before him who pulled the same stunt), corking the bat to make it lighter is a flawed approach. A wooden bat is a close-to-perfect swatting tool: it’s solid enough to resist absorbing much impact from the ball, but not so hard that it overly deforms the ball when hitting it. A bat with cork in the middle will be squishier, and won’t hit the ball as hard. Imagine the difference you’d expect if the bat were made of pillows. That’s a little extreme, but you get the idea. According to a recent Mythbusters show, corked bats don’t improve the power of a hit.

See for yourself what a difference swing speed can make. Check out our online “Scientific Slugger.” You can choose different swing speeds and pitches, and see which combinations go farthest (if hit perfectly).

Did Sammy know he was swinging a corked bat the day he was caught, or was it truly an accident? We’ll probably never know. But what’s clearer is that, in terms of a baseball career, it probably wasn’t worth the risk.

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

I am working on a project to build a space telescope named SNAP, SuperNova Acceleration Probe. We have applied for funding with NASA and the Department of Energy and are competing with two other projects named DESTINY and ADEPT. Crossing all of our fingers, we hope to launch the satellite into an orbit one million miles from Earth in the middle of the next decade.

Whenever I describe this project to someone for the first time, it’s easiest to say that we are trying to build a new and improved Hubble Space Telescope, named after Edwin Hubble. This isn’t quite true, but it’s pretty close. The excitement lies in the new perspective SNAP will provide. Think of being able to see the entire moon at a fine level of detail as we can only see a small crater on the moon with Hubble. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

The Hubble Space Telescope performs different observations for different science missions several times a day. SNAP, however, will be entirely dedicated to two missions. First, we will search for and observe approximately 2000 very distant supernovae. These supernovae are very important in cosmology for measuring the shape of the universe. We will then observe very distant galaxies across the sky to understand the timeline of the evolution of the universe (hint: it’s a long timeline). I will continue to revisit these very important topics for the cosmology community in later posts.

More than 100 people were at a recent SNAP collaboration meeting in Paris, coming from as far away as Vancouver, Ann Arbor, Pasadena, and Philadelphia (better luck next year, Eagles). Like in all good meetings and cocktail parties, they discussed a slew of topics, ranging from the complicated effects of image quality on the data to my personal favorite, the maintenance of the SNAP Myspace page.

A few months ago, I actually logged into Myspace for the first time in my life to see what all the fuss was about. I found that SNAP, as a 20 yr old female from Berkeley, has made 38 friends. Some of the more impressive friends were XMM-Newton, SWIFT, and GLAST, all space-based astronomical telescopes. And, to boot, I even found Weird Al Yankovic in SNAP’s extended network. Unfortunately I just checked again last night and found that he has cut off his friendship. I hear his latest hit is “White and Nerdy”, but I guess SNAP no longer qualifies.

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.

In the Midwest and Northeast United States, homeowners are anticipating increased fuel oil costs this coming winter. Here in California, we don’t face their kind of extreme weather (in my freshman year at Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, I woke up one morning in January to -25°F weather with the prospect of a one mile walk to a math class–it took me several months to thaw) but heating costs are still a significant part of our budgets, especially for low-income families. And electricity costs are still at an all-time high across the country and are expected to keep rising.

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (www.aceee.org) recently came out with a list of energy saving measures to help us prepare for winter.

1. Seal air leaks in ceilings/attic floors, at baseboards and electric outlets in exterior walls, and around exterior windows and doors.

2. Seal leaky air ducts at joints, starting at the furnace air handler, and insulate ducts that run through unheated basements or attics.

3. Hire a professional to tune up existing heating equipment, including changing air filters.

4. Turn off lights, and home office and entertainment equipment when not in use.

5. Install an ENERGY STAR-rated thermostat and program it to set back temperatures when you are asleep or away.

6. Insulate hot water pipes leading from your water heater, and install low-flow shower heads and faucet aerators.

7. Replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

8. Consider replacing an old refrigerator, clothes washer, or water heater.

9. Check your attic insulation and consider improving the R-value to R-38.

10. Invest in energy-efficient, right-sized heating equipment with the help of a good contractor.

Another great resource is the Home Energy Saver Web site (http://hes.lbl.gov), provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Home Energy Magazine’s host organization. At the site, you can input your zip code, plus some information about your house, and get back practical suggestions for things you can do to save water, energy, and money. Your local hardware store or big box home store will have all the tools and materials you need to do it yourself.

Also, I can suggest some Bay Area home performance contractors who will be able to do an energy audit of your home, make recommendations for upgrades, and contract with you to do the work you choose. The list is not exhaustive, but these contractors have been featured or will be featured in Home Energy, and they all do high quality work.

1. Advanced Home Energy (www.advancedhomeenergy.com)
2. Applied Home Performance (www.appliedhomeperformance.com)
3. Building Solutions (www.buildingsolutions.com)
4. Sustainable Spaces (www.sustainablespaces.com)

Hope this helps!

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.