QUEST Community Science Blog

Human beings have used maps to describe the world for thousands of years. Blind people have used Braille for about 150. But there’s never been a way for blind people to have easy access to maps of everyday places. Until now. Amy Standen reports.
You may listen to the “Tactile Maps” 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: 37.7909, longitude: -122.434

Why cell phones are bad for gorillas and how Eco-Cell is helping.

Got a cell phone? Then in your pocket or stuck to your ear is a metallic ore called Coltan, short for Columbite-tantalite, a vital component in the capacitors that control current flow in cell phone circuit boards.

Your i-pod, laptop, DVD player and game console most likely also contain Coltan. This highly desired ore lives in the soils of the rain forest. 80% of Coltan comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The main area where Coltan is mined contains the Kahuzi Biega National Park, home of the highly endangered Mountain Gorilla. In the Park, ground-clearing for mining operations has reduced food and habitat for the gorillas, cutting their numbers nearly in half. Mining has also displaced the local people, leading them to kill gorillas and sell the “bush meat” to the miners and rebel armies that control the area.

Within the Dem. Rep. of Congo as a whole, the number of Eastern Lowland Gorillas in eight national parks has declined by 90% over the past 5 years, leaving only 3000 gorillas total.

There is hope. Companies that use Coltan are beginning to demand that their Coltan only comes from a legitimately mined source and for that fact to be verified on the packaging, much like Dolphin Safe Tuna.

What you can do currently is reduce and recycle. Reduce the amount of electronics, including cell phones, that you buy and recycle them when you are definitely done with them. Recycling these items helps
eliminate the need for more mining and keeps them out of the landfill.

The Oakland Zoo is happy to take your old cell phone and recycle it through companies such as Cartridges for Kids or Eco-Cell.

Eco-Cell, a Kentucky based company, works to help gorillas by encouraging cell phone recycling, educating about the issues and donating funds to support gorilla conservation.

You can also help gorillas by attending a family friendly event at the Oakland Zoo, Gorilla Doctors: Saving Endangered Great Apes, featuring children’s author Pamela Turner and epidemiologist Dr. Lynne Gaffikin on February 6, 2008. Bring in a cell phone to recycle for a free raffle ticket.

Amy Gotliffe is Conservation Manager at The Oakland Zoo.

latitude: -4.03833, longitude: 21.7587

Star or Comet?Yesterday was a very long day at work. I was stuck in meetings with our collaborators for over 6 hours! To make it worse, we spent the entire time discussing a single topic. I even wrote my last paper on it. What could possibly be so captivating, you ask?

Remember the solar wind I wrote about a few weeks ago? This stream of protons does more than create comet tails and aurora, it also destroys all of those fancy electronics we work so hard to put into orbit.

The protons streaming from the sun carry a lot of energy, and they leave a lot of this energy behind as they pass through satellites and astronauts that don’t have the Earth’s atmosphere to protect them. The energy released wrecks havoc on the system, throwing electrons and atoms around like a game of ping-pong. This is one form of radiation damage.

Definitely a comet!
This radiation damage is harmless over short periods of time, much like an occasional X-ray at the dentist. However the solar wind becomes a problem for something like the Hubble Space Telescope or our proposed satellite SNAP which are exposed for many years.

To understand how a telescope degrades from exposure to radiation, let me give an extremely quick explanation of how we gather astronomical images. A telescope is very similar to a camera you buy in the store. The large mirror is equivalent to the lens on your camera. The part that suffers the most radiation damage is the Charge Coupled Device, also known as a CCD.

The CCD is essentially the same as the 8-megapixel chip in your digital camera. This serves as an electronic version of film, recording the image through the photoelectric effect rather than through a chemical reaction. If you can still remember how photography was in the days of film, I’m sure you can appreciate the relief of going digital. Astronomers realized this early on and were pioneers in the use of CCDs.

The photons from the subject of the photograph collide with electrons in the silicon of a CCD, knocking them free from their parent atom. The free electrons are then collected in a well near the site of the collision. Once the exposure is complete, charge is moved one well (or pixel) at a time toward a transistor which then reports the number of electrons found. This process is usually described through the analogy of a bucket brigade passing buckets of water from a reservoir to a fire.

