Are you using Twitter or other social media as a way to promote progressive causes like energy efficiency? What do you think about mandatory home energy audits or line drying clothes versus machine drying? Source image: Tina KellerSomebody close to me recently turned 50. Okay, it was me who just turned 50. My how things have changed since 1959! My first experience with computers was as a freshman lining up to hand over my punch cards to the computer operator to be fed into a computer that filled a room. Up until recently I got my news of the world through newspapers and television. For most of my life I stayed in touch with distant family and friends through letters and phone calls. When my brother was in Vietnam during the war we had to call him through short wave radio to tell him that his Corvette got smashed. (He didn't care. He was relieved that we were all okay.)

Now I get my information mostly off the Internet and through Twitter, the social media service that is in the news because of its use by the opposition parties in Iran. Twitter is like snail mail cubed. You send messages from your computer or smart phone that immediately show up on the computers or phones of all your "followers." You get followers generally by following others. It's kind of an unwritten rule that if someone is following you should return the favor. So far I am following about 30 people or groups and have 11 followers. But I just started.

I am following Energy Circle, a new Internet resource that is using social media to report news about home energy efficiency on Twitter. A recent "tweet" connected me to an article by Peggy in Toronto who thinks that mandatory home inspections should be replaced with mandatory energy audits upon the time of sale of a home. Advanced Energy's Research Director Melissa Malkin-Weber, tweeted "Energy saving smugness nixes scratchiness of air dried sheets. But don't ask my kids about how those stiff cloth diapers felt."

I agree with Peggie and Melissa. But what do you think about mandatory home energy audits or line drying clothes versus machine drying? Are you using social media as a way to promote progressive causes like energy efficiency? You can respond below, and your response needn't be limited, like "tweets" are, to 140 characters. Or sign up for a Twitter account and join the conversation at KQED Science!

This past Friday, a few thousand folks attended Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to see dignitaries including California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein dedicated the world's newest and most powerful laser, the National Ignition Facility (NIF).

Governor Schwarzenegger, clad in a pink tie– an odd sartorial choice for dedicating this giant hulk of a building housing 500 trillion watt laser housed within– nevertheless succeeded in channeling at least some of his Hollywood days. When they originally visited the facility last November, "we were so excited that we said, 'We'll be back.'"

The project's goal is to focus 192 laser beams onto a BB-sized capsule of hydrogen fuel in order to heat it to the point of ignition, that is, to achieve a nuclear fusion reaction where more energy comes out of the capsule than is put in. Fusion is the common process for creating energy in the Sun, and has been demonstrated on Earth both in the apocalyptic specter of thermonuclear weapons and in the more hope-inspiring form of plasma reactors such as those at the Joint European Torus (JET) in Britain. However, ignition has yet to be demonstrated, as JET requires a constant influx of energy greater than anything it is capable of producing. If all goes well within the next several months, ignition could be achieved at NIF as early as 2010.

For all of these exciting aspirations and promise of new technology, the press' reaction to NIF throughout the twelve years of its construction has been often lukewarm, and at worst scornful. Some of this has been deserved, and it is certainly true that the facility's $3.5 billion dollar construction cost is a hard price tag to swallow.

However, NIF is a worthy scientific cause and might well turn out to be an excellent investment. To put things a little bit into perspective, other large science projects are similarly expensive. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Hubble Space Telescope have both been estimated at about $6 billion. Dianne Feinstein argued in the past (and reminded the audience at Friday's dedication) that Enron needlessly cost $9 billion during the California Energy Crisis. Put another way, with $9 billion you could (a) experience rolling blackouts while Enron power traders cheer for wildfires ravaging your countryside, or (b) assemble the world's most powerful laser and use it to bring the nation to the brink of being able to replicate, in a controlled manner, the sorts of reactions that power the Sun. Twice.

The physics promise of the NIF, meanwhile, is truly fascinating on all three fronts of NIF's stated goals: energy production, basic research, and national security.

Fission reactors, which extract atomic energy from the splitting of large atoms such as uranium, have been a viable source of energy since 1954. However, the waste they produce remains radioactive for thousands of years. Potential fusion plants, on the other hand, would operate by an altogether different mechanism: the merging of much smaller hydrogen atoms. Radioactive byproducts are still generated, but the timescale for their radioactivity is shorter, on the order of 10 to 20 years.

A significant line of inquiry has already been pursued toward commercially viable nuclear fusion at JET and its planned successor, ITER. Such experiments employ powerful magnetic fields to maintain hydrogen plasma in a confined space and heat it to the point of fusion as it soars around inside a doughnut-shaped ring.

NIF serves as a valuable compliment to these magnetic confinement experiments. Instead of forcing a fusion reaction to perpetuate using costly magnetic fields, the NIF laser will attempt to blast its fuel with so much energy in such a short time period that the fuel will have no time to expand before it undergoes fusion. "If it works, developments at NIF would entirely reshape the dialogue on nuclear fusion energy," said Brian MacGowan, a NIF Program Director.

Even the most optimistic estimates place the viability of these types of energy sources 20 years into the future. NIF itself will never be able to function as a power generator even if all experiments performed at the facility proceed exactly as planned. The raw potential for such power extraction is nevertheless tantalizing.

