If a DNA testing company gets bought out, what happens to their customers' DNA? Image by Molly Eyres. / CC BY 2.0

One niggling worry I had when I decided to get some genetic testing from 23andMe was what would happen to my DNA if the company failed. By all accounts, 23andMe is a very healthy company* so it was more of a theoretical worry for me. Not so for deCODEme folks…

Like 23andMe, deCODEme looks at hundreds of thousands of different areas of a customer’s DNA in order to predict that customer’s future health and provide information about his or her ancestry and traits. This week deCODEme’s parent company, DeCode Genetics, filed for bankruptcy. Press reports indicate that parts of the company will go up for auction. I am not sure if that includes deCODEme but I am sure all of their customers are sweating it out right now.

The big question now isn’t whether these people will still get good service from deCODEme. Instead it is what the company that buys deCODEme will do with all those customers’ DNA. Will they maintain deCODEme’s previous privacy policies? Or, in the worst case scenario, will they connect DNA to name and sell the combination to the highest bidder?

I have to say that at first I was a little panicky when I started thinking about this. Especially when I started to contemplate what my health insurance company would do to me if they got a hold of my DNA.

Everyone has some genetic problems lurking in their DNA and I am sure that insurance companies would be happy to limit or even drop people’s coverage based on this. The new health care reform bills are supposed to prevent an insurance company from dropping someone based on a pre-existing condition but I am not sure if something like this counts. If it doesn’t, then I would probably end up with a policy that doesn’t cover conditions my DNA says that I am more likely to get. (Very useful insurance!)

If the new bill does consider potential risks from our DNA a pre-existing condition, then this isn’t really that big a worry. Except that I bet the new bills allow the insurance companies to jack up someone’s premiums based on their pre-existing conditions. In which case they’ll charge me so much I’ll have to drop my coverage anyway.

The other possible uses for my DNA that I could think of paled in comparison to this one. For example, I don’t think I’d mind if they sold my DNA to a pharmaceutical company so that the company could make a useful drug. Or to academics so that my DNA could be used to learn something about the human genome. It seems like those are sort of noble purposes for my DNA, kind of like donating it to science.

I couldn’t really think of much else that other companies might do with my DNA. Of course if the health insurance scenario were to happen, that would be plenty bad enough.

* Especially since one of the cofounders, Anne Wojcicki, is married to Sergey Brin, Google cofounder.

Quantum mechanics and Foosball? Credit: RickyDavid.

When I began this story, it seemed pretty simple. I'd heard that scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab were working to mimic photosynthesis and create a man-made version of the process that could supply us with renewable energy.

The premise is to create a "closed-loop" energy system. Artificial leaves would use water, sunlight and carbon dioxide as inputs to create fuels like butane. Those fuels would be used for transportation or fuel cells. And by burning those fuels, we would produce carbon dioxide. The cycle goes on from there.

I never thought that quantum mechanics would enter the picture. That's what I discovered at the UC Berkeley lab of Graham Fleming. He says we have a lot to thank photosynthesis for. It produces the oxygen we breathe and is the basis for the entire food chain on the planet.

Fleming's lab is dedicated to understanding how photosynthesis works so well. And one of the things they've found is that plants are somehow tapping into quantum mechanics to improve their efficiency. It's pretty complicated – but with the help of the folks in Fleming's lab, they helped me understand it through, of all things, Foosball. Here's an audio version of it to help you out.

Listen to the Building an Artificial Leaf radio report online, and listen to our Web Extra: Photosynthesis and Foosball.

The view from the control room of Chabot's planetarium during
the live LCROSS lunar impact event

Rewind to October 9th. It was a lot of fun watching the event up here at Chabot. We'd hoped to observe the impact through our 36-inch telescope, Nellie, but were clouded out. Fortunately, the main part of the show was brought to us via satellite from NASA—and from the vantage point of the LCROSS spacecraft, on its collision course with the Moon, where terrestrial weather was not a factor.

Our planetarium was filled—overfilled actually; we had to open up our theater across the hall as an overflow viewing area! Mind you, it was 3:00 in the morning on a Friday, and still over 300 people showed up in various states of caffeination.

I set up the planetarium to resemble the control room of a futuristic starship: a huge spinning animation of the Moon overhead, and several large projections showing simulations of the impending impact, recent images from other lunar missions, and, front and center, the view from NASA, which alternated between Mission Control at Ames Research Center and a live view from the LCROSS spacecraft itself.

