Hydrogen is not exactly a fuel. That is, we don't burn it to make energy. It's used more as a medium for storing and transporting energy.

The science of hydrogen fuel cell systems is based on a simple concept. When you combine hydrogen with oxygen, energy is released. You get electricity. What makes it such a clean technology is that the byproducts of that chemical reaction are just heat and water.  So when a fuel cell takes hydrogen from a fuel tank and combines it with oxygen in the air, it produces electricity and emits only a wisp of heated water vapor from the tailpipe.

Hydrogen is combustible (remember the Hindenburg?), and needs to be handled carefully. However, there are easy ways to demonstrate electrolysis, which breaks water apart into oxygen and hydrogen, and the opposite process of joining those chemicals. In fact, you could make a type of fuel cell in your kitchen, with a popsicle stick, battery clips, Scotch tape and a few other household products. You do need one item that can't be found in your kitchen: platinum wire or platinum-coated nickel wire.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. And hydrogen fuel cell conversion is a squeaky clean technology. But the production of hydrogen for use in fuel cells — that can produce a lot of carbon dioxide. In fact, most hydrogen is currently made by stripping, or re-forming, natural gas. That's one of the ongoing criticisms of fuel-cell technology, that it generates greenhouse gas emissions just to get the hydrogen in the first place.

Fuel cells also can store energy generated by solar-powered electrolysis, as well as similar energy generated by wind and hydropower. That's the kind of hydrogen generation that advocates hope to eventually use in fuel cells. But being able to store energy also makes it extremely attractive to harnessing wind, solar and hydropower.

For example, California could generate a lot of wind energy at night, but since electricity has to be used right away, that nighttime, offpeak energy is less valuable. But if it could be stored in a fuel cell through the electrolysis process, that would make it much more lucrative.

Listen to the Where's my Hydrogen Highway? radio report online, and watch our Web Extra Slideshow.

A phonautograph, which made the first sound recordings (playback made possible thanks to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Last summer, QUEST told you about how scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have developed a technology to playback old audio recordings using visual scans. Along with bringing to life the wax cylinders we featured in our TV story, the Berkeley technology helped the world hear, for the first time ever, the oldest known sound recordings ever made. Now the historians who unearthed those recordings have discovered that they've been playing them all wrong.

The recordings were made by a phonautograph, invented by a Frenchman named Léon Scott more than 20 years before Edison came up with the phonograph. The technology worked by scratching sound waves onto sheets of paper covered with lampblack. Last year, historians used the Berkeley Lab's "visual stylus" to replay an 1860 recording of what they thought was a young girl singing the French song "Au Claire De La Lune". Since then, they've realized that they were actually playing the recording at double speed. Instead, it's likely the inventor himself doing the singing. You can hear both version at FirstSounds.org, or listen to an interview with the historians from NPR. It turns out learning to play old sounds isn't the only challenge — we have to know how to play them right!

Watch "How Edison Got His Groove Back" to learn more about how LBL's innovations are helping restore old sound:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

As this radio story airs, Congress is debating two Cash for Clunkers proposals, one from the Senate and one from the House of Representatives. (A third proposal, also from the Senate, is almost identical to the House version.) Both would pay consumers to scrap their "clunkers" in exchange for brand-new, more fuel-efficient models. Both define "clunker" as a car that gets less than 18 miles per gallon. But after that, they diverge.

The House version comes from Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. If it passes, a consumer would get a $3,500 voucher for trading in a truck with 15 miles per gallon in exchange for buying a new truck that gets 16 miles per gallon - a one MPG difference. (If the new truck got 17 miles a gallon, the consumer would earn $4,500). That's why environmentalists complain that the legislation is more about stimulating car sales than it is about getting gas guzzlers off the road.

The Senate version proposed by U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), puts the bar a bit higher. In order to qualify for the $3,500 voucher, that same replacement truck would have to get 20 MPG - five miles per gallon more than the old truck. (An improvement of seven miles per gallon would earn the consumer a $4,500 voucher.)

Interestingly, this is a compromise even for Senator Feinstein herself. Check out her original, more stringent, Cash for Clunkers bill here. Proposed in January, it required stricter efficiency from the replacement vehicle, and would have allowed consumers to use their vouchers for used cars, or for public transit. Those conditions were junked, presumably, because they don't stimulate new car sales.

This article from the Christian Science Monitor, takes the number crunching even farther. Among the details worth considering is the "carbon cost" of making all these new vehicles that consumers will be enouraged to buy, should C4C pass: between 3.5 to 12.4 tons of CO2 per vehicle, according to a Duke economist.

Listen to the Cash for Clunkers radio report online.

Credit: NASA.

When the LCROSS satellite, nicknamed Centaur, smacks into the south pole of the moon in late October, it is expected to produce a plume of dust 37 miles high, which may be visible from Earth with a good backyard telescope. It will be visible in an arc from Hawaii to Texas.

