Credit: NASA.

When the LCROSS satellite, nicknamed Centaur, smacks into the south pole of the moon in late October, it is expected to produce a plume of dust 37 miles high, which may be visible from Earth with a good backyard telescope. It will be visible in an arc from Hawaii to Texas.

If you'd like to catch the impact, the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland is hosting a Shooting the Moon star party on the night of impact. Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco may host a star-gazing event, as well, but it hasn't been announced yet. And you could check in on other observatories in the Bay Area, as well: Lick observatory in the Santa Cruz mountains, Foothill observatory in Los Altos Hills, Sonoma State observatory in Rohnert Park, and the Fremont Peak observatory in the East Bay.

Not all of them will be open to the public; for instance, Foothill Observatory will be closed to the public, because they’ve been asked to take photographs of the event.

If you know anyone with a 10-inch telescope (that's the diameter of the lens), you can bet that telescope will be lined up to look skyward when the LCROSS probe hits the moon.

If the impact goes well, then the plume above the moon's surface could hover there for hours. It will make its own crater on the moon about 6 feet deep and 30 yards wide, so the plume of dust will not be visible to the naked eye, or even through binoculars.

The exact date, time and even the exact location of the impact have not yet been determined. Keep your eye on NASA's site for more information.

And one aside: This impact will not hurt the moon, or send it off its orbit. That may seem apparent to many people, but NASA Ames officials say those are the most-asked questions about the project.

Listen to the Crash Landing radio report online.

Who's more energy efficient with the dishes– you or your dishwasher? Image: Ronan_tlvA microwave oven is the most efficient way to heat water for a cup of tea, hot chocolate, or coffee. True or False?

Now as a regular morning coffee drinker who uses a kettle and a gas stove to heat water for coffee (not instant– yuk! I use a coffee filter cone and PEET's coffee, of course) instead of the microwave, since our microwave is an old piece of inefficient junk that takes forever to heat water, I thought that buying a new microwave would make me a more energy efficient coffee drinker. But I was wrong!

Jennifer Mitchell-Jackson, while a graduate student at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, measured the energy use of an average microwave oven, an electric stovetop, and a gas stovetop to heat up a mug of water. Turns out that an electric stove uses 25% less electricity than an average microwave oven to heat a mug of water. A gas stove is less efficient and uses more energy than a microwave oven, but depending on the cost of gas, it might cost less to heat a mug of coffee with gas compared to the microwave.

It is more efficient to wash dishes by hand than it is to use a dishwasher. True or false?

How many arguments has that one caused! The research to dispel this myth came from Germany. Rainer Stamminger, a professor of household and appliance technology and his colleagues at the University of Bonn, gathered more than 100 volunteer dishwashers with varying skill levels and dishwashing styles in a laboratory, and measured the amount of water and energy each used to wash big stacks of dirty dishes. He then washed similar dirty dishes in dishwashers and measured the dishwashers’ water and energy use.

His conclusion: The machine is more efficient than the hand. In general, the dishwashers used much more water and somewhat more energy than the dishwashing machines. Some test subjects used 53 gallons of water to clean 12 place settings! But there is a wide variation in the styles and economics of hand dishwashing.

Clearly, a new, efficient dishwasher is best. But if you can’t afford one, or like to spend a lot of time with your hands in soapy water, Stamminger and company have some suggestions:

• Remove large dish scraps with a fork or spoon.
• Do the dishes soon after a meal before the food has dried on the plates (get your dinner guests involved).
• Do not pre-rinse your dishes under running tap water (same goes for dishwasher use).
• Use a hot-water sink for washing and a cold-water sink for rinsing.
• Use just the amount of detergent recommended by the manufacturer.

And put that coffee mug in the dishwasher when you're done.

So where exactly does the water go when you flush your toilet? The short answer, if you live around here, is the San Francisco Bay. But what about the steps in between — where are those plants that clean and disinfect that water first? And which of the treatment plants have had problems with unintentional spills of untreated water into the Bay? To answer those questions, we created the first-ever online map of Bay Area publicly-owned sewage treatment plants and spills.

Our timing couldn't have been better; just this month, the State Water Resource Control Board released its own set of interactive spills maps. These maps, which are updated every 24 hours, show the locations and details of any wastewater spills that come from the sewer lines that lead to the plants. The State's map does not include any spills from wastewater (sewage) treatment plants themselves, however — luckily that's exactly what we've been working on!