When the CCD is brand new, the bucket brigade performs almost perfectly. If I want to observe a star, the image comes out crystal clear. However, after enough time in space and in the solar wind, the CCD begins to show its wear. The bucket brigade gets sloppy at work and has to contend with an increasingly difficult obstacle course, spilling a little bit of water (or electrons) during each transfer. That same star now leaves a trail of charge behind and begins to look more like a comet.

Now, if I am observing a star, I want my image to look like a star, not like a comet. Is that really too much to ask? Unfortunately, the CCD will inevitably deteriorate in space and astronomers have to find ways to predict and correct for this deterioration. This is what we spent yesterday discussing. We passed around some pretty good ideas but still have a bit of work to do before we can prove a new method for correcting the images. I just hope we it figured out before our satellite launches in 2015!

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.

latitude: 37.8768, longitude: -122.251

Cal Academy scientist Kelly Herbinson
collects ants with a Bay Area science teacherAs the winter drags on, I often think fondly of a chilly Saturday in December where I found myself in a small alleyway in San Francisco trying to suck elusive ants into a rubber tube called a pooter. What was the point of this seemingly silly endeavor? I was leading a QUEST educator training with the California Academy of Sciences (one of the more fun parts of my job).

I was first introduced to the pooter, an insect catching device, last July at the California Academy of Sciences Nature Journaling workshop in the Trinity Alps and little did I know where it would lead.

The Nature Journaling workshop blended sketching and watercolor techniques with information about the natural area in which we camped. In addition to discovering I could actually be artistic (not one of my strong suits in the past) and falling in love with vegan cashew chili (I’m a big fan of meat), the highlight for me was learning how to catch small insects by sucking them into a vial at the end of a long rubber tube.

This contraption, which includes a small piece of gauze between the vial and the rubber tubing, so you don’t suck the insect all the way into your lungs, is the aforementioned pooter. By the end of the workshop, we had planned a joint educator workshop using QUEST media about invasive species with the hands-on ant collecting activities from the Bay Area Ant Survey and the California Academy of Sciences.

QUEST’s Jessica Neely
collects ants with a pooterFast forward 4 months. In early December, 29 Bay Area science educators gathered at the California Academy of Sciences to learn about Bay Area invasive species. We started the day off with QUEST’s television story San Francisco Bay Invaders, moved to some discussion about how to help our students become “media savvy” in the 21st century, and then it was time for the pooters.

Educators paired up and we took a field trip to the alley behind the Cal Academy – not the most ideal location to find ants, but it was the best we could do with limited time. It was so cold that day that Kelly Herbinson, our ant expert, had to set out bait for the ants in the morning. We poked, prodded, searched high and low, and a few of us were able to capture the cagey little critters with our pooters. Kelly led us through the identification process (yes, I’m sorry but some ants were harmed) and introduced everyone to the Bay Area Ant Survey, an amazing citizen science project where just about anyone can contribute to scientists’ understanding of the distribution of ants in the Bay Area by capturing, labeling, and sending in their ants.

Teachers study ant samples to
help identify the ants they collectedA few post-workshop take-aways:

• Despite what you hear on the news, science teachers are doing wonderful work with students

• Students are getting their information from an increasing number of sources and teaching them how to be media-savvy is tricky (not something that is currently tested on standardized tests…)

• Most importantly, ants are AMAZING! Did you know that the trap-jaw ant can snap its mandibles shut so hard and fast on an object that it can propel itself backwards 2 feet to escape predators?

Want to participate in an upcoming QUEST Educator Training? Visit our list of upcoming workshops and register.

And please add a comment if you know of a great educational resource for teaching about Bay Area invasive species. And please share your story if you use QUEST with your students!

Jessica Neely is a Project Supervisor of Science Education.

latitude: 37.781891, longitude: -122.403327

No, this is not Big Brother. Credit: Jim GunshinanThe answer to the question, Who controls your thermostat?, which I raised in an earlier post, is now clearly answered. You control your thermostat!

