To go solar or not to go solar? Homeowners looking to save money on their energy bills have a number of factor to consider.

It's easy to get excited about installing solar panels on your house – particularly when you find out that state and federal rebates can cut the price almost in half.

But, as we've reported before, you might get more bang for your buck from far cheaper (and yes, far less exciting) fixes. Small things like weather stripping your doors, turning down the thermostat or upgrading your refrigerator, can put a dent in your utility bills.

Even if you've done all that, solar panels still might not pencil out. That's because of something called "tiered pricing", which is how most utilities calculate your monthly energy bills. The idea is that energy is relatively cheap as long as you stay within a certain amount. Exceed that, and you're in the next "tier," where the rate increases. At the next tier, the rate is even higher. The difference between top tier and bottom pier can be as much as 44 cents versus 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

That's why solar panels tend to make more sense for people with substantial energy needs – the big, air-conditioned houses, the heated pools, the multiple flat-screen TVs.

The higher your monthly utility bills without solar panels, the faster those panels will pay for themselves once they're installed. Plus, even if those panels don't meet the complete energy needs of your house, they may be enough to bring you down to a lower tier, where the rate is much better.

If you're interested in making your home more energy efficient, this handy and comprehensive online audit from the people at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs is a good place to start.

Oakland Unified teachers assembling Galileoscopes at ChabotWhat was it like for Galileo, the first time he put an eye to his telescope to see things in the heavens as never before seen? As anyone who has seen a planet or a star cluster or a nebula—or the Moon—through even a small telescope knows, the sight can be quite breathtaking. For Galileo, it must have been a universe-changing experience….

Through a generous donation by a concerned citizen (concerned that kids today aren't seeing enough of the sky), Chabot just completed a pair of workshops for Oakland teachers that places in their capable hands and in their classrooms "Galileoscopes"—special telescopes designed and manufactured for the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. The Galileoscope is a low cost, simple, but good-quality telescope designed to simulate the power and field of view of Galileo's original telescope, which opened up the universe in such a profound way.

In September and October, a total of 23 Oakland teachers received training, activities, and one Galileoscope each (plus tripod), enabling them to share the experience with their students and, hopefully, spark their imagination and curiosity about the world around us in a way that nothing but astronomy does.

A look through a telescope—any telescope, big or small—does put a spark in the eye and the imagination. At least, that was my experience. Growing up in Oakland back in the 60's, I didn't have access to any small telescopes, but Chabot Observatory was only a couple miles away, and my family often went up on a weekend night for a classroom demo, a planetarium show, and thoroughly enjoyable viewing through the two antique telescopes, Leah and Rachel. Something about the actual light from Saturn or Jupiter or a distant galaxy tickling the receptors in your retina places you out there—or puts those objects directly into your brain.

The Oakland teachers now armed with their Galileoscopes will use these simple but effective tools to show their students the difference between seeing Saturn as a spot of light and Saturn as a disk with "ears" (the appearance of its rings through a Galileoscope), or the difference between Jupiter as a brighter spot of light and Jupiter as a world with a giant storm in its clouds and four smaller "worlds" (moons) in orbit around it, or the difference between the Moon as a disk with light and dark areas that make interesting shapes in our imaginations and the Moon with mountain ranges, vast plains, thousands upon thousands of craters, and shadows stretching across the landscape.

By the way, Galileoscopes can still be ordered, through the Galileoscope website, for a short time still, in case you're interested in getting your toe into the door of a much bigger universe….

Lawrence Berkeley Lab's TEAM 0.5 is capable of resolving individual carbon atoms in the honeycomb crystal structure of graphene. See QUEST's video The World's Most Powerful Microscope for more information. Image source: Nano LettersThe twentieth century’s most important physicist after Albert Einstein is almost certainly Richard Feynman. Known as much for his eccentricities as for his brilliance, he spent his adolescent spare time picking locks, translated Mayan hieroglyphics as an adult, and was one of the few people brash enough to attempt viewing the U.S.’s first atomic bomb test without protective sunglasses. Feynman’s chief scientific contribution was the development of QED, a fundamental and astonishingly accurate description of electricity and magnetism. However, he was also a champion of the practical, and in 1959 gave a gave a prophetic speech at Caltech to his colleagues entitled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” The speech described a rich world of possibilities that could arise if we only applied ourselves toward controlling matter on smaller and smaller scales.

