NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury-artist concept.

Photo by: NASA

I’ve been waiting for the “whole story” on Martian ice at the Phoenix lander site to unfold more completely, but the chemical analyses have not yet run their full courses-so I’ve decided to widen the focus on this blog to give a status report on current active robotic exploration of planets going on around the Solar System.

Limiting my scope to only planetary spacecraft, the list is still respectable. In no particular order, here’s the round-up:

Spirit: Mars Exploration Rover Spirit’s activities on the Martian surface have been reduced to save on power, but the robot remains alive. With the arrival of Martian winter, Spirit spends more power running heaters to keep key electronic and power equipment healthy. Spirit remains in the giant Gusev Crater, where it will spend its entire life on Mars.

Opportunity: Exploring a much smaller crater of its own, Victoria Crater-Spirit’s twin, Opportunity, continues its investigation of the rock layers of Mars’ geological history. As of June 10, Opportunity has clocked in at 7.26 miles of total “roving” on Mars, since its landing back in 2004.

Phoenix: The brand-spankin’-new Mars Phoenix lander has been digging into one of Mars’ greatest scientific mysteries: water. Detailed chemical analysis of samples taken at Phoenix’s site near the northern polar ice cap is underway, but the big question– is Phoenix standing on frozen Martian water– has been answered: yes.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: The newest orbiter in the Martian fleet continues to send back its extreme-high-resolution imagery and its revealing chemical measurements, as well as to serve as a high-speed data and communication relay for other Mars-exploring robots.

Mars 2001 Odyssey: Credited with detecting the massive amounts of frozen water in Mars’ northern hemisphere-the same ice that the Phoenix lander is now scraping at, Mars 2001 Odyssey continues its surveillance of Mars’ chemistry and atmosphere.

Mars Express: The European orbiter that launched the ill-fated Beagle II lander has continued on a respectable career of exploration in its own right. Mars Express also helped support the landing of the Phoenix.

Cassini: Saturn’s first robot-in-residence, Cassini, has concluded its initial 4-year mission and is now continuing on an extended mission. Cassini has given us unprecedented close-up images and measurements of many of Saturn’s stunning moons, its complicated ring system, and the swirling, aurora-touched cloud formations of Saturn itself.

MESSENGER: The first spacecraft to visit the little-understood Mercury since 1975 made its first flyby of that planet last January, and will settle into a permanent orbit in March 2011. Even the few pics it snapped as it hurled by gave us far more detailed images of Mercury than ever before.

New Horizons: Launched a couple years ago on its outward bound, meteoric flight to Pluto, New Horizons has already performed some exploration duty, capturing images and data of Jupiter, Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, and Jupiter’s long magnetic “tail.” Now in “cruise mode,” this little robot will fly past Pluto (dwarf planet; king of the Plutoids) in July 2015.

Voyagers 1 and 2: Do you remember the remarkable voyages of discovery made by the Voyager spacecraft, both launched in 1977? Since completing their primary missions of flying by the Gas Giant planets (Voyager 1 at Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2 at all four), these two veterans have continued to operate and send information back to Earth, and are now about 3 times more distant from the Sun than Pluto.

That’s the wrap. If I missed anyone, my apologies!

Photo by: Melissa Batson

And how they put a snare in the plan for chimps and humans to live together.

In the Budongo Forests of Uganda, a large group of Chimpanzees, named by researchers The Sonso Group, attempt to thrive in their natural habitat, eating plants and small prey. At the same time, humans who live around the forest are also trying to survive, working at places like the local sugarcane plantation and living in straw and mud houses. For food, they set out into the forest with small snares and aim for duiker and or pig.

Most of these snares are made from wire. As chimpanzees walk through the forest, their hands or feet may become trapped in the snare. In two of the forests where chimpanzees are studied, researchers have observed up to 25 percent of chimpanzees are maimed due to snare injuries. More die.

This problem is typical all over the world. How do the chimps and people live together? How do elephants and people live together? Wolves and people? Mountain Lions and Bay Area people? Though solutions seem impossible at times, I am impressed by many of the solutions, one being that of the Budongo Snare Removal Project.

