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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells, in Death Valley. Photo: Craig Miller.

Now, okay, "quiet" is a somewhat subjective thing. When I lived on the upper (way upper) west side of Manhattan in the 1980s, any interval without hearing a car alarm seemed like blessed relief. Quiet can be measured, of course, with sound pressure meters. Anything below about 40 decibels is pretty darn quiet for most people's purposes.

The National Park Service (NPS) says the quietest place it has yet measured is a spot in Great Sand Dunes National Park, where Vicki McCusker, who helps oversee the natural sounds program for the Park Service, says it was "bottoming out" their meters.

I've never been there but it's hard to imagine greater quietude than an afternoon I spent in Death Valley. Coincidentally this was also on a sand dune, near Stovepipe Wells. It was also Christmas Day, which kept the tourist traffic to a minimum. It was at a point in my life when I was in desperate need of some deep introspection, so I parked my car along Highway 190 and trekked into the dunes, found an accommodating slope and sat down. Occasionally a fly (or something) would buzz by. Other than that, the loudest thing was the buzzing in my own head, which I can only hope would've been inaudible to anyone with me.

It's interesting how, when things get really quiet, our bodies try to make up for it with ringing ears and internal chaos. The noted bioacoustician Bernie Krause talks about the time he and his wife, Kat were hosting guests from New York, who literally had to leave the Krause's semi-secluded Glen Ellen "sanctuary" because the night-time quiet was creeping them out.

I asked Krause what he could draw from that. "Well, it tells me that we’re more insane than I ever thought in the first place," he mused. "I mean, we’re definitely verging on pathological.  Because it’s exactly those kinds of sounds–the urban acoustic envelope in which we enfold ourselves–that kind of urban noise that’s driving up the numbers of prescriptions for Prozac."

Surveys of national park visitors would seem to bear that out.  In the early 1990s, NPS surveyed 15,000 visitors in 39 parks, about noise issues (NPS manages 391 "units" nationwide, 58 of which are designated as "parks"). More than nine out of ten visitors surveyed cited "enjoyment of natural quiet" as a reason for visiting. This survey provided some juice for the ongoing natural sounds program in the parks.

An open question is: where does it go from here? Much of the current effort in the parks appears to be geared toward developing "air tour management plans," a response to concerns that first arose over the increasingly crowded skies above the Grand Canyon. McCusker told me that while aircraft overflights are the most pervasive noise issue across the parks, the most common complaint is probably over loud motorcycles (note to "straight-pipe" Harley owners).

Krause, who conducted a year-long project documenting soundscapes in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, hopes the research will also be used to develop new rules governing on-the-ground noise pollution. "If the parks can set aside places where people can go and hear the natural world as it is, at any season of the year, then that will be a really big benefit for visitors coming to the parks," he says. "Otherwise, you’re seeing the parks with the wrong soundtrack. It’s like watching Star Wars without a soundtrack."

So check out this four and a half minute “journey” I produced with Bernie Krause, founder of Wild Sanctuary. It takes you from the familiar cacophony of the urban soundscape to a serene spot in Sequoia Park.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Listen to the radio report, "Soundscapes of National Parks" online.

The last time we reported on Swine flu, or 2009 H1N1 virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was considering whether or not to invest in a vaccine for the new influenza strain.

Now, after several delays, the first batches of vaccines — first, a nasal spray version, then an injectible vaccine — is due to hit hospitals and clinics across the country (and around the world) in the first weeks of October. It's up to each state to decide which groups to prioritize, but pregnant women, young children, and those with certain preexisting conditions such as asthma may be considered priorities. Over the following weeks, the flow of vaccines, produced at five different labs across the country, will steadily increase until, officials hope, any American who chooses to be vaccinated has access to a dose.

To learn more about where to get the vaccine, call: (800) CDC-INFO (800 232-4636) or visit www.cdc.gov/flu.

Here's another good resource for basic H1N1 vaccine info.

In this piece, we profile work taking place at the University of California, San Francisco's Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center. This lab is home to the ViroChip – a powerful viral diagnostic tool that won its inventor, Joseph DeRisi, a MacArthur "Genius" Grant back in 2004. TheViroChip and other tools are critical to the fight against 2009 H1N1 . Among other things, they may be the first to alert us should the virus mutate into a form that's resistant to the leading antiviral drug, Tamiflu. (Several cases of Tamiflu-resistant 2009 H1N1 have already been reported, but so far they appear to be isolated incidents.)

They'll be looking out for another important mutation too: That's if 2009 H1N1 changes enough so that the current vaccine for it — the one coming out in October — no longer works. (This kind of subtle virus mutation is the reason we need new flu vaccines every year.) So far, this does not seem to be the case.

Listen to the Predicting Swine Flu radio report online.

You've probably heard about some of the breakthroughs in personal genome sequencing, where companies take a look at your DNA and send back your risk profile. That can be confusing information to have (check out this post from Quest blogger Dr. Barry Starr for his take on it). But there's a flip side to all this genetic research that doesn't have to do with risk: personalized medicine. That's where doctors can customize medical treatments to fit your genetic profile.

