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.

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.

According to Sunset Scavenger Spokesman Robert Reed, San Francisco residents should have nothing but "film plastics" (like plastic bags from stores and dry cleaners) and polystyrene, aka Styrofoam.

But the life of a recycling ascetic ain't easy. First of all, it means learning the rules of your particular community, since recycling practices vary depending on where you live. Probably, It means forgoing juice boxes, disposable diapers, complicated, multi-material packaging. It means you've scraped out your cat food cans ("contaminated" recyclables are often tossed). If you're a paper shredder, you've put all the scraps into a paper bag labeled "shredded paper." (Tiny pieces of paper are too hard to collect – sorters usually landfill them.) In short, you've earned a PhD in recycling. (And if you think that's complicated, consider the Japanese.)

Some experts have argued that this is all too much trouble – that instead of aiming for zero waste, we should accept a certain amount of landfilling. Others say that the more citizens recycle, the more efficient the program becomes – hence the movement toward mandatory recycling. One point that nearly everyone seems to agree on is that products on the shelves must be designed to be more easily recyclable than they are today.

Is This Recyclable?

On that note, we interviewed two recycling experts: Mark Murray, director of Californians Against Waste, and Kurt Standen (no relation, amazingly to both of us), general manager of the Sacramento Recycling and Transfer Station. We came armed with six recycling stumpers, including a rubber boot, a juice box, and that much-maligned item of transport, the plastic bag. See what Standen and Murray had to say by clicking on the images below.

Listen to the Getting to Zero Waste 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.

Cal Poly's CP-4 mini-satellite in orbit. Credit: The Aerospace
Corporation.

It's a classic engineering story – a garage inventor spends years working in isolation, only to produce something that gets the attention of the world. Ok, the CubeSat story may not be quite as romantic, but it does have a lot of the same ingredients.

Professors at Stanford University and Cal Poly created CubeSats – 10 by 10 by 10 centimeter mini-satellites – as enginneering projects to give their students hands-on experience. Compared to standard satellite missions, which can run hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to complete, CubeSat missions are mean to be done cheaply and quickly.

CubeSat is also a standard – a basic blueprint that any university program can use. CubeSats are actually known as "FedEx satellites," since universities can mail them to Cal Poly to arrange a ride into space. They've created launching devices called P-Pods (a box that fits the CubeSats perfectly) so they can piggyback on larger rocket launches. Once the main cargo is deployed, the P-Pod releases the CubeSats into orbit. Depending how high they are, CubeSats can orbit for more than a decade before they burn up in the atmosphere.

What started at universities has spread – NASA, Boeing and other aerospace companies all have mini-satellite programs. Despite the small size, CubeSats are actually able to do valuable research. They can space test new technology, submitting it to all the rigors of space travel like solar radiation and launch stress. Recreating those conditions on the ground can be very expensive.

CubeSats can also gather scientific data. On Tuesday, NASA will be launching Pharmasat, which they hope will be their second nano-satellite in orbit. It will carry yeast samples, and once in orbit will hit them with an anti-fungal to see if their resistance is increased in space. NASA has previously observed that some bacteria are more resistant to antibiotics in space, something that could be dangerous for future human space travel.

You can tune in on Tuesday evening for the Pharmasat launch. Three other CubeSats from Cal Poly and other organizations will also be getting a lift into space.

Listen to the Do-It-Yourself Mini-Satellites radio report online, and see our Web Extra: Mini-Satellites Slideshow.