Fifty years later, a new field of nanotechnology has exploded. At the cutting edge, researchers are successfully manufacturing everything from corporate logos to radios that are all small enough to be stacked end-to-end perhaps a million items long across the proverbial head of a pin. The advent of personal computers and smart phones has brought the power of such miniaturization into sharp focus for the general public. In a very real sense, we have all become bottom feeders. Below is a brief progress report on the state of the field.

Microscopes: The old adage “seeing is believing” was not lost on Feynman back in the late fifties. He noted that many of the most fundamental questions in biology could be readily solved if we only had the ability to see the molecules directly. Today, new inventions such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the transmission electron microscope (TEM) have all achieved resolution at the scale where individual atoms can actually be seen and manipulated.

Miniature Motors: Perhaps the speech’s most imaginative scenario, due to Feynman’s friend (and graduate student) Albert Hibbs, was the concept of being able to “swallow the surgeon.” Feynman imagined that we might some day be able to construct robots capable of repairing or investigating the inner reaches of an ailing patient’s body. Mixing engineering and biology like this can run quickly into thorny ethical questions. Nevertheless, interesting progress has been made. Researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at UC Berkeley have recently constructed a nano motor, for example.

Information Storage: Using order-of-magnitude arguments, Feynman argued that the Encyclopedia Britannica could be squeezed into a pin’s area if the text were reduced by a factor of 25,000. He offered a $1,000 prize to the first person capable of printing one page of any book at this scale. Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford, first accomplished this in 1986 with an impressive reprinting of the first page of Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities. Today, you can buy the book in its entirety for only 1.9 megabytes. For a high-end smart phone with 30 gigabytes of memory, you could perhaps hold 15,000 books within the palm of your hand. Not bad.

Then again, at the extreme limit, Feynman also reasoned that you ought to be able to squeeze the text of every book that has ever been written (now more than 32 million titles according the Library of Congress) within the confines of a single speck of dust. We still have a long way to go.

Henry Coe State Park won't be experiencing any part-time closures, but it will reduce trash and restroom service and has shuttered a new visitor center off the Pacheco Pass.

So you want to reserve that primo camping spot at your favorite California State Park? You might just have to take your chances. Most state parks are not accepting reservations through spring of 2010. It's part of a series of service cuts to slash millions from the State Parks' budget. Remember back in September when the Governor threatened to close 100 parks to balance the budget? Well, after a giant public outcry, he backed off but he still is requiring California State Parks to cut this year's budget by 14-million dollars. Superintendents from the state's 21 parks have come up with a plan to close that budget gap.

More than half of the state's parks will be scaling back days or hours. The list includes inland campgrounds and day use areas, many state beaches, museums and missions. In addition to reduced hours, trash and restroom service will be cut back at many state parks. I visited Henry Coe State Park in Morgan Hill. Because of it huge acreage (87,000 acres) and back country wilderness, Coe won't be experiencing any part-time closures, but it will reduce trash and restroom service and has shuttered a new visitor center off the Pacheco Pass. The park also lost all of its ranger aides. I also took a tour with the Superintendent at Angel Island State Park where they will be closing some restrooms, postponing school field trips and non-emergency repair needs. The situation is not expected to get better right away. The governor has already signed a budget that requires State Parks to cut 22-million dollars next year. California's parks have relied on the state's unpredictable general fund…and that has resulted in a billion dollar maintenance backlog. Park supporters are considering a ballot measure for next year that would impose about a 15-dollar a year vehicle license fee to pay for park operations. Want to hear more? Check out our radio report.

A technician checks the combustion efficiency and safety of a water heater—an important part of any home energy audit.

I hope I’m certifiable. I’ll find out in about a year when I’ve completed all the training and taken the written and field exams to become a Building Performance Institute (BPI) certified Building Analyst. The certification would allow me to perform energy audits on homes and maybe even get paid for it if I started an auditing business or joined an existing company. The certification would not prepare me to perform energy upgrade measures, such as air sealing and insulating an attic, only recommend the most cost effective ones. Many energy auditors work with a team of trusted contractors who can do the work the homeowner chooses.

My publisher Tom White and I decided that going through the kind of training that we have been pushing in our magazine will give me a more realistic view of the home performance industry, and the people who are just entering it now—the new weatherization workers, and newly minted technicians, contractors, and small business owners who will help build the new green economy. And it’s an excuse to get off my butt and out of the office more often. If I get certified, I’ll need to continue taking classes and have hands-on experience in the field to stay certified.