In January 2000, the Jane Goodall Institute in collaboration with the Budongo Forest Project initiated a snare removal program in the Budongo Forest Reserve. The objective is to reduce the number of snares set, reduce the number of animals caught in snares and traps, and increase the number of local people who obey wildlife laws and understand the need for protecting wildlife.

Teams of two men locate and remove snares. After the first year of operation, they found that the number of snares being set within the grid system of the research area dropped. The census teams found heavy poaching and illegal activities were being carried out in the southern end of the forest reserve, so the team near the research site extended their range.

A new education center reaches out to the local community and provides education around ecology, wildlife and the treasure that is the chimpanzees.

The Oakland Zoo adopted this project in 2001 and the support covers the salaries for four field assistants, two educators, two eco-guards, and allowances for transportation and bike repair, gum boots, rain gear, backpacks, and compasses.

Funds raised at an annual fall lecture and silent auction and on Primate Discovery Day go toward this project.This year’s Primate Day is September 27^th and the lecture, featuring Shirley McGreal, is on October 2^nd.

The Oakland Zoo also supports connection and awareness of this project by visiting the site in Uganda. Teens will be traveling there in July and adults will embark on the journey (including gorilla trecking) in October.

More spots are available on this once in a lifetime adventure. For details, email: amy@oaklandzoo.org.

I knew I was in trouble when I saw the jars. Big jars, filled with tinted liquid, with weird things suspended in them. Things that definitely used to be alive, and that I would not have wanted to see when they WERE alive.

“One of my favorites is this one here,” says my host, Senior Wildlife Forensic Specialist Jeff Rodzen, “we have a bird who choked to death on the head of a lizard.” Hmm. A favorite? Maybe compared to the others lining the wall: jars filled with parasitic worms, a tule elk fetus, a see-through rabbit where you can see every bone.

Add in the bighorn sheep skull among the modern equipment, and the paws sticking up in the back of the evidence and it made for a surreal day of reporting.

Welcome to the autopsy and necropsy room at the California Fish and Game office in Rancho Cordova, about 12 miles east of Sacramento. This is the place where blood and hair and small fibers from wildlife crime scenes are DNA-matched for all the poaching cases in California.

This is a fascinating place, if a little macabre. And it was the starting point for a QUEST radio story that had many more story lines than I could possibly pursue in one feature.

• I learned about a canine program designed to track down poachers, and an offshoot of that program that actually sniffs out invasive species like Quagga mussels.
• I found out how dangerous the job of Game Warden actually is, and the reasons it’s so hard to recruit new officers.
• And I found out how complicated poaching can become, and how endemic it is in California.
• I discovered there’s a subculture of poaching.

Some poachers hit the country backroads late at night, right after the bars close, and Game Warden Todd Tognazzini said those are the easier ones to catch. But the ones who are good at it use sophisticated communications equipment, night-vision sights on their guns, and small, strong flashlights to stun wild pigs or deer into standing still. This is called “spotlighting.” Some poachers will black out their brake lights, run on roads without headlights, and use other ingenious ways to keep a low profile while they illegally hunt wild animals.

Game warden is one of the most dangerous law enforcement jobs around– after all, you’re going into a remote area, with no backup, to confront people who are carrying guns and knives. Would any urban police officer do that? There is a dearth of game wardens in California, partly due to decades of budget cuts. Last thing I found: The newest high-tech method of tracking down poachers is actually pretty low-tech. Dogs. A new canine program helps game wardens find illegal animal kills. Not surprisingly, poachers hide their contraband, and it’s not easy for game wardens to find it. Lieutenant Kristie Wurster is stationed in Alpine County, near Placerville. She’s one of 18 wardens in the canine-training program, and she uses her dog Wrigley to sniff out illegal fishing and hunting. .

Wurster estimates the dog saves about 800 man-hours of work a year. “We are so small in numbers and we just tip the iceberg of how much poaching is going on,” she says. “That’s why I’m so excited about the program, to have another set of eyes and ears – and nose – to be able to detect the issues.”

Listen to the “Wildlife CSI” Radio report online, and check out our photo set on Flickr which includes: photos of a game warden at work tracking poachers in the foothills of southern Monterey County, as well as deer, boar, abalone and other illegally killed animals.