If you'd like to catch the impact, the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland is hosting a Shooting the Moon star party on the night of impact. Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco may host a star-gazing event, as well, but it hasn't been announced yet. And you could check in on other observatories in the Bay Area, as well: Lick observatory in the Santa Cruz mountains, Foothill observatory in Los Altos Hills, Sonoma State observatory in Rohnert Park, and the Fremont Peak observatory in the East Bay.

Not all of them will be open to the public; for instance, Foothill Observatory will be closed to the public, because they’ve been asked to take photographs of the event.

If you know anyone with a 10-inch telescope (that's the diameter of the lens), you can bet that telescope will be lined up to look skyward when the LCROSS probe hits the moon.

If the impact goes well, then the plume above the moon's surface could hover there for hours. It will make its own crater on the moon about 6 feet deep and 30 yards wide, so the plume of dust will not be visible to the naked eye, or even through binoculars.

The exact date, time and even the exact location of the impact have not yet been determined. Keep your eye on NASA's site for more information.

And one aside: This impact will not hurt the moon, or send it off its orbit. That may seem apparent to many people, but NASA Ames officials say those are the most-asked questions about the project.

Listen to the Crash Landing radio report online.

The swine flu virus. Credit: C. S. Goldsmith and A. Balish, CDC.

As this story is being produced, the reports on swine flu are changing hourly. Cases are popping up closer and closer to home, and the CDC is updating several times a day on the spread of the virus, and plans to fight it.

The $64,000 question is how worried we should be.

Swine flu is largely untreatable: The two effective antiviral drugs, Tamiflu and Relenza, must be taken within 48 hours of infection to stop the spread of the virus.

That leaves a vaccine. Vaccines are relatively straightforward to create, but they take time. If swine flu becomes a deadly pandemic (meaning it's not only widespread — a pandemic – but more lethal than it appears to be so far) the demand for vaccines would likely far outpace supply. According to Art Reingold, at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, it could take years for doses to reach everyone in the world who's vulnerable to the disease. Here in the US, we have very few vaccine producing facilities, which means we'd be competing with other countries' priorities to treat their own citizens.

Our story focuses on what could, one day, be the answer to pandemics like this one: a universal vaccine. Scientists like Harvard Medical School's Wayne Marasco believe that, in just a few years, we might be able to inoculate ourselves against nearly all influenza viruses – like a tetanus shot, against the flu. Universal vaccines will come too late for our current swine flu pandemic. But they may well be our response to pandemics of the future.

Listen to the Swine Flu and You radio report online.

Applications are due May 15 for the 2009-2010 QUEST Science Education Institute.

After working with such talented, motivated teachers at our QUEST Science Education Institute last year, we figured we'd better do it again! The QUEST Science Education Institute is KQED Education Network's year-long professional development program for Bay Area school districts. Over the course of the year-long Institute, we will work with teams of science educators and educational technologists from school district offices and school sites to provide training and resources on using QUEST multimedia to enhance science education. Our aim is to help districts develop a broad-based technology implementation plan that leverages QUEST media and aligns with their current technology integration goals.

Here is a quick overview of the year-long Institute:

Who should apply?

The QUEST education team is committed to building capacity for sustainable integration of technology into the science classroom. We seek to work directly with six school districts dedicated to enhancing 21st century skills through the use of local, relevant, informative high-quality media about science. We are asking districts to form teams of 6-8 members composed of district office staff, educational technologists, librarians, and science education leaders. By connecting with districts in this way, we aim to support existing district learning plans and align our resources with the expectations districts and schools have set for teachers and students in science teaching and learning.

Is your district ready for QUEST? Do you have:

Then you are ready to apply!

Visit our KQED Science Education Workshop Website to find out about benefits to participating, see a schedule of activities, and to apply online.

New instruments hook to the underwater lab.
Credit: David Fierstein © 2005 MBARI

We heard about the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's new underwater laboratory in a radio story last fall. When that story aired, the lab (known as the Monterey Accelerated Research System, or MARS) was just getting going, with lots of neat experiments planned. Now, few of those have become a reality.

In case you missed the first story, the MARS is essentially an underwater data hub, perched on the ocean floor almost 3,000 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay. A 32-mile cable connects the system to land, acting as a power cord and data link. Several "underwater extension cords" allow a variety of instruments to plug into the hub, getting power from land and sending back data via the cable. That constant connection is a big step forward in undersea science; without it, researchers have had to use boats to stay physically close to their instruments (something hard to do for very long), or have sent the instruments off on their own, relying on batteries to keep them running and collecting data.

Until late February, earthquake scientists at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory had been using that second method with their seafloor seismic station, the Monterey Ocean Bottom Broadband (MOBB). "We had to wait three months to even know if the instruments were alive," said Barbara Romanowicz, the lab's director. But the MOBB is now plugged in to the MARS system, and is transmitting its information about earthquakes in real-time.