(View this map– Wastewater Woes: Treatments & Spills– in a larger size)




The information was not very easy to come by. While spills from treatment plants sometimes get a lot of press, often they slip by mostly unnoticed. And there's no central database that collects all the information about these spills in one place. We combed through news reports, records provided by the State and Regional Water Resources Control Board, and the state Office of Emergency Services incident reports to piece together information about recent spills.

While our map won't get updated every 24 hours, the staff at the watchdog group Baykeeper intend to keep it current with new info. So go ahead, poke around. Find the plant nearest you, see where spills have been happening. And next time you watch water run down the drain, you'll know exactly where it's going.

The guts of the system are hidden underground.
Right about the time I started researching the story about sewage spills in the Bay Area, I also started the preliminary stages of potty training my nearly-two-year-old twin boys. This involves first getting them familiar and comfortable with the whole process of using the toilet. So for the last couple of months, I’ve been dutifully inviting them into the bathroom with me when I go “potty”.

They LOVE announcing like, squawking little birds, exactly what it is I'm doing in there. They knock each other over for the chance to flush the toilet. But it seems the best part of all is giving it a hero’s send-off: "Bye-Bye, Poo-Poo! Bye-Bye, Poo-Poo! Bye-Bye, Poo-Poo!" Apart from it just being sort of fun to say, I don’t think that I’m imagining that they are experiencing a kind of satisfaction in making it go away. Call me jaded but I think my own enthusiasm for the process has faded somewhat since I was their age. But after producing Wastewater Woes: Sewage Spills in SF Bay, I've learned some things about sewage collection and wastewater treatment systems that are good to be aware of.

When one of the 47 wastewater treatment plants around the bay has a spill or an overflow during wet weather, it's unlikely that Bay Area residents consider that it was caused by anything that we've done or neglected to do. But I learned that one of the main reasons for so many sewage spills in San Francisco Bay- both from the treatment plants and the collection systems underground- is that those of us who use and depend on the sewage system don't really understand it. Water and sewage customers need to be conscious of a few key facts:

• The water that's flushed down the toilet, used to wash clothes or dishes, or runs while we brush our teeth ultimately ends up getting treated then is discharged into the bay or the ocean.
  

• Putting grease down the drain, flushing rags, feminine hygiene products or anything but toilet paper down the toilet can lead to blocked sewage pipes and dangerous spills in the collection systems.
  

• Years of neglecting our cracked and crumbling sewage collection systems, including privately-owned sewage lateral pipes that connect every single home and business to the city-owned sewage mains, has resulted in the inflow of great volumes of rainwater to the collection system as well as spills and overflows downstream at treatment plants.

Sure, sewage is not the most pleasant thing to contemplate and it's understandable that most people don’t give it a second thought because the guts of the system are hidden underground. But it is precisely this "out of sight, out of mind" mentality that has led to untreated sewage spills in San Francisco Bay becoming a significant source of pollution that can have harmful impacts on people, animals and habitat. The cost of fixing the Bay Area's systems is estimated at several billion dollars. Obviously, that won't happen overnight. So in the meantime, have your own lateral inspected and repaired and don’t be surprised if your sewage rates continue to creep up.

For my own part, I will strive to teach my boys responsible flushing and instill in them a little bit of curiosity about what exactly happens AFTER we flush the toilet.

Watch the Wasterter Woes: Sewage Spills in SF Bay television story online.

Kids will want to keep learning science when they see how fun it is.The economy is in the tank and so the cuts at schools begin. And of course one of the first things on the chopping block is anything that can keep kids interested in science.

These programs tend to be more expensive than other programs and so are natural targets for the axe.  For example, at my kids' school, they are cutting 5^th grade science camp.

Kids go off for a 5 day trip to a place out in the woods to study nature.  The kids have a blast and can see that science is more than memorizing phyla or sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks.  Instead they get to explore nature and use books to figure out what they're seeing.

And if history is any guide, there will be a big fall off in field trips to zoos and museums too.  These are more places where kids can see that science is actually a lot of fun.

Some might argue that if money is limited these programs should be cut.  This is true only if we want a workforce that can't do the jobs that are becoming available in our information based economy.

To do well in the future job market, people are going to need a good basic understanding of science and/or engineering.  Think about what an auto mechanic does these days.  Or a nurse or a radiologist.

We need to keep people studying science for their own good.  And frankly, for the good of the U.S. as well.