There are three kinds of certifications for a wannabe energy auditor to consider: certification as a Building Analyst through BPI; certification as a HERS (Home Energy Rating System) rater through the Residential Energy Services Network; or one of many “green builder” certifications that exist nationwide. I think the Building Analyst is the most basic. The training follows closely that of a HERS rater, but HERS raters need to become expert at rating software; it’s a bit more involved. I thought about being certified through Build It Green California as a Green Building Professional. But once I’m certified through BPI, I think it would be a small step to being certified by the other organizations.

Now I am asking what many people in the midst of career decisions are asking. Where do I go for the training and how much will it cost? BPI is in Malta, New York. (Might as well be Malta, the country.) Fortunately, BPI has hundreds of affiliates and approved trainers all over the country. There is also online training, and trainers who will travel to your hometown, as long as you have several people interested in the training. My plan so far is to complete an online training course through well-respected training organization, Saturn Online. That will prepare me for the Building Analyst written exam. I can even take the exam online. The course costs $595, plus about $70 for a book and field manual. Once you start the online course, you have about 8 weeks to complete it, so I can study and take the quizzes and final exam in my spare time—maybe over the holidays. The written exam fee is $225.

But you can’t get all the training you need online, nor would I want to. (Remember me wanting to get off my butt more often?) Saturn also offers three day intensive hands-on field seminars in locations in several locations around the country that culminate in the Building Analyst field exam. I have friends in Portland I haven’t seen in a while; maybe I’ll go there for my field training. The field seminar costs $950. If you want to take the exam at the end of the seminar, there is an additional $350 charge for proctoring. Total costs of going for BPI Building Analyst certification: $2,190. The value of certification: priceless.

Prion diseases are neurodegenerative, attacking the brain. Could they be responsible for the recent wave of Zombie attacks across the globe? Original photo: digitalsextant. I’m a sucker for zombie movies; I’ve watched dozens of them. I am especially fond of the Resident Evil Trilogy, where the T-Viruses effectively restructure mortality and create a world of zombies. There is something incredibly satisfying with the zombie movie plot – a virus outbreak devastates a planet but a group of people are immune and fight to save humankind. Having the ultimate evil as a virus also makes it seem more plausible and compelling. Yet viruses and bacteria do not live in limbo. They are alive and under the right conditions can be killed. Which is bad news for Zombies.

But what if there existed a substance that acted like a virus or bacteria but wasn’t living? Medicine made a revolutionary leap during the time of Louis Pasteur in the mid 1800's. The inventor of food pasteurization and one of the founding fathers of microbiology – he was able to prove germ theory. Food spoiled and organisms got sick because of the growth of bacteria and viruses within them. Within sterile environments, viruses and bacteria could be killed off and food could be preserved or organisms could recover from illness or infection. Sterilization works on living micro-organisms. Prions, however, are not living organisms.

Prions are infectious proteins. For unknown reasons, these proteins refold abnormally and cause a domino effect in surrounding proteins which in turn mutate into stable structures. Prions will then cause tissue damage and cell death to surrounding areas. Prion diseases are neurodegenerative, attacking the brain and are characterized by "holes" in the tissue. The incubation time for Prion diseases is quite long. They usually surface later in life but after they surface, the diseases are rapid and fatal. Such examples of Prion diseases include Mad Cow Disease in cattle, Scrapie in sheep and Fatal Familial Insomnia in humans. FFI is a disease that literally takes away the ability to sleep and in a few months leads to death. The Book “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep” by journalist D.T. Max follows a family in Italy that passes this disease from one generation to the next over subsequent centuries.

Prions have been and still are a medical mystery. What causes them to mutate and aggressively eat away at the brain? How can they be stopped? Because they are not living they are highly resistant to sterilization methods. While viruses and bacteria can be eradicated on equipment through heat, radiation or chemical reagents, Prions are strongly immune. Maybe Zombies are not so far off after all – lurking in the shadow of medicine has been a mutation that is resistant, brain-eating and neither alive or dead. It has some serious similarities to the zombies I have watched over and over again on the big screen.

If you want to learn more about Prions and their history, check out Down to a Science’s next reading group which is focusing on the book The Family that Couldn’t Sleep or check out the book Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health by Richard Rhodes. And one more thing – Happy Halloween!

Luis Medellin and Karl Tupper set up a drift catcher in Lindsay, CA.