Blower door equipment is used to measure a home’s
air leaks. A blower door test is part of the evaluation for
determining a home’s HERS Index.
Photo by: D&R International

Remember the day when most men knew the horsepower of their muscle cars? Now most of us are concerned about miles per gallon. But what can we use to bring prestige to our houses? It used to be that a large square footage gave us bragging rights. But if all goes according to the plan of the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET), the talk around the water cooler will be “What’s your house’s HERS score?”

Home energy ratings have been around since 1981. The idea began in the mortgage industry to credit the energy efficiency of homes towards the home mortgage. An energy efficient home means that the homeowner is spending less each month on electricity and natural gas and therefore has more to spend on the mortgage. RESNET has been developing the Home Energy Rating System (HERS) since 1981. In the beginning, it was the higher the HERS score the better. But because of the more widespread introduction of renewable energy systems, such as photovoltaics (PV) and solar hot water systems, into homes, and the ability of many houses today to produce as much electricity and/or hot water as they need over the course of a year-these are called net zero-energy houses-a HERS Index of “0″ is the goal. A HERS score of 85 means that a new home meets Energy Star standards. A HERS score of 150 means you’re living with an Energy Hog. The typical existing home in the United States has a HERS Index of 130.

HERS raters look at a home’s heating and cooling efficiency, insulation levels, appliance and lighting energy use, window efficiency, a home’s solar orientation, and other factors that are tailored to the home’s climate region, and use computer software to calculate a HERS index.

Some readers my be asking, “Why should I care?” You should care because the HERS score is becoming the standard du jour for homebuilders. If you want a bigger, energy efficiency mortgage, you’ll need a HERS rater to measure the efficiency of the home you want to buy and to tell you what retrofits you need to do to qualify. If you are a builder and want to catch the “green wave” by earning an Energy Star rating for the new homes you are selling, you’ve got to get those homes rated by a certified HERS rater.

Many states have Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standards and Energy Efficiency Credit trading, and many more will in the future as we move towards national standards for meeting greenhouse gas emissions goals. The HERS Index is in place to serve the need for a third-party verifier of energy efficiency improvements.

Want energy efficiency tax credits for your new home? Better find a RESNET-certified rater. Moving to Canada? The Canadian RESNET, or CRESNET, is in the process of accepting the U.S. standards. I don’t know the HERS Index of my home, but we did recently have some air sealing and insulation work done-but not quite to Energy Star standards. My guess is we’d score about 100. What’s your HERS score?

Penguin-cams are now at
the California Academy of Sciences.

Upon writing this blog, the California Academy of Sciences is scheduled to open in 94 days. After years of planning, staff is contemplating two digits - literally three months until opening. It seems surreal. But progress at the park is moving along at a steady clip. African Hall is nearly done, with the backdrops painted and the specimens perfectly placed.

Select staff took a tour the other day across the western expanse of the public floor to see the new changes. The Foucault pendulum is placed in its new home with only a few touches needed before opening. Speculation was given over who will have the job of placing the pegs on a regular basis. The floor exhibits are being placed and labels are being printed. The tanks on the floor are being outfitted and water is being tested before fish are added. The opening is starting to feel palpable.

Yet so much is still to be done and a great deal of the building is off limits for staff because construction is on-going. Yet, so many still just want a little sneak peak. For this, there is one area with constant access albeit through technology. Three webcams have been placed in the new African penguin enclosure that now streams real time video footage. The enclosure sports a more natural rocky look and is twice the size of the penguin enclosure on Howard Street. The new residents at the end of African Hall are acclimating quite well to their new abode. The enclosure holds the 20 African penguins and they are now Academy ambassadors through our website. Views give a wide view of the enclosure, an underwater view and a handheld view from Pam Schaller, senior Aquatic Biologist and Penguin handler.

Along with streaming video, the Academy penguin-cam page features a blog updated by Pam about penguin behavior and research. Amongst the blog tidbits include observations of penguin courting and unusual markings on Ocio, one of the penguins. But you don’t have to take my word for it - you can visit yourself and spend some time with the Academy African penguins by visiting here.

