I was excited to be working on this story. After all, it's not that often that a primarily environmental reporter gets to spend a couple weeks focusing on forensics technology and the debate over gun control (let alone receive firearms training on a 38-special from a senior criminalist at the DOJ's California Criminalistics Institute). In the end, there was much, much more to report than I could squeeze into five minutes.

Supporters of microstamping will want to have heard from the technology's inventor, Todd Lizotte of NanoMark Technologies. Lizotte reports a much higher success rate than the UC Davis study and, according to a microstamping supporter I spoke with, has declined any potential profits he might have made on it.

Microstamping itself has far more subtleties than I was able to report on. Fred Tulleners experimented with (and had various degrees of success with) several different types of stamping, as documented in the report he and others prepared for the California Policy Research Center. Even for a non-ballistics expert, that report makes for compelling reading. Tullener's personal opinions on microstamping are also more complex than the story allows: He told me that he would like to see more investment in law enforcement and detection — on the street investments, in other words, rather than new technologies.

I also want to point out that the story overestimates the overall success rate of Tulleners' microstamping tests. I say that microstamping worked "roughly three quarters;" of the time; in actuality, Tulleners says it was closer to 50 percent.

And finally, there's more afoot in the world of gun control technology than I was able to delve into. For example, "Smart Guns," which would recognize and respond exclusively to their registered owner's grip. Supporters point in particular to the number of minors killed while playing with their parents' guns. Of course, controversy follows every new gun proposal. Here’s a Wired article about the Smart Guns debate.

Listen to the "How to ID a Bullet" Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Not everyone would be excited about a box of 16 pounds of meat. But for the members of the Bay Area Meat CSA, the enthusiasm was off the charts. I took part in their spring share this year, where member of the CSA receive a monthly box of pork, poultry, lamb and beef from local Bay Area Farms. The idea began when blogger Bonnie Powell of The Ethicurean put out a call to her readers. Many of them were already getting vegetable CSA's – a meat CSA seemed a logical step. Since then, Tamar Adler, a cook at Chez Panisse stepped in to help run it. And running it is no easy task. This past spring, they were distributing 1,000 pounds a month to members.

Since the CSA only buys whole animals, members get a few interesting things in each delivery. As Adler says, not every cut on an animal is a grill-able cut. Some cuts require other cooking techniques, and so members are challenged to do braises and stews with what they get. The idea is to create a new market for many of the local, small-scale producers. And Adler says she's been getting phone calls from many others looking to join.

Adler has decided the CSA will take the summer off, so she can work on restructuring it into a more cooperative model. As she says, one of the goals of the CSA is for consumers to connect with their producers and she's hoping the CSA's structure can reflect that. The good news is a number of other meat CSA's have arrived on the scene in the Bay Area for those of you looking to join one. Those are:

• The Clark Summit Meat Club
• Sonoma County Meat Buying Club
• Marin Sun Farms
• And here's a list of meat CSA's nationwide

As I also discovered in this story, eating a low-carbon diet is not simple. Researchers are just starting to get a handle on the methodology used to do a life cycle analysis for food. And the news isn't good for meat and cheese lovers – it turns out red meat and dairy products have the highest carbon footprints. The further you dive into their life cycle, the more complicated it gets. Luckily, Gail Feenstra of UC Davis's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program has a few simple tips to cut your carbon.

• Eat less red meat and dairy
• Avoid foods grown in heated greenhouses by eating seasonal food
• Avoid food transported by air by eating locally
• Consolidate your shopping into as few trips as possible
• Waste less food. If it goes into a landfill, it emits the same gases as cows

You can get a sense of the footprint of your diet through the Bon Appetit Management Company's Eat Low Carbon Calculator or you can look up a local farmer's market with Local Harvest.

You may listen to "Eating a Low Carbon Diet" report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Nobody likes moving. The packing, taping, lifting, shipping… it can be major hassle. But nobody's experience compares to what's going on at the California Academy of Sciences. They're moving to their new 400,000 square-foot building in Golden Gate Park after three years in downtown San Francisco. But they've got a lot more to move than most people. Try 38,000 live animals and 20 million scientific specimens.

From fossils and gemstones to bird eggs and a stuffed Kodiak bear, it takes a lot of creativity to pack their collection. Everything seems to have special requirements. Their fish collection is made up of 200,000 jars – all filled with alcohol. And since it's a flammable liquid, they'll need a licensed hazmat driver to take it across town.

The live animals take extra care, of course. In this story, we followed the move of three black tip reef sharks. They hadn't been fed in a few days (so they wouldn't make any, um, deposits in their holding tank) and they weren't easy for the staff to catch, but they made it safely to their new exhibit. Even the largest of the three, F3 as she's known, made it ok, despite being a little groggy at first from too much oxygen.

As curator Bart Shepherd put it, their new Philippine Coral Reef Exhibit is a giant science experiment. The water for the 200,000 gallon tank comes straight from the Pacific Ocean through a four mile pipe. But most impressively, the Academy has been growing coral just for the exhibit. Just managing the water chemistry alone has been a major project, but now several dozen colonies of coral are happily planted in their new home.

Make sure to check out the audio slide show for this story to see how the new building is shaping up. And check out a few of the posts from QUEST science blogger Cat Aboudara, who is an Academy staff member, for more details on what it takes (here, here and here).

Watch the "Moving Day" audio slide show online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Lauren Sommer is an Associate Media Producer for QUEST.

Concern over global warming and rising gas prices has just about everyone, including presidential candidates, touting biofuels. Taking the energy from plants to make a gasoline alternative that can run our cars has great promise. But there are challenges to meeting the nation’s goal to replace 20 per cent of the nations annual gasoline consumption with renewable fuels by 2017. Today's radio report is on the next generation of biofuels being developed right here in the Bay Area.

The biofuels we look at in this piece are primarily cellulose-based. Some of the researchers we talked with called the products they are designing, biopetrol because they are trying to mimic, synthetically, what petroleum does. The San Carlos start up, LS9, is making a biopetrol product. The hope of these researchers is to use plant matter, or biomass, to make a cellulosic biofuel that can be used in the existing petroleum infrastructure without needing to change pipelines, pumps at stations or gas tanks.

There are a number of California companies and research institutions working on developing advanced biofuels. The big, new academic center for research is the Joint Bio Energy Institute out of Emeryville.

As you will hear in this story, some are tinkering with microbes, others are trying to improve on current feedstocks.

Biofuels don’t have to come from traditional plants in the ground but can come from converting algae or trash into biodiesel. While that is not the focus of this story, we hope to take it up in the coming months.

You may listen to the "Designer Biofuels" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

In Silicon Valley, a battle between neighbors has turned into a different kind of face off: solar energy versus trees. It turns out that growing redwood trees can actually be a crime in California, if they block solar panels… as one couple in Sunnyvale found out the hard way. David Gorn reports on a new kind of legal battle — the struggle over who has the right… to sunlight.

7/23/08 UPDATE: The contentious battle between solar energy and redwood trees has come to an end. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a bill into law that guarantees if California property owners plant a tree before a neighbor installs solar panels the neighbor can't require the tree to be chopped down, or trimmed, if it is shading their solar panels. Check out this article in the San Jose Mercury News.

You may listen to the "The Right to Sunlight: Solar vs. Redwood Trees" Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.