One of the keys to getting more people to take the science they need is to show them how fun and exciting it is.  We need to let them see that science is actually about studying the mysteries of the natural world and applying them to make that world a better place.

This is what the programs that are going to be cut do.  Without them, schools will continue to turn kids away from science.  And the U.S. will fall behind other countries.

I have no idea what programs should be cut instead and I am sure that other people see higher priorities than science camp.  But I think it is time that public schools recognized that science is as important to a student's future as are the three R's.  Someone needs to come up with a way to make science into an R so we can have the four R's.  Any ideas?

For these notes, I thought I'd focus on something that didn’t make it into the sea lions radio broadcast: the necropsy.

Each year the Marine Mammal Center treats somewhere between 600-1000 animals, including California sea lions, Pacific harbor seals, Northern elephant seals, and steller sea lions. About half of them are treated successfully at the center and released into the Pacific. The other half either die naturally or have to be euthanized.

Most of them end up at the center's hospital after passersby spot the animals on the beach and sense something’s wrong. (The Marine Mammal center responds to calls anywhere between Mendocino and San Louis Obispo Counties — some 600 miles of coastline.) Some problems are human-caused, like boat-propeller injuries or ingested fishing nets and hooks. Other times, it's cancer, domoic acid poisoning, or leptospirosis. Sometimes, it's hard to tell exactly what happened — hence the need for necropsies.

On the day that Quest intern Jennifer Skene and I visited the center, veterinarian Nicola Pussini performed two necropsies, both on sea lions. One animal seemed to have died from a tumor underneath his fin; the other was a suspected domoic acid intoxication.

Each necropsy takes about an hour and a half. First Pussini measures the animal, then he slices it open and inspects every part, from tongue to tail. He inspects the teeth, pulls out all the organs, checks to see how much fat the animal has. The data, along with tissue samples, are archived and shared with other research institutions. This is the kind of basic research that Marine Mammal Center staff cite when people ask why they devote so many resources (most of it from private donations) to animals whose populations are neither threatened nor endangered.

I should mention that I didn't exactly see this entire process firsthand. Let's just say that after my first strong whiff of sea lion intestine, I felt a compelling need to go check on things outside the necropsy room. Luckily for me, Jennifer has the stomach of a true scientist and managed to both hold the microphone and take photos. Luckily for you, we’re sparing you her gorier shots.

Listen to the Sea Lion Rescue radio report online, and watch our photo slideshow.

I admit it, I watch way too much television. Some good television (KQED QUEST for example), but mainly bad television: American Idol, Amazing Race, pretty much anything on the VH1 channel. My brain was turning to mush.

After some cajoling from the wife, I trekked down to the library to check out the science section. I was amazed at the bevy of great pop science books. Most are accessible, quick reads on pretty much every science topic under the sun. However, I'm a social creature, I wanted to discuss science books with peers.

A few quick searches and voila! Science book clubs exist right here in the Bay Area (one of them hosted by myself so I'd have more control on book selection). Lively discussion and science books, it's a good combination.

Down to a Science Book Club

Book: "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer

When: Monday, May 25th, 7-9 PM

Where: Books Inc, 601 Van Ness @ Turk, 2 blocks north of SF City Hall

Details: Ever had a experience of option paralysis? Like when you are looking at the 11 different types of Cheerios in the cereal aisle? If you're anything like me, decision making is an "interesting" process. Jonah Lehrer tackles the neurobiology of decision making and points out a few ways you may be able to overcome that paralysis. Watch Jonah discuss decision making at the Commonwealth Club or listen to him discuss Choice on RadioLab.

California Academy of Science Book Clubs

Teens Talk Books: Underwater Explorations

Book: Shark Life: True Stories about Sharks and the Sea by Peter Benchley

When: June 6th, 11:00 am in Education Classroom

Where: California Academy of Sciences

Coming face to face with the jaws of a great white shark.  Chasing leaping orcas near Vancouver.  Swimming with hoards of hammerheads in the Sea of Cortez.  Benchley, the author of Jaws, shares his many underwater adventures with sharks and other marine creatures, while helping the reader learn more about these majestic creatures, how to swim with them safely, and why it is vital for us to protect our oceasn.  Join us for a discussion of Benchley's fascinating read!

Reservations: Free with admission to the museum, but participants should call the Naturalist Center at 415-379-5494 to reserve a space.

Bookworms (Adult Book Group): Why Do Oceans Matter?