The view from LCROSS showed an ever-nearing wall of lunar craters and topography as LCROSS homed in on its fate. The announcement was made that the primary impactor, LCROSS's Centaur upper rocket stage, had impacted, and we all strained our eyes looking for the plume of dust the impact was hoped to produce. But, the impact didn't create as visible an ejecta plume as expected; we stared on, but only saw the wall of craters loom closer and closer.

The four minutes between Centaur impact and the inevitable impact by LCROSS itself ticked by, and we held our breaths. Then, the image went blank, and NASA announced that LCROSS had impacted the Moon. Though we didn't see the plume, it was exciting to ride along with LCROSS to its end, and live to tell about it. Next better thing to being there….

Back to the water. Though no plume of dust was seen by LCROSS's main visible camera, that's not all it had in its toolbox of instruments. Most revealing was data collected by LCROSS's spectrometer—the device that sorts out the wavelengths of light and discriminates the specific wavelengths emitted by specific chemicals. Water (H2O) and hydroxyl (OH) seem to have been present in the dust plumes kicked up from the permanently shadowed floor of Cabeus crater, at the lunar south pole.

And more: other volatile chemicals—whose identities will no doubt be revealed by NASA in coming months in the due course of their data analysis—appear to have been detected in the impact plume.

How much water? Are we talking vast sheets of solid ice, glaciers, and land-locked icebergs? Well…though NASA hasn't yet characterized the quantities of water inferred by LCROSS's detection, the serene waters of Cabeus likely are a mixture of lunar soil and ice—a substance you'd have to work at to extract pure water from.

For more exciting discoveries to come, stay tuned to the Moon….

Electron microscope image of a hole embedded within a sheet of graphene. The corners of the green hexagons are carbon atoms which form graphene’s crystal structure. Image courtesy of the Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley.

Acquiring a sample of graphene is almost comically easy. Start with an ordinary piece of graphite, which is basically the same material that is used in pencil lead. Squeeze it between two pieces of Scotch tape and tear them apart. Repeat several times until pieces of the graphite have been cleaved into sheets no more than a single atom thick. Voila – graphene! Total cost of 1 pencil plus a roll of Scotch tape: about $3.

Simple as this process is, scientists did not even know that single sheets of graphene could exist until 2004. Now that we know that we can make graphene, it turns out that it has some amazing electrical properties and someday might even replace silicon as the most important component in computer circuitry. To that end, researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at Berkeley have endeavored recently to isolate suspended membranes of graphene for study and image them at Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope (TEM). Results were published last spring by Çaglar Ö. Girit and others in the Science.

Two aspects of the Zettl group’s recent work have been particularly interesting. First, the TEAM 0.5 microscope not only has the ability to see individual atoms of graphene, but can also take pictures in close to real time. This means that Girit was able to see dynamics of graphene as they actually happened. Other types of microscopy (scanning tunneling microscopes, for example) can take several minutes to get a single picture.

Second, Girit and others centered their images at a hole within the graphene sheet. This allowed them to observe the dynamics that occur at the material’s edge. Such edges can have a notable effect on a graphene sheet’s electrical properties and thus understanding them and controlling them would be crucial in the design of any future technology.

Aside from technological applications, graphene is a theoretical physicist’s dream system because it beautifully combines the dynamics of relativistic particles from space such as neutrinos with the experimental accessibility of an easy system to make and manipulate here on Earth. Girit thinks that this is perhaps the single most exciting aspect of the system.

Only time will tell if graphene will have a long-term impact on society, but this would not be the first time a new discovery has transformed the Bay Area. In 1955 William Shockley moved to Mountain View, CA to found a new startup developing the silicon transistor. His company’s success was ultimately marred by Shockley’s own belligerent personality (“He understood everything except people,” Charles Townes once remarked), but the invention and the industry that grew up around it have revolutionized the region. The Santa Clara Valley’s old nickname, “the Valley of Heart’s Delight,” has long since been whisked away into a memory of a distant time and setting. Today most of us know it only as Silicon Valley. Our children may know the region as something entirely different.

As the high-speed rail inches toward reality, it's encountering a thicket of NIMBYism.