Right now, there are only a handful of drugs that are labeled with genetic information, so doctors can take it into consideration. (Here's an article from the New York Times that gives an overview).  But that doesn't mean existing medications are left out.  I spent some time with Deanna Kroetz in this story, who studies pharmacogenomics at UC San Francisco.  She explained that differences in our DNA can cause some of us to process drugs at different rates. We all metabolize drugs with enzymes in the liver, but based on expression of our DNA, we may have different levels of enzymes or our enzymes may not function as well.

There are plenty of other things that affect how we process drugs, like our diet or other drugs we're taking. But these genetic differences mean some people metabolize drugs quickly and others metabolize them slowly. One example that many people are familiar with is codeine.  Codeine is converted into morphine by our bodies and it's the morphine that actually has an effect — but that conversion depends on a particular enzyme. Some people have very low levels of the enzyme that's needed, so codeine doesn't do much for them.

They're also studying another drug response mechanism at UCSF and it has to do with our cells. Many drugs have to go inside our cells in order to have an effect, but if you think back to high school biology, you might remember that cells are protected by membranes.  It takes transporters – those special gatekeepers sitting on the cell membranes — to allow things in.  They also can spit things out of cells.

I spent some time in the lab with Rachel LaFond, a graduate student at UCSF.  She was running experiments on one particular transporter known as ABCG2. This transporter is particularly good at spitting things out of cells. Normally its job is to kick toxins out, but some cancers have been able to hijack this machinery.  Cancer cells with an over expression of this transporter can spit out chemotherapy drugs, which means they aren't helping the patient.  LaFond is working to understand this variation better, so they could one day develop a genetic test for it.

Listen to the Personalized Medicine radio report online.

I often look at the chemical ingredients in what I buy. I shop at farmers markets for organic produce and use green cleaning supplies. So, it caught me off guard when a friend remarked, "you are so aware of what you eat, why aren't you just as curious about what you drink?" Well, we drink organic coffee but not organic wine. I was worried about sacrificing taste and I just didn't think most vineyards were heavily sprayed with pesticides. Then I learned that wine grapes are the second most sprayed crop in the state. This didn't seem like it could be that good for the farm workers, the Earth, or the consumer. Several studies have found trace amounts of pesticides in wine. They may be at extremely low amounts, but what kind of impact could pesticide residues have overtime?

Armed with a new green cause, I set out to find more information about eco-wines. I learned that organic wine is just one type of green wine — there is also wine made with organic grapes. It turns out I had been drinking some of these wines and enjoying them. The thing is, you can't call it "organic wine" if the wine has added sulfites, a naturally occurring compound. Most winemakers add sulfites to help preserve the wine and make it more stable. If a wine is made from organic grapes but contains sulfites, the world "organic" can only be mentioned as part of the ingredient claim on the back of the bottle. No wonder I didn't know I was drinking wine farmed organically.

It turns out northern Sonoma County and Mendocino county are hotbeds for green wine. In the course of reporting this story, I visited several of these wine makers. Bonterra Vineyards, below Ukiah, has been farming organically since 1987 and now farms one of their ranches, McNab, biodynamically. Their red blend is nicely balanced and tastes very good.

Biodynamic is a novel form of organic farming practice with its roots in France. A biodynamic vineyard is a self-sustaining ecosystem — making organic compost, removing chemicals from the soil and farming with the cycles of the Earth.  Biodynamic has its own international certification. (Here is a list of their certified wines). Just up the 101 from Bonterra is Parducci Wine Cellars. This family run company is farming organic grapes and in some cases, biodynamically. Parducci also claims to be one of the most sustainable wineries in the country.

Sustainable is a squishy term. Sustainable wineries may be running off solar power or doing creek restoration to save spawning salmon but they are not necessarily organic and they are not certified. However, the California Sustainable Winegrowing Program is working toward an industry certification. The idea is to raise the entire industry's practices and help vintners make more eco-friendly choices that often include using less chemicals in the vineyards.

Back to sulfites. This ended up being the main reason for the stigma still associated with green wine. Twenty years ago, green wines were uneven and there were not that many choices. Now, several of these eco-wines are winning high points from the industry. Organic wine can only contain naturally occurring sulfites, under 10ppm. Wines farmed organically must keep the added sulfites below 100ppm. Conventional wine can contain sulfites as high as 300ppm. When I was reporting this story, several folks asked me if I was going to explain why they get headaches from red wine. Isn't it the sulfites? Actually, it is not known why some people get headaches from drinking red wine. It could be the histamines. It doesn't look like it's the sulfites. Less than 1% of the population, according to the FDA, is sensitive to sulfites. The reaction is a respiratory one.

Anyway, if you enjoy wine, I encourage you to think beyond red and white but to consider green, too. To find out more, listen to our radio story and check out our links. Also, green wine pioneer, Paul Dolan together with Parducci has created a green wine handbook which is very helpful.

Listen to the The Politics of Green Wine radio report online.