Book: Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans by Sylvia Earle

When: June 16th, 6:30 pm in the Naturalist Center

Where: California Academy of Sciences

Details: In recognition of World Ocean Day this month, the group will read and discuss noted marine biologist Sylvia Earle's book which is both a plea for ocean conservation and a very personal story of her own lifelong exploration of life in the deep.

Reservations: Free.  Reserve a space by calling 415-379-5494.

This Week In Science Online Book Club – Hosted by TWIS.org

An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere

Details: Most of the time we hardly notice that we're moving through air. But when a storm system whips it into a whirling mass that grows into a tornado or a hurricane, then the air around us makes headlines. Science consultant Walker (Snowball Earth) presents a lively history of scientists' and adventurers' exploration of this important and complex contributor to life on Earth, from Galileo's early attempts to show that it has weight to the explorations by 20th-century scientists Oliver Heaviside and Edward Appleton of the ionosphere, which acts as a giant mirror bouncing radio waves from one side of the globe to another. Walker provides readers with easy-to-follow discussions of the science behind the discovery that carbon dioxide levels are rising exponentially.

The Hubble Space Telescope being serviced by Space Shuttle
Atlantis astronauts in May 2009. Credit: NASAFour hundred years ago, Galileo built his telescope and became the first on record to point the new device (invented the previous year) at objects in the sky. Today (in fact, even as I write!) what has become a symbol for the current state of evolution of the telescope—the Hubble Space Telescope–is being repaired and upgraded by the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis…for the last time.

Galileo's telescope had a magnification of only about 27x, allowing him to see that Venus has phases like the Moon, Jupiter has four large moons of its own, Saturn does not appear as a simple disk but has unusual "projections" to either side, and the Milky Way contains far more stars than is apparent to the naked eye. And though these are features that can be seen through the least powerful home telescopes today, Galileo's observations changed the way we look at the universe.

Hubble has done the same thing, but on a modern scale of magnitude. Not a large telescope by the standards of ground-based behemoths like Keck in Hawaii (Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter), Hubble's "edge" is it's location in space, orbiting the Earth over 300 miles high, outside of our atmosphere. Particularly in its earlier days before ground based telescopes were using adaptive optics techniques to compensate for atmospheric distortion, Hubble's vision on the universe was unparalleled in its clarity.

Here's is a recap of a few of the many big discoveries Hubble has made possible:

Dark Energy: By accurately measuring the distance and velocity of distant supernovae, over a large range of distances, Hubble has refined out knowledge of the rate of expansion of the universe–leading to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating, contrary to what was expected. Scientists suggest the existence of a mysterious "dark energy" throughout the universe that exerts an antigravitational repulsive pressure on the cosmos.

Age of the Universe: Since Edwin Hubble (for whom the Space Telescope was named) discovered that the universe is expanding, astronomers have been trying to determine how long ago the expansion began–how long ago the "starting gun" of the Big Bang was fired, and thus the beginning of the universe. Through precise observations with the Hubble, astronomers in recent years have been able to peg it between 12 and 14 billion years. (Most recently, observations made with the WMAP mission have honed that down to 13.7 billion years, give or take 0.13 billion.)

Supermassive Blackholes: Hubble found the clues that point to the existence of "supermassive" blackholes at the heart of maybe most–or every–galaxy. The Milky Way's own central blackhole has a mass equivalent to four million Suns.

Stellar Dust Disks: Before the first extrasolar planets were actually detected, Hubble observations revealed that flat disks of dust encircling young and developing star systems–aka "protoplanetary disks"–is commonplace. This has given us a glimpse at what our own solar system may have looked like before the planets formed.

It has been seven years since the last Hubble servicing mission, with another servicing scheduled a few years ago cancelled in the wake of the Columbia disaster. Several failing systems will be repaired or replaced this time, and other instruments are receiving upgrades that will make Hubble more powerful than ever in its declining years.

This mission to service the Hubble will be the last. Since NASA is retiring the Space Shuttle fleet after 2010, we will no longer have a space vehicle large enough to carry upgrade and replacement equipment to and from the Hubble. After that, the next new big space-based descendent of Galileo's spyglass will be the James Webb. Stay tuned…

The rate of asthma in children younger than five increased 160
percent between 1980 and 1994.
When I set out to produce a QUEST story on the latest research on the causes of childhood asthma, I didn't expect to discover how little researchers know about this question. They do understand the lung disease's mechanisms: a chronic inflammation of the airways causes an overreaction to allergens like pollen and dust mites, which in turn brings on symptoms like wheezing, coughing and a dangerous tightening of the chest and shortness of breath.