We'd been wanting to do an update on the California high speed rail project for months now. (Here's David Gorn's HSR Quest Radio piece from 9/08.) Luckily, there's no bad time to cover high speed rail. The project is so huge, so expensive, so ambitious and so controversial that you could make a whole beat out of it and stay entertained for a good long time.

But if – like me – you're just taking a dip, the first place to check out is the High Speed Rail Authority site. The Authority clearly has deep pockets when it comes to producing animations of the 432-mile train line. Would that the planning process ran as smoothly as those blue and yellow trains.

Click below to use the interactive map.

Your next stop should be this great primer on the technology and issues surrounding HSR, produced by my TV colleagues at QUEST.

I also recommend Robert Cruickshank's California High Speed Rail Blog. Cruickshank makes no secret of his pro-HSR stance — nor of his irritation at those who've put up roadblocks or expressed concerns — but his site is readable and impressively comprehensive. I guess you can count on the train buffs to track every twist and turn of the most ambitious rail project since the Transcontinental Railroad.

The former Vice President Al Gore was a speaker at this year's Greenbuild International Conference and Expo.

It took me about six hours to travel from my bed in Walnut Creek to the Phoenix Convention Center, the location of this year’s Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council, and then about an hour more to make my way to the Home Energy booth in the Exposition Hall. Big event, big venue. There are more than 1,000 companies and organizations here, representing every facet of green building, from mulch to windows to lighting to HVAC to water to insulation to… I don’t know the final count, but I heard there are more than 20,000 participants.

Thank goodness I had booked a few appointments. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to start. I met Graham Martin, Chairman and CEO of EnOcean Alliance. The Alliance brings together companies from around the world who work in wireless devices. The group got together to ensure that Company A devices could talk to Company B devices. For example, Verve Living System is a lighting control system that allows a person to wirelessly turn on and off all the lights and outlets in a house. Goodbye wasted standby power! It is being used in new construction and is especially appropriate for multifamily buildings, but it can be installed in retrofit buildings.

With Illumra controls, you can turn on and off whatever office lights you want from your iPhone, from wherever you are. And Graham was enthusiastic to show me EnOcean switching devices that need no batteries. The mechanical energy of one finger flipping a toggle switch is enough to power a wireless signal telling your air conditioner to shut down. According to Graham, EnOcean technology will take the smart grid into the home. “ZigBee is great technology to connect homes to utilities because it can use power from the network. But once inside, EnOcean technology uses so little energy that you never even have to change a battery.” Wow, it’s like the Smart Grid is learning to talk. Its first words are “Fight global warming.”

In the evening we were inspired by Vice President Al Gore at Chase Field, where the Arizona Diamondbacks play baseball. I got to watch from the press box, and we didn’t even have to be quiet. The food was pretty good and the beer was very good and I met some interesting people who write about glass, construction processes, and international trade relations. The “former next President of the United States” warmed up the crowd with some, frankly, corny jokes. There was one about a farmer and a pickup and cow, but I won’t waste anymore of my word count on that. He said, “We have enough ideas and technology to solve three or four global climate crises, but we only have one.” I like his optimism. The former next President called for a new Marshall Plan for energy security. “With the first Marshall Plan, we made sure that there would not be another world war in Europe. There are a lot of reasons why we have gone to war there, and there is a lot of interest in the area of the world that happens to sit on two-thirds of the world’s oil supply. We need to move away from fossil fuels so that we are no longer dependent on other countries for our economic security.”

But it was Gore’s last point that gave me a big boost. “I was thirteen years old when President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the moon. Most people thought that we didn’t have the technology or the knowhow to do it. “When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the average age of the scientists and engineers manning their stations in Mission Control was 26. That means that they were 18 when President Kennedy made his speech.” I work with people every day who were part of the energy efficiency revolution of the 70s and 80s and who are still going strong. Gore asked for a show of hands of anyone 18 years old or younger. From the press box I saw a lot of hands.

What would it take you to change your shower to a low-flow shower head?

Do you love a long, hot and powerful shower? What would it take you to change your shower to a low-flow shower head? Be honest.

• A. I understood the environmental impact that it would have
• B. I have knowledge of and compassion for the watershed
• C. Someone came to my house and put in a free low-flow shower head for me
• D. I would be publicly recognized
• E. I verbally committed to doing it
• F. Everyone else on my block is doing it
• G. President Obama and Jane Goodall are doing it (not together!)
• H. All of the above.