The California Energy Commission (CEC) was to require, as part of the 2008 Title 24 building standards, that all new homes be outfitted with programmable communicating thermostats (PCT). The PCTs would allow a utility to remotely control your thermostat during power emergencies, especially during hot summer days when air conditioning use causes electricity demand to peak. By cutting peak electricity demand in this way, California could potentially avoid rolling blackouts and even eliminate the need for building expensive new “peaker” power plants, or firing up old, dirty plants just to meet an afternoon’s demand for electricity. But after a chorus of criticism from individuals and groups around the state, CEC has dropped the rule from the standards.

From the CEC Web site:

“There has been considerable discussion concerning programmable communicating thermostats (PCT) and their proposed inclusion in the regulations for the 2008 building standards. On January 15, 2008, the Energy Commission’s Efficiency Committee (Commissioner Rosenfeld and Chairman Pfannenstiel) directed that PCTs be removed from the proposed 2008 energy efficiency building standards.”

News of Home Energy’s and my support in particular for PCTs made it’s way into some online discussion boards and we felt the backlash. I’ve never been called a fascist before! I mistakenly believed that under the new rule, a utility would not be able to fiddle with your thermostat without your permission, even in an emergency. But if I looked carefully at the proposed standard, I would have read, “The PCT shall not allow customer changes to thermostat settings during emergency events.” I was wrong.

So, Big Brother will not be controlling your thermostat anytime soon. That’s a good thing, and, in fact, the CEC now agrees:

“Technology can be a powerful tool in managing our energy use. However, it is of utmost importance that consumers make their own energy decisions.”

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

When football fans tune in on Super Bowl Sunday next weekend, they’ll be watching a greener Super Bowl, according to the NFL. Demand for carbon credits is booming, with companies from Dell Computer to Enterprise Rent-a-Car offering their customers offsets with their purchases. But critics are concerned that consumers don’t know what they’re buying - or might not be getting what they’re promised.

The 2006 Word of the Year was “carbon netural” in the The New Oxford English Dictionary. But there’s still a lot of debate about what it means. Many people compare the U.S. carbon offset market to the Wild West. Since there is no regulation, how do you know what you’re buying?

There are several guides to carbon offsets that have been created by non-profit organizations, designed to help the average consumer (see related resources). But part of the problem is that many people are still debating what a carbon offset should be. And that’s a debate that can be found in the blogosphere.

One place you can find it is on the Grist.org blog which has many bloggers writing about green issues. Forestry offset projects, which sell credits based on the fact that trees sequester– or hold carbon dioxide, have come under fire. You can read about a few of the critiques here, here and here.

Another blog, Treehugger.com, has followed the issue as well. They posted this comparison of offset providers to help their readers do their homework and this more in depth guide on the issues buyers should be aware of.

Of course, one of the earliest debates over offsets was whether offsets would act as “indulgences”, distracting consumers from making concrete changes in their lifestyles to reduce their carbon footprint. Terrapass, one offset retailer, has tried to investigate this by surveying their customers. They found that the majority of them had already had green habits. Still, the virtues of offsets are a matter of personal opinion.

You may listen to the “Cashing in on Carbon” radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Lauren Sommer is an Associate Media Producer for QUEST.

latitude: 37.325510, longitude: -120.640341

How can you tell when someone’s smile is fake?

See if you can tell from the 2 images below:*

A real, spontaneous smile incorporates tiny muscles around the eye that are nearly impossible to contract at will. You can see this for yourself in an exhibit called “Polite Smile, Delight Smile” part of the Exploratorium’s new Mind exhibition.

This corners-of-the-eyes giveaway, as well as many other subtle, yet revealing, facial gestures, was discovered by Paul Ekman, now a professor emeritus of psychology from the University of California, San Francisco. Ekman’s been studying the universality of facial expressions and the secrets our faces reveal for over four decades. The notion that certain expressions of emotion are programmed into us wasn’t so well received when he proposed it in the 1960s. At that time, social scientists believed facial expressions were cultural. Then, in 1967, Ekman embarked on an expedition to Papua New Guinea, where he asked people belonging to an indigenous tribe that had virtually no contact with the developed world to imitate the expressions they would have in certain situations, such as meeting an old friend or discovering a decaying animal. Ekman found that the ways these people’s faces expressed sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust involved the same eye and mouth muscle movements that people from Western cultures displayed. The collection of photos he took there will be on display at the Exploratorium from January 22 –April 27, 2008.

