Doug Nomura in action on the Bay Trail.

Something about San José photographer Doug Nomura’s pictures of birds in flight, or attempting to get off the ground to fly, grabs you.  I think it’s the sheer energy and effort that the photos convey.

It’s especially timely to be broadcasting our profile of Nomura as the Your Photos on QUEST (please link to our YPOQ8 segment) 2-minute segment on our Oct. 13 television episode, since the Bay Area is inundated with migratory birds starting in October.  The Bay Area is on the Pacific Flyway, a major north-south route of travel for migratory birds in the Americas, extending from Alaska to Patagonia.  As a result, close to 700,000 ducks are usually counted in the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta during October, said John Takekawa, research wildlife biologist with the US Geological Service. Raptors like hawks and falcons also stop over in the Bay Area in fall and winter.

Doug Nomura looks forward to the beginning of the migration in October because it multiplies his opportunities to photograph birds in flight.  He stalks his subjects along the Bay Trail, a shoreline trail that will eventually hug the entire circumference of the San Francisco Bay.  When the Bay Trail is complete, it will be 500 miles long.  Currently, the public can enjoy almost 300 miles of paths.  Nomura, whose day job is as a computer network security specialist, is an avid fan.  “This allows me to turn the cell phone off and go out there for a couple of hours,” he said.  “It’s some of the best therapy one can give oneself and it doesn’t cost anything.  I’d like my photographs to inspire people to visit the Bay Trail to look at the wildlife and appreciate what we have in our backyard.”

Kevin Cain, Digital Capture Supervisor for Maya Skies, demonstrates his innovative image-capture process that replaces expensive custom hardware with affordable consumer equipment.

The film is groundbreaking for a couple of reasons.  It’s the first time the Chabot center is using state-of-the art laser scanning technology to create one of its films.  For Tales of Maya Skies, a team of 25 people spent seven weeks scanning the ruins of the ancient city of Chichén Itzá, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.  This technology is widely used by Hollywood productions because of the flexibility it gives a creative team.  Once they’ve scanned a particular site, they can play with any one of its variables: they can create the illusion that the camera is moving in crazy ways; they can manipulate the light conditions, and they can change the look of the location in any way they want.

The creative team behind Tales of Maya Skies, made up of, among others, Emeryville nonprofit Insight, the San Francisco animation companies Digitrove and Palma VFX, the ARTS Lab at the University of New Mexico, producer Konda Mason and director Jin An Wong, are taking advantage of all the possibilities that the scanning of Chichén Itzá provides.  The audience will be immersed in full-color animations that go beyond showing the ruins of Chichén Itzá as they exist today.  Instead, through laborious historical research, the creative team has reconstructed what the monumental city must have looked like at its peak 1,200 years ago, with temples painted in bright reds, greens, blues and yellows, and incense burning and flags waving atop them.

By using the 3-D digital images created through laser scanners as the raw material for the animations in Tales of Maya Skies, the film is also breaking ground in more indirect, but perhaps even more important, ways.  Insight, the Emeryville nonprofit that oversaw the scanning at Chichén Itzá, as well as the Orinda-based CyArk, another nonprofit that worked on the project, are engaged in scanning irreplaceable sites around the world, documenting them for the benefit of the archaeologists charged with preserving them, as well as for generations to come, which might lose the real thing to natural disasters, war, or the passage of time.  CyArk’s co-founder, Ben Kacyra, has set out to use laser scanners to document 500 sites in five years.

But laser scanners, for all the wonderful detail, speed and flexibility they offer, are expensive.  They can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000.  That’s why Kevin Cain, Insight’s director, has been testing an alternative system that can accomplish the same thing at a fraction of the cost. All the gear he needs is a digital camera, a flash and software, at a total cost of under $2,000.  Here’s how it works.  For every 32-square-foot swatch of an object, Cain takes 10 still photos with his camera and flash.  Then he uses the photos to reconstruct the object based on the brightness of each individual point on its surface.  The system is based on a principle of physics discovered in the 18^th century.  The high quality of today’s cheap digital cameras is what makes it possible to apply this principle to create an inexpensive image-capturing system.

“With this new technique, our ultimate goal is to be able to provide very low-cost, very usable results for archaeologists,” Cain said, “because until the price goes almost to zero, archaeologists aren’t going to be able to adopt it, just given the realities of their field.”  To illustrate those realities, Cain used the example of the work that Insight has done in Egypt for the past decade.  Each year they join a team of archaeologists for their field work at the Tomb of Ramses.  A complete yearly field season costs under $50,000, many times the cost of an inexpensive laser scanner.

Simone Crew (left) is now a freshman at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Today’s episode of QUEST-TV includes a 2-minute segment that marks our first collaboration with the San Francisco spoken word presenter Youth Speaks and The Redford Center, based in Provo, Utah. For the past four years, these organizations have been putting on a contest for young spoken word artists who perform poems about environmental themes. In our first installment of QUEST-TV’s Youth Speaks Green feature, 18-year-old San Francisco poet Simone Crew performs excerpts from her poem Yasmeena, which she originally performed at this contest. You can download a copy of the complete poem here.