Canadian environmental psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr believes that the last five reasons inspire more behavior change than the first two. I recently took a workshop with McKenzie, who coined the phrase “Community Based Social Marketing”, and was amazed to learn that studies indicate that “information intensive” campaigns are not very effective. Uh-oh – time to recycle the brochures. This is the method that we have been using to influence behavior change for years.

An earlier blog of mine explored what makes a person care about nature. Now I’m compelled to explore what makes a person change a behavior for the good of nature – the outcome I ultimately desire. Perhaps Community Based Social Marketing (CBSM) is the answer.

CBSM believes that people do not change behavior or do an activity because:

• They do not know about it
• They have many perceived barriers to the activity
• They believe it is easier to continue to do their current behavior than to change

Once the targeted audience knows about the issue, and the barriers are identified with research, it is time to convince them that the benefits outweigh those barriers.

There are many tools for inspiring the change of behavior: making a commitment, copying a well-respected community leader, being reminded with prompts, realizing that the behavior is the current social norm, clear and vivid messages, incentives, ease or a combination of these concepts. CBSM also believes that requests to change behavior are the most effective when they are at the community level and involve direct contact with humans. At the end of the program, outcomes are measured, not outputs. This makes sense!

So, with this in mind, what if President Obama and Dr. Jane Goodall arrived at your door with a lovely, low-flow shower head and installed it while they told you all about the watershed and how you are helping. They then planned to install an identical shower-head in all your friend’s bathrooms followed by thanking you all in the local newspaper. Would you change your showering behavior then? I think I would – a victim to the new concept of Community Based Social Marketing.

I can’t wait to try to get influence our zoo public to compost, our staff to recycle, and my supervisor to send me to more of Doug McKenzie’s workshops. And I will await that knock on my door.

"Mysteries of DNA" image courtesy Mark H. Adams. Full-size version.

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I recently took a 23andMe genetic test and have been blogging about it ever since. Today I thought I would focus on one of the fun parts of the service: traits.

Lots of our traits are at least partly dependent on our genes. So a genetic test should be able to tell me a bit about what I’ll look and even be like in the future. It may even tell me what I can expect for my kids.

Here is what is available on the 23andMe test (click on the image for a larger version):

As you can see, some of this is pretty obvious…I know my eye color for example. It is kind of cool to see my blue eyes written in my DNA but not necessarily that helpful. When I click on eye color, I find out that people with this particular bit of DNA have a 72% chance for blue eyes, a 27% chance for green and a 1% for brown. (Incidentally, this 1% brown is probably a big reason why blue-eyed parents can have a brown-eyed child.)

What would have made this report more interesting for me is what it meant for my kids’ eye color. Does it mean I’ll have blue-eyed kids? This of course depends on my wife’s genes but it would be cool to have the option of including my wife’s data to find out.

Other less obvious traits were very interesting to me. The results say that like most mammals, I should be lactose intolerant. Which I am not—I’m fine drinking milk. So did 23andMe get it wrong?

Probably not. The science is pretty good on this topic. People with a certain difference in their lactase gene almost always lose the ability to make lactase as adults. No lactase means lactose intolerance.

When I dug deeper on the website I got some hand waving about other genetic influences or the environment. A better explanation is that I will probably become lactose intolerant at some point in my adult life—it just hasn’t happened yet.

Losing the ability to make lactase is a gradual thing. It happens to some people early in adulthood and others later on. I am probably one of the “later ons.” Something to look forward to…

One trait that I’ve always been a bit interested in is HIV resistance. Some people are more resistant to infection by HIV (the virus that causes AIDS). If these people do become infected, they tend to develop AIDS symptoms much more slowly as well.

In Europeans at least, this resistance has been tied to a DNA difference called CCR5-delta32. The people who are resistant to infection and who develop AIDS more gradually tend to have two copies of this DNA difference.

This DNA difference has been proposed to have become common in Europeans because it also makes people resistant to either the plague or smallpox. If true, my ancestors must have died like flies from the plague or smallpox because I don’t have the DNA difference.

I also now know about what my DNA tells me about my earwax, how I respond to a certain bitter chemical, and whether I flush from alcohol. These are sort of interesting but not very.

This part of the 23andMe experience is kind of fun though. I really enjoy it when genetic theory matches up with what I can see about me. It sort of validates genetics…

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 Chabot

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….