Do you have a note from your doctor?

So much information, so little understandingOn June 9, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) sent letters to 13 different direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies telling them that they were not in compliance with California laws and needed to stop providing testing. The two main issues appear to be:

1. The testing facilities were not licensed correctly.
2. The tests were ordered without the request or counsel of a doctor.

This seems to me to be the opening salvo in an upcoming war between the government and these companies about DNA testing. The government wants to protect the consumer from getting incorrect results and/or misinterpreting the results they get. The companies want to provide people with information about their own DNA. I have to say I am unsure where I stand on this one.

On the one hand, there are some companies out there selling snake oil. For example, anyone claiming that they can provide a set of nutritional products based on your genetic test results almost certainly should be shut down.

And I would guess that the CDPH is not going after purely recreational companies like those involved in ancestry. I can’t imagine why a doctor would order that kind of test. If these letters target ancestry companies, then whatever laws are involved should be changed.

There are also companies that comply with the current California laws. One of the most prominent is DNA Direct. This company follows all of the rules of the state, only offers well validated tests that are performed in a CLIA lab, and provides genetic counseling so people can understand the results they get.

But what about the companies between DNA Direct and ancestry testing services? Although we don’t know for sure, the CDPH seems to have targeted many newer companies that look at hundreds of thousands or even millions of DNA differences at once throughout a person’s DNA.

The three main companies that I know about that are in this gray region are Navigenics, 23andMe, and deCODEme. Navigenics is a different sort of beast from the other two in that it only provides information on DNA differences that have a well established link to a disease and they also provide genetic counseling. The other two can really be thought more of as recreational genomics at this point.

23andMe and deCODEme give a client all of their information and then tell the client what is known about each DNA difference. They offer ancestry, trait, and disease information bundled up in a single 1000 dollar test.

These companies count on the consumer being able to digest all of that data and recognize what is a strong and/or important correlation and what is not. This is the point where a group that includes the government, doctors, and many academics differ with these companies.

Once we make sure that the testing is done well, the question really boils down to whether or not the consumer can handle all of the information*. Can consumers interpret these kinds of results and know when to seek help and when not to?

The answer is that some can and some can’t. So how do we protect those who can’t but still allow people access to their own DNA? Or should we protect consumers at all from their own DNA information?

*There is also the stipulation about a doctor ordering the test but frankly I don’t get that one and am not sure it should be part of any consumer protection.

Copy of the letter from Wired Science

Humans produce 500 billion plastic bags annually.

In China, they recently banned it. Australia, Bangladesh, Ireland, Italy, South Africa,Taiwan, Mumbai and India have either banned it or discouraged its use by raising taxes. And on March 27, 2007, San Francisco became the first city in the USA to ban it from large grocery stores.

More people are ditching plastic bags on a local and national level with good reason: we produce about 500 billion plastic bags world-wide, and less than one percent of that is recycled.

A recent QUEST report shows that plastic bottles are straining our environment, too: each year the USA alone produces 50 billion plastic bottles. Some would say to switch from plastic to paper bags - but reports show that paper bags aren’t the most sustainable solution.

Plastic can have a longer shelf-live than humans do: it can persist in the environment for anywhere between 20 to 1,000 years. But a 16-year-old from Waterloo, Canada figured out to decompose it in only six weeks.

Daniel Burd, a student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, discovered the key to decomposing plastic bags for a school science fair. Needless to say, he won.

“Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” said Burd to The Record, a Waterloo newspaper. “One day, I got tired of it and wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”

First, Burd decided to isolate the microbes that break down plastic in polyethelene plastic bags. Burd ground plastic bags into powder and created a solution to break it down using tap water and yeast. Six weeks later, he found that the plastic weighed 17 percent less than the control group.

Burd then isolated the effective strains that caused the degradation - Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas - and tried the experiment again, adding sodium acecate.

Six weeks later - as opposed to 1,000 years - the plastic decomposed by 43 percent.

For his final report, Plastic Not Fantastic, Burd wrote that his process of polyethylene degradation can be used for large-scale plastic bag biodegradation.

“As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills,” wrote Burd.