Through Youth Speaks Green, we’ll explore how young people in the Bay Area view the challenges of becoming green. We’ll be looking beyond clean fuels, efficient vehicles and solar panel rebates and delving instead into the personal. Crew, who is now a freshman at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, wrote the poem when she was 16 and centered it on her experiences with an eight-year-old girl called Yasmeena, whom she had babysat. Through Yasmeena’s insistent questions, Crew began to feel the weight of the responsibility to conserve the natural world for her. In an engaging play of mirrors, we as the audience get to watch Crew observing Yasmeena, as Yasmeena makes sense of the world around her.

Crew will be performing a new environmentally-themed poem at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2010, as part of a Youth Speaks team.

In coming episodes, we hope to present you with the work of other talented young Bay Area poets in our Youth Speaks Green segments.

Watch the Youth Speaks Green television story online.

An image of a bioreactor being developed by OriginOil scientists.

Today’s episode of QUEST features our 10-minute TV story about efforts to produce biofuels from algae. In 1996, when the U.S. Department of Energy concluded its 25-year research project into the potential of algae as biofuels, its report concluded that the most cost-effective way to grow algae was in open ponds. With climate change and geopolitics prompting new research into the algae-as-fuel question, some companies are pursuing the open pond route, while others are looking into closed systems such as bioreactors. In our TV story we profile OriginOil, a Los Angeles-based company developing a bioreactor that looks like a miniature Christmas tree, complete with bright, colored lights. And we interview the CEO of Aurora Biofuels, a company based in the Bay Area city of Alameda, which is re-imagining open ponds, as well as trying to create strains of algae that are ideal for fuel production. Before becoming the CEO of Aurora Biofuels, Bob Walsh worked at the oil company Shell for 25 years. Here’s an excerpt of QUEST’s March, 2009, interview with Walsh, most of which didn't make it into the TV segment.

QUEST: What excited you about algae?

BOB WALSH: I ran oil products businesses for many years and understand the cost-competitiveness and the commodity basis of it. And what excited me about algae was, A, it’s renewable. B, you're using a feed stock of carbon dioxide, which is basically free. And finally, what excited me about this company, Aurora Biofuels, was the aspect of solving it end to end, not just the biotech (end of things), but also the engineering aspects.

Q: What has algae been grown for in ponds in the past?

WALSH: Algae’s been grown in open ponds for decades. And typically it’s been done with nutraceuticals – spirulina, which many people use as a protein pill. That is grown in open ponds, but not very cost-effectively because they haven’t had to be very cost-effective. They can charge $10 per pound.

Q: What would be the difference that you would be looking for in terms of cost-effectiveness, compared to what’s been done already?

WALSH: Historically, algae were just grown in an open pond and captured carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and the sun. What we’re actually doing is injecting the CO2 we recover from a steel mill or power plant, to give the algae food. And we’ve engineered it to get better mixing, so it grows more quickly. And then finally, rather than drying the algae out, we actually do a wet extraction of the oil, which is much more cost-effective than drying it as they have historically done for proteins.

Q: So what price would you be aiming for, and what price can the algae be grown for now?

WALSH: Oil today has been around $50 per barrel. We believe we need to be competitive in the $50-60 range. And that’s what our final target is. I think oil will be $60-100 over the next 10 to 15 years.

Q: What would the algae biofuels facility of the future look like?

WALSH: You’ll situate it very close to a CO2 source – a steel mill or a power plant. It will encompass several thousand acres of barren land – because you want dry, barren land – and use salt water. And it would produce roughly 120 million gallons a year of useable fuel into the existing infrastructure.

Q: Can algae fuel actually make a contribution to our transportation needs?

WALSH: Algae can be a player. It’s going to take a lot of different solutions because of the different climates and things that you need for it. It’s also a trillion-gallon market. And so it’s not going to happen tomorrow. But certainly algae can be a 5- to 10-percent player in ten years, in the marketplace.

Watch the Algae Power television story online.

The rate of asthma in children younger than five increased 160
percent between 1980 and 1994.

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.

The microscope is so big that it was hauled into the Center on a crane. It's housed in its own room, which is insulated to maintain an ideal temperature, and it's mounted on springs to isolate it from vibrations that make images blurry.

The TEAM 0.5, as the microscope is called, excels at producing clear images of atoms sitting side by side. This makes it very useful for the scientists who investigate the properties of the materials that we use to build everyday objects like computers and airplanes. In fact, the images they produce with the microscope may one day help build stronger, lighter airplanes, and smaller, faster computers.

Watch the World's Most Powerful Microscope television story online.

The film follows Kavanaugh and his collaborator, University of California-Berkeley doctoral candidate Sean Schoville, as they search for the beetle, then put possible candidates to the test by dissecting them under the microscope and doing genetic testing on them.

