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….

Geek Out by taking the Mars Survival Challenge

Forget the challenging landscapes of the Arctic or Everest; if you want a true survival test, how about Mars? Our red neighbor has inspired thousands of intrepid explorers (and a number of awful movies) to formulate colonization plans. With a little help from Google Mars, you can choose plot near all the important landmarks: Valles Marineris, Olympus Mons, or even the famous northern polar ice caps.

Thanks to our friends at the Lawrence Hall of Science, you too can help the colonization effort. At their Geek Out event on 11/18, you’ll be able to design your own Mars Base. There will be experts on hand from the SETI Institute and NASA to provide some info on the Martian landscape and what it takes to survive there.

You’ll be able to videotape your landscape to share with the rest of the universe. Who knows, the first ever Martian colony could be named after you!

This is the 2^nd LHS Geek Out event, a new monthly science series for adults. The evening will be full of interactive science, music, and cocktails. There is also a free shuttle from the Downtown Berkeley BART to the museum. For a primer, check out this video from the 1^st Geek Out event.

LHS Geek Out: Mars Survival Challenge
When: Wednesday 11/18, 7-10 PM
Where: Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley
Cost: $10, $8 for members and UC Berkeley Students
Details: Come to Lawrence Hall of Science, grab a drink and a friend, and get ready for some downright nerdy fun. All events include full access to exhibits, a cash bar, hors d’oeuvres, and of course the best view in the East Bay. Program is for adults only.

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.

Could the cosmetics in your purse be harmful to your health? Image from Wikimedia Commons. / CC BY-NC 3.0

Each October, within Breast Cancer Awareness Month, my friends and I get into a flurry organizing and putting on Beats for Boobs. Beats for Boobs is an annual fundraiser started by my friend Juliana Cochnar after finding out her mother was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. The Beats for Boobs mission is to educate the community on breast cancer through a collaborative celebration of art, fashion, food and music.

This year the fundraiser welcomed 1200 people through its doors and raised over $20,000 for local Breast Cancer organizations. The theme this year was Green is the new Pink. The education team, which I have been a member of for three years, now, was tasked with educating the public on ways to prevent breast cancer. We set up a prize wheel and gave everyone a chance to win; all they had to do was answer a question about Breast Cancer correctly.

Some of the questions posed were:

Question: Synthetic Chemicals can accumulate in body fat and remain in breast tissue for decades- some that can cause mammary tumors.

TRUE/FALSE

Answer: TRUE

Question: 80,000 chemicals have been registered for use in the United States in the last 40 years, yet _________ of them have been fully tested for their effects on our health.

10%
25%
50%
5%

Answer: 10%

Question: No more than _______ women who have Breast Cancer have a genetic history of the disease.

1:5
1:3
1:8
1:10

Answer: 1:10

Question: Which of the everyday products below can contain chemicals linked to breast cancer?

Shampoo
Deodorant
Face Cream and Make-Up
Sunscreen
All of the above

Answer: All of the above

Most of the night, I was stationed at the What’s in Your Purse Table, which used the Skin Deep: Cosmetic Safety Database Website to access the hazard of everyday products. “Now in its fourth year and third major update… Skin Deep database provides you with easy-to-navigate safety ratings for nearly a quarter of all products on the market — 52,099 products with 8,799 ingredients. At about one million page views per month, Skin Deep is the world's largest and most popular product safety guide. The database rates items on a 1 to 10 scale – 0-2 is low hazard, 3-6 is a moderate hazard, 7-10 is a high hazard. After the fundraiser, I became very well acquainted with the Skin Deep website. I went through every cosmetic item in my house and as a girl with a love of make-up that meant quite a few items! Most of the items I was using on my face were a moderate to high hazard rating. The toothpaste I used had a rating of 7. The eyeliner I used on a daily basis had a rating of 9 and the lip-gloss I wore nearly everyday had a rating of 6. At the end of my research, I had found out that my mineral make-up was low hazard but my eye shadows, sunscreen, soap and toothpaste had to go. I got rid of a full shopping bag of products that all rated 5 and above. I called my mom and told her what I found out. I am bringing over my laptop and we are going through her bathroom and toiletries next week.

Each year, on the education committee for Beats for Boobs we try to make the education fun and accessible so we can instill ways to prevent Breast Cancer. The Skin Deep website was an excellent resource to do just that. Only one person was able to get something out of it this year but I am hoping that with this blog and a new approach next year, that number will continue to rise.

This blog is in honor to my Aunt who is surviving Breast Cancer.

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.

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.

The Exploratorium turns 40!

The Exploratorium opened quietly that fall, slowly changing the way science museums are organized and oriented to their audiences. It combined a living laboratory, art, and interaction under one roof; the result is a place where science is accessible and owned by all.

In celebration of this anniversary, the Exploratorium is hosting a number of events at the museum over this weekend. Plus they are throwing in quite a treat…admission is free all weekend (November 7-8). For a full list of activities and an exceptional history of the museum, check out the Exploratorium’s 40^th anniversary website.

Exploratorium After Dark: Electrifying Science with Dr. MegaVolt
When: Thursday 11/5, 6-10 PM
Cost: Free for members, $14 for non-members (Adults 21+ only)
Details: Blow your mind with the electrifying science of Tesla coils and Austin Richards, PhD—aka Dr. MegaVolt. This electrifying Exploratorium Science After Dark will feature Dr. MegaVolt jousting with 14-foot electrical arcs from his high voltage Tesla Coil.

Cutting Ice into One with a Motorcycle
When: Saturday 11/7
Cost: Free
Details: Imagine a big block of ice suspended from the ceiling of the Exploratorium. Now imagine a wire wrapped around the middle of that ice block from which is hung a motorcycle. Chill out with other skeptics and watch the motorcycle fall to the floor as the wire very slowly cuts through the ice, but bear witness—the ice block remains one whole piece!

Iron Science Teacher
When: Sunday 11/8, 2-3 PM
Cost: Free
Details: Cheer on the competitors in this zany science cook-off, where teachers compete before a live audience for the revered title, 'Iron Science Teacher.' In recognition of the Exploratorium’s 40th birthday, this special edition of our popular show features a secret ingredient closely related to birthdays!

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up – A Conversation with Author K.C. Cole
When: Sunday, 11/15 at 3 p.m
Cost: Free with admission to the museum
Details: Discover the never-before-told story of Frank Oppenheimer, physicist, educator, brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and founder of the Exploratorium. Believing that “without understanding, we’d all be sunk,” Frank Oppenheimer created the Exploratorium to be a museum of human awareness that combined art and science while encouraging play, experimentation, and a sense of joy and wonder.

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 Letters

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.

Prion diseases are neurodegenerative, attacking the brain. Could they be responsible for the recent wave of Zombie attacks across the globe? Original photo: digitalsextant.

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!