Cris Benton inspects his kite aerial photography rig
before sending it up in the sky. Credit: Jane Liaw.

UC Berkeley architecture professor Charles ‘Cris’ Benton is a kite aerial photography (KAP) enthusiast. Benton is well-known in the KAP world for sharing his knowledge and love of the art.

In this art form, a camera is carried aloft by a kite and operated remotely from the ground. The pictures taken provide a bird’s-eye view that can’t be seen from the ground or an airplane. Benton’s Web site, chock full of information and gorgeous photos, has attracted numerous newbies to KAP.

I am profiling Benton for the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program. As I was casting around for an interesting scientist to write about, Benton stood out to me. He has a distinct and coherent philosophy that extends through both work and hobby.

Benton explains his attraction to KAP on the Web site:

Kite aerial photography appeals to that part of me, perhaps of all of us, that would slip our earthly bonds and see the world from new heights. An aerial view offers a fresh perspective of familiar landscapes and in doing so challenges our spatial sensibilities, our grasp of relationships.

KAP is a natural fit for Benton, who says architects also think about bird’s-eye perspectives and relationships between buildings in the landscape.

KAP was invented more than a century ago, but fell out of favor as military and commercial photography from airplanes became popular. In past few decades, artists interested in a unique perspective from the sky have revived the art. Today, thousands of people worldwide pursue KAP, and Benton is one respected example. He builds the rigs that hold his camera aloft from parts he finds around the house. The camera cradle, for instance, is re-purposed from an old computer hard drive. Benton, who took his first aerial photographs at Cesar Chavez Park in 1995, has built every rig himself; he’s now on his tenth.

Benton’s creation is impressive. He has set a camera in a wooden frame, and engineered a remote mechanism that pushes the shutter button and can move his camera to vertical or horizontal positions. To take his aerial photos, he handles the spool of kite string with one hand and works the radio controller that remotely manipulates the camera with the other.

At Cesar Chavez Park today, I watch as Benton hooks the kite to a park bench after it’s aloft, then attaches the camera to the kite line, rigged in a pulley system that allows Benton to move the camera up and down the line. He snaps a few photos of himself at different heights to show me.

Benton peers up at his rig as he positions it for some
photo-taking. Credit: Jane Liaw.
Benton doesn’t use real-time video to help compose his shots, as some kite aerial photographers do. With video, the photographer on the ground sees exactly what the camera’s shot will look like. Instead, Benton “interrogates the landscape.” He thinks through the shot, forms a hypothesis on what he might see if he were looking through the camera lens in the sky, takes the picture, and compares his imaginings to the actual shot.

Benton has in recent years developed a fascination with the south San Francisco Bay. For several years, he has been documenting the area as part of the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Hidden Ecologies project. Benton takes kite aerial photographs of the South Bay salt flats and other Bay geographies, while a microbiologist takes “microcinematography”– photos of tiny critters such as bacteria and diatoms that inhabit these ecosystems, captured with the help of field microscopes.

Benton has published his photos on a blog: majestic overviews of the South Bay salt ponds that run the color spectrum from red to green to pink, depending on how the microscopic organisms adapt to varying salinity levels.

Cris will be collaborating with KQED staff on our next 2-minute “Your Photos on QUEST” segment for broadcast and web distribution. It will air on August 26, 2008.

His stunning set of Kite Aerial Photography of South San Francisco Bay did a wonderful job of expressing a sense of locale, with a passion for nature, via a process that captures something unexpected and essential.

In his own words:

"…juxtapositions abound – dendritic marsh channels as foils for the straight lines of infrastructure; wild openness confronting the confines of encroaching capitalism; salt ponds, vividly colored by the aforementioned halophiles, constrained by subtly hued mud and marsh; derelict, forgotten engineering works faintly echoing their former functions. ."

Benton makes his own kite rigs, but if you’re interested in taking up the hobby and are daunted by putting together your own equipment, you can also buy ready-made rigs online from Brooks Leffler, a pioneer of modern KAP.

I was excited to be working on this story. After all, it’s not that often that a primarily environmental reporter gets to spend a couple weeks focusing on forensics technology and the debate over gun control (let alone receive firearms training on a 38-special from a senior criminalist at the DOJ’s California Criminalistics Institute). In the end, there was much, much more to report than I could squeeze into five minutes.