But asthma researchers are still very much working to figure out what, besides changes in the way asthma is diagnosed, might account for the 160 percent rise in the rate of asthma in children younger than 5 that took place between 1980 and 1994. Our QUEST TV story looks at one interesting hypothesis, called the "hygiene hypothesis." The hypothesis proposes that as certain types of bacteria have become less and less present in our lives, we have developed allergic diseases in response.

I also asked researchers if their findings allowed them to make recommendations to parents on what they might be able to do to help reduce the risk of their children developing asthma. Although our two interviewees were careful to caution how little scientists know with certainty at this point, they were willing to venture some advice, which you'll see in our Web-only video.

Watch the Asthma television story online.

Seahorses are sold as expensive ingredients used in
traditional Chinese medicine.
When I was a kid I rode horses and was an avid ocean swimmer, and I absolutely fell in love with all sea creatures. But there was a special place in my heart for the one that seemingly combined my land and sea passions, the seahorse. Come to think of it, I don't think I actually thought these undersea chimeras existed in real life…in my mind they lived in storybook land along with unicorns and Mr. Tumnus. I mean, I never saw a real one…so how could I know? But these days kids are getting familiar with the real deal thanks to the hard work of a handful of public aquariums, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, The Steinhart Aquarium, The National Aquarium in Baltimore, The Shedd Aquarium, and The Birch Aquarium among others.

Not surprisingly, I jumped at the chance to produce the Quest "Seahorse Sleuth" story, but I will admit that the process of making this piece was demoralizing, to say the least. I spent days in San Francisco’s Chinatown trying to get shop owners who sell Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to talk to me about their trade, and specifically about seahorses. I must have visited 20 or so stores, multiple times, and I saw many hundreds of dried seahorses and thousands of shark fins, not to mention enormous piles of antlers, skins, penises, and whole dried animals. Though I tried many different approaches, no one would talk to me…I was clearly an outsider and not to be trusted. (Had I managed to garner the trust of one of the shop owners, I would have certainly included them in the piece). This experience made me even more impressed and appreciative of the hard work that the folks at Project Seahorse are doing, and exhausted at the thought of how far they still have to go to convince fisherman and governments around the world not to decimate their seahorse populations.

But whereas Project Seahorse must be measured and careful in their approach to these conversations about TCM in order to make headway, I feel that in this blog I can be more forthcoming about my feelings about the use of these animals, and all animals, in TCM.

Of course TCM has a rich history dating back at least 2,000 years, and at least a quarter of the world's population uses this form of medicine. I myself find acupuncture and herbal remedies to be very helpful and do not wish to debunk the efficacy of at least those two parts of the tradition. But I personally draw the line at the use of animals, because I'm a huge animal lover, and I am absolutely appalled at the use of endangered or threatened species for any use. This planet may have seemed endlessly bountiful 2000 years ago, but today we can no longer afford to take the survival of non-human species for granted. To add salt to the wound, it is my understanding that China does not, as of yet, perform the kind of rigorous testing of these products that we must perform for drugs in the U.S. to determine their effectiveness. (This is why we get products from China with arsenic in them, for example). One of the main uses of dried seahorses (and many other dried animals) in TCM is for male virility, though I do not believe there have been any studies that actually prove it has any effect on virility. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s dumbfounding that a country with an official one-child policy, which has led to female infanticide levels that have caused a significant gender imbalance in China, thinks they need to ingest threatened and endangered species to improve the potency of their male population. Let's put the pieces together here folks.

Ok, I'm going to get off my soapbox now, since I'm getting into territory that I am certainly not an expert in. But I did want to present this topic for open discussion – since that's what blogs are for. But before you get too riled up, let me suggest a few websites for further research.

First of all, learn what you can do to help save seahorses by signing on to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seahorse Conservation Page. You can also brush up on the specific uses of Endangered Animals in Traditional Chinese Medicine with this informative paper on Encyclopedia's “Advocacy for Animals” site.

TRAFFIC (The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network) has a new Chinese-language textbook aimed at raising awareness on how to best protect threatened species used in TCM. Lastly, check out The World Wildlife Fund’s FAQ page on Traditional Chinese Medicine.

And that’s just to get you started…the web has plenty of information on this topic…read it and tell your friends!

Watch the Seahorse Sleuths television story online.