It's rare for a biologist to predict the discovery of a new species – even for someone like Kavanaugh, who has discovered 73 new species. For his prediction, he drew inspiration from Charles Darwin's own prediction, which the English naturalist and founder of modern evolutionary biology made in 1862.

When Darwin saw an orchid from Madagascar with a foot-long nectare, he predicted that a pollinator would be found with a tongue (called a proboscis) long enough to reach the nectar inside the orchid's very thin, elongated nectar "pouch." Darwin's prediction was based on his finding that all living beings are related to each other and that some of them evolve closely together. His prediction came true in 1903, when a moth was discovered in Madagascar with a long, thin proboscis, which it uncurls to reach the nectar in the orchid's nectare. In the process of feeding from the orchid, the moth serves as its pollinator. The moth was given the scientific name Xanthopan morganii praedicta, in honor of Darwin’s prediction.

"Chasing Beetles, Finding Darwin" is QUEST TV's contribution to the celebration of Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book "On the Origin of Species."

Watch Chasing Beetles, Finding Darwin online. You can also see additional photos for this story.

"There's a long list of concerns that people have raised about the effects of chronic HIV infection on different health outcomes," says Dr. Paul Volberding, who as a co-chair of San Francisco's Center for AIDS Research is bringing together this group of scientists. UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital cardiologist Priscilla Hsue, for example, has found that HIV-positive patients (the patients she sees in San Francisco are mostly men) have heart attacks when they're around 50 years old. That's 10 years earlier than when your average, uninfected, man has a heart attack.

Other researchers have found that HIV-infected patients develop dementia younger and kidney failure at a faster rate than their uninfected peers. Volberding says that these patients are also showing accelerated bone loss and accelerated loss of their kidney function. These are all ways in which our bodies normally decline as we age. But in patients with HIV, the decline seems to be faster.

At the beginning, researchers believed that anti-retroviral drugs were causing the aging, but as research has progressed, the thinking has shifted. "The more nuanced recognition now is that maybe some of that was from the drugs," says Volberding, "but maybe some of it was because the drugs were working and patients were living longer and allowing us to see these other effects of chronic viral infection." Even though anti-retroviral drugs can bring the amount of virus in the body down to almost undetectable levels, there is always a tiny amount of HIV replicating inside a patient's body. And Volberding and others believe that this virus could be responsible for the sped-up aging.

UCSF molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, another member of this new group, has spent her life studying the tips of our chromosomes, called our telomeres (pronounced TEAL-oh-meres), and the role they play in aging. Blackburn has found that as we age, our telomeres wear away and shorten. She has studied the telomeres in patients with heart disease and cancer, and now she wants to look at HIV patients' telomeres.

Listen to the Graying of HIV radio report online.

The Tesla Roadster is an all-electric sports car you can buy today.

Plug-in hybrids run for a certain distance on batteries (so far, hackers have been able to create plug-in hybrids that run for about 10 miles on batteries). After that, they revert to standard hybrid operation, which uses gas and electricity. When you get home in the evening, you plug the car in and recharge the batteries so that the following day you can drive another 10 miles with the electric charge.

Today you can only get a plug-in hybrid by hacking your Prius to add more batteries to it. We filmed members of the Palo Alto nonprofit CalCars doing just this for our QUEST story on plug-in hybrids in 2007. If you're not handy with tools, you can have someone else retrofit your Prius with the necessary battery pack. Luscious Garage, in San Francisco, has started offering this service. They're featured in today’s QUEST story "Waiting for the Electric Car," which explores why all-electric everyday cars remain an elusive goal. The limiting factor is the difficulty in making a battery that is powerful, long-lasting and cheap. QUEST goes behind the scenes to a battery lab at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley to find out what goes into the making of a lithium-ion battery and why it’s taking so long to make one that can power an all-electric car, or even a plug-in hybrid that can go for more than 10 miles on its electric charge.

Watch the Waiting for the Electric Car television story online.

The footage of the August total eclipse that we got from the Exploratorium and used in our story is incredibly beautiful. The red images of the sun that you'll see are created by a telescope that views the sun in a wavelength of hydrogen gas. "The sun is mostly made of hydrogen gas," said Doherty, "and this is a deep red wavelength called hydrogen alpha." You can watch the entire China 2008 eclipse on the Exploratorium's web site. And Doherty recommends trying to view the next two total solar eclipses live. They will be visible on July 22, 2009, from Shanghai, China, and on July 11, 2010, from Easter Island. But if your budget doesn't allow you to travel that far, you can always wait until 2017, when a total eclipse will be visible in Washington and Oregon and all the way across the United States to South Carolina. Or you can plan to visit the Exploratorium or the Chabot Space and Science Center on any of those three days, to watch the eclipse through their live feed.

Watch the Eclipse Chasers television story report online.