Today, Ekman is lauded by psychologists. He’s considered the leading expert on detecting deceit, and his ideas are used to train CIA, Homeland Security, and other law enforcement officers to detect when they are being lied to by someone they’re questioning and to spot unusual behavior. He devised a tool known as the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which catalogues the musculature behind thousands of facial expressions. Some of the most subtle of these Ekman calls “microexpressions,” fleeting muscle movements that reveal emotions the subject is trying to suppress. With the knowledge that these revealing expressions are universal, FACS allows a trained person to “read” someone’s emotions by observing their facial muscles.

When Ekman’s book Emotions Revealed came out in 2003, I thought it would be great to master the subject matter. Who wouldn’t benefit from learning to understand the fleeting messages people send oh-so-subtly? But the more I thought about it, the more uneasy I began to feel. Something didn’t sit right with me about the practice of decoding people without their knowledge. Then again, isn’t that what any of us do when we “sense” that someone was nervous or untruthful or secretly overjoyed? It’s not like our microexpressions are hidden. We express them in plain sight. They may be the source of an intuitive person’s “sixth sense.” But to formally study these expressions with the intent of detecting emotions that the subjects themselves are unaware of–is that a violation of privacy? Ekman would say no. He insists that he can’t read minds, only emotions, and that leaves out most of the personal details. Still, there’s something unsettling about the idea that feelings I’ve long considered private are written all over my face.

* BTW, the real smile is image 1. Did you guess correctly? Leave a comment to tell us how you knew.

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

latitude: 37.8041, longitude: -122.448

Diversity of thought has always been a cornerstone of science; however, diversity amongst scientists has often gone unnoticed. Martin Luther King’s birthday was just celebrated in remembrance of his leadership in the African American community. However, he is not the only pioneer who has brought about great and lasting change. Below are just two examples of the great scientists and innovators in the African American community who have graced the history of science for the betterment of mankind.

George Washington Carver: (1864-1943)
Agricultural Chemist and Innovator

On the epitaph on the grave of George Washington Carver it reads, “He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.”

Through his work as an agricultural chemist, Dr. George Washington Carver changed the agriculture of the South by discovering three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. From the peanut Dr. Carver created meal, instant and dry coffee, bleach, tar remover, wood filler, metal polish, paper, ink, shaving cream, rubbing oil, linoleum, synthetic rubber, and plastics. From the soybean he obtained flour, breakfast food, and milk. He also significantly boosted the agricultural economy by formulating the crop rotation method, which revolutionized agricultural practice. He educated the farmers to alternate the soil-depleting cotton crops with soil-enriching crops such as peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potato, and pecans. He did not profit from these discoveries but freely gave them for the benefit of mankind, and it was said he turned down a $100,000 salary in order to continue his agricultural work. Rising from slavery in Diamond, Missouri, Doctor Carver struggled to gain an education and used it to give back to the land. Dr. Carver died in 1943 and was buried next to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute where he worked as the Director of Agriculture. On July 17, 1960 the George Washington Carver National Monument was dedicated at Dr. Carver’s birth site. This was the first U.S. federal monument dedicated to an African-American.

Matthew Henson

Matthew Alexander Henson (1866-1955)
Arctic Explorer

“As I stood at the top of the world and thought of the hundreds of men who had lost their lives in the effort to reach it, I felt profoundly grateful that I, as the personal attendant of the commander, had the honor of representing my race in the historic achievement.”

Matthew Henson was the first man to reach the geographic North Pole with long time colleague and explorer Robert Peary. Henson was born of poor parents in Charles County, Maryland. His parents died at the age of twelve and he was then shipped off to be a cabin boy on a merchant ship. He educated himself on the sea and became a skilled navigator. Henson met Commander Robert Peary in 1888 and joined him on an expedition to Nicaragua. Peary was impressed with Henson’s seamanship and recruited him as a colleague. For years they made many trips together, including Arctic voyages in which Henson developed trading with the Eskimos by learning their language, building sleds and training dog teams. In 1909, Peary led his eighth attempt to reach the North Pole and selected Henson to be one of the team of six who would make the final run to the Pole. Peary became ill before reaching the summit and sent Henson ahead as a scout. Later, when measurements were taken, it was discovered that Henson, during his scouting had been the first mortal to walk on the top of the world. Although it was Peary who got most of the acclaim for the exploration, it was Henson who made the first historic steps. On November 28, 2000, the National Geographic Society recognized those steps and awarded the Hubbard Medal to Matthew A. Henson posthumously.