My radio story on pesticide drift looks at how residents in the citrus town of Lindsay are monitoring pesticides in the air and in their bodies. They are using a device called a Drift Catcher, modeled after technology used by the California Air Resources Board and the Department of Pesticide Regulation.

The pesticide drift catcher has a vacuum pump that sucks air into a glass test tube, where pesticide residues are trapped in a resin. Community members change out the test tubes and send them to a lab, where scientists crack them open, extract the residues with an organic solvent, and then analyze those extracts through gas chromatography.

The Lindsay study measures Chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that can cause headaches, blurred vision, and muscle weakness when people breathe in the air from a recently-sprayed orchard or field. Studies also show prenatal exposure MAY have effects on children's cognitive and motor skills.

Environmental lawyers are using preliminary data from the Lindsay drift catchers in a petition asking the EPA to create pesticide buffer zones around schools, child care centers, and hospitals.

Listen to the Catching the Drift – Part Two radio report online.

Students in Cork, Ireland interacting live via Skype with Chabot
during real-time observing session.What do Chabot's 36-inch telescope, Nellie, and a classroom full of 14-year-old girls in Cork, Ireland have in common? In a few words, the International Year of Astronomy and the Web of Stars!

Wednesday morning around 1:00 AM, Chabot staff astronomer Conrad Jung and I fired up the systems in the 36-inch observatory and made a Skype video call to the Blackrock Castle Observatory in Cork, Ireland. Staffers Frances McCarthy and Alan Giltinan answered—it was 9:00 AM for them, and Frances had already been up four hours to prepare for our premiere session of Web of Stars. A bus-load of girls from a local school were on their way through the downpours of rain Cork was experiencing at the time.

On our end, everything technological was working fine: Nellie, our 36-inch telescope, was stoked, motors humming and ready to drive us to faraway celestial locales; computers were singing (in their own particular way), and the webcam-Skype interlink was green. The webcam view nicely framed the telescope, making a great background for the session.

A little after 2:00 AM PDT, the girls from North Presentation Secondary School rolled into the classroom, and there was a great deal of excitement. Eight or nine of them immediately descended upon the microphone and webcam and started chirping "helloes" and "hi's" at us across the 5,000 mile gulf (what's an ocean and a continent to get in the way of the Internet?).

After the greeting buzz died down, and the girls' teacher and the facilitators at Blackrock Castle got them to their computer stations, the morning's work began….

"We regret," Conrad and I had to inform them, "that the weather at Chabot is damp, and we're completely fogged out." This was a disappointment, of course, but we had a Plan B lined up in the event of bad astronomy weather. From Conrad's archive of astrophotography, we pulled up some un-processed astronomical images from months past and dumped them to our FTP server, where Alan at Blackrock Castle immediately downloaded them to the girls' computers: Comet Lulin, the Andromeda Galaxy (M-31), the Hercules globular cluster (M-13), the Apollo 15 landing region on the Moon, the Great Nebula in Orion (M-42), and the Ring Nebula (M-57) were the fare for the session.

With the astro-image processing software Salsa-J, the Cork girls proceeded to process the images—taking each set of three color channel (red, green, blue) black and white images and combining them into composite full-color images. Throughout the 2-hour session, the girls broke away from their computers two and three at a time to come to the microphone and chat with Conrad and I—we were even treated to a song or two from the girls, one by the entire class: On the Banks of My Own Lovely Lee.

The Web of Stars program was conceived of by Blackrock Castle Observatory, and Chabot became the partner observatory through proximity to San Francisco, which is a sister city of Cork. In Ireland, classrooms competed over the summer to earn one of the six pilot observing sessions with Chabot, and the program will unfold from October through March with one session each month.

Though we had to resort to our bad weather Plan B ("B" for "bad" weather) for our kick-off session, the A plan ("A" as in "actual active astronomy") will be for us to acquire and image objects with Nellie from lists of targets sent to us by the students in Cork, and deliver them in real time to the classroom at the Castle, where they will conduct the image processing and measurement activities in lock step.

Please wish us and the students in Cork good weather!

This year's Wildlife Conservation Network Expo in full swing at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

It’s a sunny, fall day in October and I am driving into San Francisco. I pass the colorful Love Parade floats revving up without a glance of longing. I pass the turn towards Golden Gate Park for Hardly Strictly Blue Grass Festival without an ounce of FOMO (fear of missing out). I giddily park outside of Mission Bay Conference Center and enter the Wildlife Conservation Network’s yearly Expo. Parades and music will have to wait; I am ready to gorge myself on colorful wildlife and rock star conservationists. Each year I am more amazed and enthralled by this extraordinary event.

The Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN) was founded in 2002 in Los Altos by Charlie Knowles and Akiko Yamazaki. Their unique approach to conservation is based on the venture-capitol model and offers organizations expert networks, fundraising support, global exposure and Silicon Valley expertise. 100% of donations to WCN go to programs. It is an efficient system with measurable results and an excellent example of conservation action.

The Wildlife Conservation Expo is a dream come true for wildlife people, and after many years of attending, it feels like an international family reunion of cousins related by their passion for animals and the natural world. Flying in from 30 countries, including the mountains of Uganda, the savannahs of Zimbabwe or the steppes of Uzbekistan, they come together to share their miraculous projects. I marvel that I simply need to navigate the s-curved bridge from Oakland to be amongst this kin of conservation heroes.

The day consists of short and sweet speaking sessions from these 24 wildlife powerhouses, each one more inspiring than the next. Between sessions, participants visit the many tables featuring local, national and international groups and projects. The Oakland Zoo table was surrounded by such favorite groups as Africa Matters, Animals Asia, WildAid, Reptile & Amphibian Ecology International, Project Tamarin, Mountain Gorilla One Health Program, Red Panda Network, Elephant Voices, or our Teen Wild Guide’s favorite, The Saiga Conservation Alliance. Add in mingling with hundreds of like-minded people, and it is a day that can’t be beat. Oh, did I mention Jane Goodall is the keynote speaker? As I write this, I watch her graciously speak with participants, sign books and scratch the head of one of the Working Dogs for Conservation. Lucky dog.

At Dr. Jane’s presentation, she begins with her uncanny chimp-like pant-hoot greeting and reminds us that passion is the most powerful asset one could have. That if we all explored and exercised our passions, what a different world it would be. As usual, I leave WCN with new ideas, new reasons to be hopeful and renewed gratitude for WCN.

The 2010 dates have yet to be decided. Watch the website for details.

Editor's Note: This week we have the first of two special reports on pesticide drift.

In this week's Quest radio piece, I talk to two pregnant organic onion workers who got sick after an apple farmer sprayed pesticides on a nearby orchard. Following a nearly three month investigation, the Kern County Ag Commissioner issued citations finding both the apple grower and the organic company at fault (see the citations here and here). Workers told me that even after the drift started, the organic farm's supervisor encouraged them to keep bunching onions, telling them to put handkerchiefs over their mouths to block out the smell of the insecticides.

Whenever a big pesticide drift accident like this happens, it raises important questions: How often do these kinds of incidents occur? Are things getting better for people in communities near where pesticides are sprayed?

That's hard to tell, because of the way the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) and County Ag Commissioners keep track of the data. There's no single enforcement code to categorize incidents as "agricultural drift affecting humans."

DPR does keep a statewide database of acute illness related to pesticides, as documented in worker’s comp or physician's records. Pesticide activists say those numbers are low, because many victims don't see a doctor. And doctors don't always know how to recognize symptoms of pesticide illness, or that they are supposed to report those cases.

And here's another twist: back in 2000, DPR changed its criteria for how it evaluates pesticide illness. So you can't compare the number of incidents from the 1990s with incidents today. All that makes it very difficult to determine if growers and regulators are really doing a better job keeping the public safe from chemicals drifting off the farm, especially after the passage of bills like the 2004 law sponsored by State Senator Dean Florez.

While that law clarified rules for emergency responders and required growers to pay medical bills for uninsured victims, it doesn't seem to have led to a dramatic drop in pesticide drift incidents.

In 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have sped up pesticide drift investigations and increased penalties. Instead, he directed DPR to streamline the enforcement guidelines for counties. Ag Commissioners can now issue a maximum fine of 5,000 dollars for each person sickened by pesticide drift.

That's a penalty some advocates, like Californians for Pesticide Reform think is far too low to act as a deterrent.

Meanwhile, County Ag Commissioners are facing budget cutbacks that may shrink their enforcement teams. Many agriculture commissioners already have just six or seven pesticide enforcement inspectors to police thousands of farms.

The Department of Pesticide Regulation says it can't enforce the law unless drift incidents are reported. The department has launched a new campaign to educate fieldworkers about pesticide drift, printing up wallet-sized cards with a toll-free hotline number in English and Spanish.

Listen to the Catching the Drift radio report online.