That new stream of information could be especially valuable in California, because the MOBB provides a unique view of the main fault system, the San Andreas, which runs along the Northern California coast. Most seismometers are land-based, and therefore positioned on the east side of the fault. The MOBB is on the west side of the fault, offering a helpful perspective on the fault's shifts and shakes.

The researchers hope that the MOBB's new stream of real-time data will improve their earthquake models, and perhaps eventually help provide early warnings about impending quakes (for more on that topic, see the TV story, Earthquakes: Breaking New Ground).

The MOBB is just one instrument using the MARS hub. A tool that uses sound waves to track fish is currently attached, and within the next six months you can expect to see a robotic DNA lab and a robot that crawls along the seafloor, collecting data on animals that live in the mud.

The biggest problem can be the smallest thing, and that's the case in the sewer world.

More than 20 million gallons of raw sewage spilled into California waterways last year, according to the state Department of Water Resources Control Board. That's not counting the partially treated sewage that makes its way into our water from overflows and sewer system malfunctions.

Many big sewer pipes are old, and many of the sewage treatment plants are antiquated. But the biggest problem faced by sewer systems in California is the tiny pipe called the lateral.

That's the pipe that runs from your home to the street, the small pipes under all of our homes that end up joining the bigger sewer pipes. When those pipes develop cracks, water leaks into them.

Storm water itself would not overwhelm a sewage system, because it's designed to be a closed system. Storm water is not supposed to BE in sewer pipes. So in one way, it shouldn't even matter what the weather is like – storm water shouldn't really mix with sewage at all.

But during a rainstorm, water seeps into your broken lateral pipe, and all your neighbors' pipes, and that rainwater mixes with sewage in the sewer pipes, and the volume of water/sewage can actually build up far beyond the capacity of the sewer pipe. And in the same way, thousands and thousands of gallons of water mixed in with the sewage can swamp a treatment plant during a rainstorm.

That's the number one concern of sewage treatment plants now. And the sewer districts need your help.

Those laterals are owned by homeowners. They're on private land, so the district can't just go in there and tear them up to replace or fix them.

However, most sewer districts offer a service where they will inspect your laterals to check for leaks, and many have started programs where the district will help pay the cost of repairing or replacing those pipes.

Sewer systems are run by local municipalities. Most communities have a local sewer district, and officials at the district can help you inspect and fix your lateral pipes.

Listen to the Sewage Spills Increasing radio report online.

This field photo of a California Newt (Taricha torosa)
egg cluster and more are free for educational use
What does the metamorphosis of a butterfly look like? What kinds of creatures live in a tidal pool? And just how big is a shark’s tooth? When questions like these come up in science classrooms, some educators are now using digital images to help students frame responses and connect their classrooms with the real world. And, with advances in digital technologies that enable effortless access to digital images, integrating digital pictures into the curriculum has never been easier.

These are some of the reasons Bay Area science educators like Aaron Vanderwerff are using photo-sharing websites such as Flickr to develop innovative image-based activities for their classrooms. Vanderwerff, a teacher and Science Department Chair at San Lorenzo High School, uploaded sets of pictures to Flickr and asked groups of students to select an image and comment on it. Students’ comments focused on observations about the photos as well as inferences they made about the situation. And more and more educators are using digital photos to change the way their students see science. Other examples of Flickr-based educational activities include encouraging students to create collaborative photo sets, facilitating discussions by writing notes and comments, teaching categories and classifications using tags, and geotagging images to connect them with physical locations on a map.

Flickr also houses an extensive collection of community-contributed digital images, including a large number of photos made available by QUEST through the QUEST Collections and the QUEST Pool. The QUEST Collections contain photos related to QUEST stories and the photos in the QUEST Pool are contributed by people who sign up to join the QUEST Flickr Photo Group. All photos in the QUEST Collections are available for use in educational projects and can be downloaded and modified for free under Creative Commons licensing.

Wine making is indeed an art form, but it is increasingly becoming more scientific. I knew growing wine grapes requires a lot of attention to detail — there is the terroir, pests and diseases and all those microclimates. But who would have known, driving down Hwy 29, the main thoroughfare through the Napa Valley, that many of those vineyards are totally wired.

In our radio story, we feature the stylishly high tech Vineyard 29 and the Robert Mondavi Winery, but scores of other wineries are using a similar toolbox of technology to help them monitor the soil's water content to grow better grapes. The technology ends up conserving water, too. Remote sensing, ground penetrating radar and satellite technology have helped Mondavi cut back on water use by 30% in recent years.

Winemakers are using some of the same technology that NASA uses to study Mars and engineers use to build hi-rises and freeways. A typical toolbox includes multi-spectral imaging, weather stations, neutron moisture probes, and pressure bombs and there is a plethora of newer technologies in the pipeline. But enough with all the high tech gizmos. How does wine from high tech vines taste? The answer might be found in the success of the winery. Mondavi has won numerous awards over the years and there is a two-year waiting list just to purchase Vineyard 29 wines.

Check out our slide show to see some of these technologies or listen to our radio report on high tech in the vineyards.