Supporters of microstamping will want to have heard from the technology’s inventor, Todd Lizotte of NanoMark Technologies. Lizotte reports a much higher success rate than the UC Davis study and, according to a microstamping supporter I spoke with, has declined any potential profits he might have made on it.

Microstamping itself has far more subtleties than I was able to report on. Fred Tulleners experimented with (and had various degrees of success with) several different types of stamping, as documented in the report he and others prepared for the California Policy Research Center. Even for a non-ballistics expert, that report makes for compelling reading. Tullener’s personal opinions on microstamping are also more complex than the story allows: He told me that he would like to see more investment in law enforcement and detection — on the street investments, in other words, rather than new technologies.

I also want to point out that the story overestimates the overall success rate of Tulleners’ microstamping tests. I say that microstamping worked “roughly three quarters;” of the time; in actuality, Tulleners says it was closer to 50 percent.

And finally, there’s more afoot in the world of gun control technology than I was able to delve into. For example, “Smart Guns,” which would recognize and respond exclusively to their registered owner’s grip. Supporters point in particular to the number of minors killed while playing with their parents’ guns. Of course, controversy follows every new gun proposal. Here’s a Wired article about the Smart Guns debate.

Listen to the “How to ID a Bullet” Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Depiction of a major alignment of
the five visible planets in 1059 BCE.

Photo By Ben Burress

There are some pretty good “lineups” coming soon to skies above you.

First of all, “lineups,” or alignments, go on in the heavens all the time, though most often they are alignments of objects too faint to easily notice, if at all. With that said, this summer holds some significant alignments of some of the brightest objects in the sky.

First on my hit list is the upcoming Saturn-Mars “near-miss”. Though these two planets are not coming physically close to each other (the closest actual distance they come to each other is about 750 million miles), they will align so closely along the same line of sight that on July 11^th they will appear only ¾ of a degree apart-that’s not much greater than the width of a Full Moon. The best time to see this pairing is after sunset on the evenings of July 10, 11, and 12, over the western horizon.

The next big ticket alignment is on August 1^st, when the Moon and the Sun occupy the same spot in the sky-the event we call a Total Solar Eclipse. As it happens, we won’t be able to see this eclipse directly from the United States, as it will only be visible in Asia. However, NASA will be broadcasting live coverage of the eclipse from Northern China. We’ll be showing NASA’s broadcast in our planetarium at Chabot Space and Science Center, in case you’d care to come up and enjoy the spectacle. Don’t let the fact that the live event goes on around 4:00 AM keep you away…it’s worth getting up for!

A bit further out on the calendar is the September alignment of three planets: Venus, Mars, and Mercury. In the dusky twilight of mid-September evenings the three will be gathering. The closest grouping of the trio is on September 11^th, when they will be within about three degrees of each other-close enough that you can just about cover all three with your thumb. Mercury and Mars won’t be very bright in the twilight-but Venus, bright enough to spot easily, can help guide your eye to the other two. Using a pair of binoculars will help a lot-but make sure you don’t point them that way until after the Sun sets….

In ancient times (and in some cases not so ancient times), different cultures around the world have viewed alignments like these in different ways. Eclipses-both solar and lunar-were regarded by many cultures as bad omens, or bad occurrences (such as the Sun being devoured by a celestial animal-dragon, dog or other-in the case of a solar eclipse).

Planetary alignments were also given special consideration, sometimes being regarded as auspicious (for good or bad-usually the latter). One major alignment of the five visible planets (February 26, 1953 BCE) was believed to have “mandated” the creation of the Hsia Dynasty in China-the first great Chinese Dynasty. (Then, four centuries later, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn apparently conspired to bring down that same dynasty-at least, their alignment on December 20, 1576 BCE was interpreted as an indicator of the dynasty’s corruption, and it was overthrown by a revolt of believers…).

However you regard the lining up of celestial bodies (astronomically, astrologically, or aesthetically), these alignments are pleasing to watch, and times to reflect upon the constant and cyclic movement among the heavens. Enjoy….