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.

The Public Policy Institute of California has been tracking public support for expanded nuclear power over the past several years. Survey participants are offered a menu of four potential energy options, one at a time.

The question posed is: "Thinking about the country as a whole, to address the country’s energy needs and reduce dependence on foreign oil sources, do you favor or oppose the following proposals?" Then the four options are offered, including: "How about building more nuclear power plants at this time."

As recently as 2002, adults surveyed in California opposed the idea by a margin of 59% to 33%. But that gap has been closing steadily in the years since and by this July, Californians were split just about down the middle on the question, with 46% in favor and 48% opposed. The poll has a margin of error of about 2%, making it a virtual tie.

When you dig into the numbers a little deeper, some demographic preferences emerge: support increases with both age and education. Californians 55 and older support more nuclear by a wide margin (58% to 36%) as do college graduates (50%-43%).

Many people use cost as an argument against nuclear but just as the PPIC was phoning around for opinions on the matter, the Palo Alto-based Electric Power Research Institute was finishing up its own report , concluding that trying to reach greenhouse gas reduction goals without baseload technologies like nuclear power, could end up costing much more. Dan Kammen, who runs an energy lab at U.C. Berkeley, would appear to agree. He said in a recent interview for Climate Watch that "Without knowing exactly where things will come down on nuclear, I think that it absolutely has to be part of the equation in a way that it has not been in the past. Energy costs from fossil fuels are rising at almost 5% a year now, and the damage we are doing and are going to do more of, if we don’t stop our fossil fuel expansion, in terms of greenhouse warming, is so large an issue that these technologies have to be back on the table.

But there's a serious question of whether the nation– let alone the state– is in a position to embrace nuclear as it did in the 1960s. Kammen is also a professor of nuclear engineering, and noted with some alarm the rate at which the industry is "graying." Now in his mid-forties, he told me that when he attends technical meetings for nuclear engineers, he's often "the youngest guy in the room–by 20 years." Since the U.S. more or less abandoned its nuclear hopes following the Three Mile Island debacle, the nation has ceded most of its nuclear industrial capacity to other nations, and few young people have chosen to enter the field.

The effective ban on new nuclear plants that California has had in place since 1976 could be reconsidered. But ultimately electric utilities will have to want it and I sense a certain "nuclear fatigue" in that arena.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) shut down its only reactor in 1989, after a thumbs-down referendum. When I called to ask for an interview on the prospects for a nuclear revival, they declined. They didn't even want to talk about it. Managers at PG&E, whose twin reactors at Diablo Canyon produce nearly a quarter of the utility's output, still claim an interest in nuclear. But when I asked CEO Peter Darbee about it recently, he said he had the sense that most people in California would prefer to look elsewhere for energy solutions. Of course, that was before the latest PPIC poll.

Listen to the New Nuclear radio report online.

Check out an interactive "atomic timeline," marking some of the milestones in nuclear power history in the U.S. By former Climate Watch intern Amanda Dyer.

The noise of all these nesting and breeding birds is almost overwhelming (check out the slideshow below for a firsthand look), but these birds speak for a lot more than themselves. Our guides, PRBO Conservation Science, have been studying these birds for 40 years. As Biologist Russell Bradley explained, these seabirds are environmental samplers. In order to raise their chicks, they depend on the food web that blooms in the spring when coastal upwelling brings nutrient-rich water to the surface. If that is disrupted or delayed, the first place scientists will see it is in these bird populations, who will either have poor or non-existent breeding seasons.

Those changes in the upwelling patterns can be due to natural variability in the system. But increasing, scientists are asking whether the changes are due to climate change. That's not an easy question to answer. There are a lot of different factors in the mix.

I spoke with Zack Powell, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies climate and upwelling, and he said it all comes down to the timing of natural cycles. First, there's El Nino – where warm water spreads across the equator and heads up the California coast. That can happen every two to seven years and when it does, it acts a barrier to upwelling, interfering with the marine food web. Scientists recently confirmed that El Nino will return this year.

Looking at changes on a longer time frame, there's the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. It's a pattern of ocean warming and cooling that can last 30 years. Powell says it can also have an effect on marine life and fisheries.

And finally, there's climate change, which comparably may cause changes on the longest time frame. Powell says there's about 100 years of historical data about the ocean conditions off the California coast and it's not much when looking at such long-lived patterns. Powell and others work on climate modeling to help answer these questions. Some of the models show that the seasonal winds may become stronger, meaning upwelling patterns could be altered. And ocean temperatures could rise significantly, changing the way warmer surface water and nutrient-rich deep water mix.