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: 37.769, longitude:-122.467

Last blog I talked about how scientists turned skin cells into embryonic stem (ES) cells. This was big news because scientists can now make an ES-like cell without destroying an embryo.

This blog I thought I’d talk about how scientists have used these cells to cure a mouse’s sickle cell anemia. If the mouse stays cured, this is a hugely important finding.

First some terminology so I don’t have to keep saying, “skin cell turned ES cell.” Scientists are now starting to call these cells iPS for induced pluripotent stem cells and I figured I’d jump on the bandwagon too. (Pluripotent is just a way to say that a cell can turn into lots of other kinds of cells).

Now as you probably know, sickle cell anemia is a genetic disease that is more common in people whose ancestors came from areas where there was lots of malaria. In sickle cell anemia, the red blood cells “sickle up,” forming crescent shapes. These shapes can’t fit in the smallest blood vessels causing the problems associated with the disease. Right now there are treatments but no cure.

The way to cure the disease is to fix the broken hemoglobin gene in the cells that make red blood cells. Since red blood cells are all replaced within a few months, this would lead to a cure pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, fixing a gene is not like falling off a log–it is really hard to do. The scientists in this study decided to try it with iPS cells. Basically they replaced the mouse’s blood stem cells with newly repaired ones so that the new blood stem cells made healthy new red blood cells. The mouse has not shown signs of sickle cell anemia for 12 weeks so far.

I don’t want you to come away thinking that it was an easy thing to do. It wasn’t (see below). But it does show that it is possible to treat and possibly cure sickle cell anemia in mice using iPS cells.

To move it to humans, we need to make sure that the treatment sticks. When these kinds of things have been tried with gene therapy, the cure almost always wears off over time. It shouldn’t happen at the DNA level with the way they did their experiment, but we need to wait and see.

The scientists also need to find genes that can turn a skin cell into an iPS with less risk of causing cancer. And to find better ways to get these genes into the skin cell so that, again, the treatment doesn’t cause cancer.

Even taking all of this into account, this is a very promising first step. Curing a genetic disease with stem cells that do not get rejected by the recipient’s body is one of the big goals of stem cell research. And these researchers may have accomplished this in mice.

More details on how to cure a mouse’s sickle cell anemia:

1. Add four genes to turn the skin cell into an iPS cell.

See the previous blogto see how to do this. To decrease the risk of the mouse developing cancer from these cells, the researchers chopped out one of the genes they used, the myc gene.

2. Use the ES cell to fix the gene using a process called homologous recombination.

Homologous recombination is a way to swap out one DNA for another. It is incredibly inefficient and we can really only get it to work at all in ES cells. Out of 72 cells, they managed to get one where one copy of the gene was repaired.* This result showed that homologous recombination would work in iPS cells which was an open question.

3. Turn the ES cell into a blood-like stem cell by adding the HoxB4 gene.

4.Destroy the mouse’s bone marrow and replace the cells with the new blood stem cells.

This is really just a bone marrow transplant using the newly created cells as the blood stem cells.

*In the end they had a mouse with one of its copies of the hemoglobin gene repaired in its blood cells. (All the rest of the cells including its sperm cells still carried the disease version of the hemoglobin gene.) The mouse exhibited no sickle cell anemia symptoms similar to most human carriers of the disease who have a single broken copy.

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

latitude 37.3316, longitude -121.89

This has been a month of dashed hopes for astronomers around the world. Last month it seemed possible that an asteroid the size of a Boeing 737 jet was due to collide with Mars on January 30. Today that seems far less likely, but, as Amy Standen reports, astronomers consider it a wake up call.
You may listen to the “An Asteroid’s Close Call” 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: 37.8768, longitude: -122.251