Powell says right now his focus is the granularity of the climate models. They simply can't predict changes on a small geographic scale. "For most models, the smallest footprint is about 100km and all the upwelling takes place closer to shore than that." But he's hoping there will be drastic improvements over the next few years. And if extreme changes do take place, for whatever reason, the birds will certainly tell us.

Listen to the Journey to the Farallones radio report online, and check out our Farallon Islands Interactive Map for the sights and sounds of the island. Or watch the audio slideshow below for a first-hand look.

This radio story tries to cram a lot into five minutes, so if you don't find what you need here, put a comment on the blog, below and I'll see if I can't provide a lead to more information.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation interested me, in part, because of how non-invasive it is. Dr. Bret Schneider, who offers TMS from his private practice in Portola Valley, was one of several experts to suggest that TMS machines might one day be available for home use. Of course, that's a long way off. TMS is expensive: about $5,000 for an initial round of treatment. It's still much easier and cheaper to simply pop a pill each morning. And researchers are still working out how effective it can be.

Studies show that TMS brings a remission in depression to about a third of patients to try it. Another third experience some improvement, and a final third are unaffected. Dr. Schneider says he sees much better success rates on patients who combine TMS with antidepressant drugs (TMS without drugs, he says, is like "trying to drive a car with no gas.") Finally, the FDA approval covers only one TMS machine on the market, Neurostar, although some physicians use other techniques, off-label.

You can find links to the abstracts of clinical studies performed on TMS and depression through a search at pubmed.com. This meta-analysis compares 30 double-blind studies, covering a total of 1164 patients (606 received TMS, 558 received sham treatments).

But TMS is just one in a class of "brain stimulation" depression treatments — an important fact that didn't make it into the story. Others include vagus nerve stimulation, deep brain stimulation and, of course, electroshock convulsive therapy — which is offered here in the Bay Area at the UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute to severely depressed patients (as well as, less commonly, people suffering from manic depression and schizophrenia).

Quest TV will cover TMS and other depression treatments in greater depth later this season, so stay tuned. For a sneak peak at some of what you'll find on the show, check out Stanford scientist Karl Deisseroth's groundbreaking work using light-sensitive proteins to stimulate neural circuits — work that could someday help treat not just depression, but other brain diseases as well.

Listen to the Depression Advancements radio report online or check out the slideshow below of Dr. Bret Schneider, a consulting assistant professor at Stanford University and a practicing psychiatrist in Portola Valley, discussing depression and the brain.

Hard economic times and changing social trends have some museums undergoing a 21st century re-design. The focus is on creating more visitor-centered exhibits using new media tools and more input from the public. Some technology and history museums in the Bay Area are helping to lead the way, as you will hear in our radio piece.

When the public is invited in to help design exhibits, it can create faster turnover and more affordable exhibits. The Tech Museum in San Jose, for example, held a competition in Second Life. The public was asked to design exhibits on the theme of art, music and film. Entries came from as far away as England and China. Winners were awarded five thousand dollars each and asked to translate their designs into a real life gallery space. That exhibit is now on display at the Tech.  According to the Tech's Director, Peter Friess, the exhibit could have taken three years to design. Instead, it took six months. Museum directors are hoping that asking the public to help generate, share and update content will also create more loyalty and drive up ticket sales.

Some people cringe at the idea of asking the public to design museum exhibits. They point to the unlimited number of cat videos on You Tube and ask, "is this really what we want to do to museums?" The museum directors I spoke with say that there is still a role for the curator in this new model, but as more of an educated facilitator than an autocratic, removed taste-setter. Nina Simon, a participatory exhibit designer who writes a blog called Museum 2.0 thinks about this question a lot and has some interesting ideas.

While the participatory, hands-on movement has been around for awhile, these museums are picking up on a cultural shift – and it's not just Bay Area history and technology museums. The Smithsonian American Art Museum was the first to offer an alternate-reality game. The director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore thinks the mission of museums may be expanding to include social services. The Brooklyn Museum created a temporary exhibit, "Click," using crowd sourcing and the Museum of Minnesota created a permanent exhibition based on nominations from the public. I wonder what Web 3.0 will bring?

Listen to the Museum 2.0 radio report online.

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.

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.