Additionally, there is basic research potential for NIF beyond fusion power. Stars are typically easy to observe from a distance but inevitably too far away and too inhospitable to explore up close. A miniaturized version of the reaction as created in the NIF target bay could provide an interesting model system. There is no way to tell, but it could be that hand in hand with this ability comes a better understanding of some of the deepest outstanding questions in physics as well, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

NIF also offers a unique way for the U.S. to test the effects of nuclear weapons without violating the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. NNSA Administrator Tom D'Agostino noted at the dedication that, particularly as the United States' nuclear arsenal ages, this will provide the U.S. with invaluable data.

We may emerge from this economic crisis a poorer, humbler country. Still, I hope that we are not yet so humble that we have lost the ability to dream big, and not yet so poor that we can no longer actively pursue at least a few of those dreams.

Who's more energy efficient with the dishes– you or your dishwasher? Image: Ronan_tlvA microwave oven is the most efficient way to heat water for a cup of tea, hot chocolate, or coffee. True or False?

Now as a regular morning coffee drinker who uses a kettle and a gas stove to heat water for coffee (not instant– yuk! I use a coffee filter cone and PEET's coffee, of course) instead of the microwave, since our microwave is an old piece of inefficient junk that takes forever to heat water, I thought that buying a new microwave would make me a more energy efficient coffee drinker. But I was wrong!

Jennifer Mitchell-Jackson, while a graduate student at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, measured the energy use of an average microwave oven, an electric stovetop, and a gas stovetop to heat up a mug of water. Turns out that an electric stove uses 25% less electricity than an average microwave oven to heat a mug of water. A gas stove is less efficient and uses more energy than a microwave oven, but depending on the cost of gas, it might cost less to heat a mug of coffee with gas compared to the microwave.

It is more efficient to wash dishes by hand than it is to use a dishwasher. True or false?

How many arguments has that one caused! The research to dispel this myth came from Germany. Rainer Stamminger, a professor of household and appliance technology and his colleagues at the University of Bonn, gathered more than 100 volunteer dishwashers with varying skill levels and dishwashing styles in a laboratory, and measured the amount of water and energy each used to wash big stacks of dirty dishes. He then washed similar dirty dishes in dishwashers and measured the dishwashers’ water and energy use.

His conclusion: The machine is more efficient than the hand. In general, the dishwashers used much more water and somewhat more energy than the dishwashing machines. Some test subjects used 53 gallons of water to clean 12 place settings! But there is a wide variation in the styles and economics of hand dishwashing.

Clearly, a new, efficient dishwasher is best. But if you can’t afford one, or like to spend a lot of time with your hands in soapy water, Stamminger and company have some suggestions:

• Remove large dish scraps with a fork or spoon.
• Do the dishes soon after a meal before the food has dried on the plates (get your dinner guests involved).
• Do not pre-rinse your dishes under running tap water (same goes for dishwasher use).
• Use a hot-water sink for washing and a cold-water sink for rinsing.
• Use just the amount of detergent recommended by the manufacturer.

And put that coffee mug in the dishwasher when you're done.

Kids will want to keep learning science when they see how fun it is.The economy is in the tank and so the cuts at schools begin. And of course one of the first things on the chopping block is anything that can keep kids interested in science.

These programs tend to be more expensive than other programs and so are natural targets for the axe.  For example, at my kids' school, they are cutting 5^th grade science camp.

Kids go off for a 5 day trip to a place out in the woods to study nature.  The kids have a blast and can see that science is more than memorizing phyla or sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks.  Instead they get to explore nature and use books to figure out what they're seeing.

And if history is any guide, there will be a big fall off in field trips to zoos and museums too.  These are more places where kids can see that science is actually a lot of fun.

Some might argue that if money is limited these programs should be cut.  This is true only if we want a workforce that can't do the jobs that are becoming available in our information based economy.

To do well in the future job market, people are going to need a good basic understanding of science and/or engineering.  Think about what an auto mechanic does these days.  Or a nurse or a radiologist.

We need to keep people studying science for their own good.  And frankly, for the good of the U.S. as well.

One of the keys to getting more people to take the science they need is to show them how fun and exciting it is.  We need to let them see that science is actually about studying the mysteries of the natural world and applying them to make that world a better place.

This is what the programs that are going to be cut do.  Without them, schools will continue to turn kids away from science.  And the U.S. will fall behind other countries.

I have no idea what programs should be cut instead and I am sure that other people see higher priorities than science camp.  But I think it is time that public schools recognized that science is as important to a student's future as are the three R's.  Someone needs to come up with a way to make science into an R so we can have the four R's.  Any ideas?

For these notes, I thought I'd focus on something that didn’t make it into the sea lions radio broadcast: the necropsy.

Each year the Marine Mammal Center treats somewhere between 600-1000 animals, including California sea lions, Pacific harbor seals, Northern elephant seals, and steller sea lions. About half of them are treated successfully at the center and released into the Pacific. The other half either die naturally or have to be euthanized.

Most of them end up at the center's hospital after passersby spot the animals on the beach and sense something’s wrong. (The Marine Mammal center responds to calls anywhere between Mendocino and San Louis Obispo Counties — some 600 miles of coastline.) Some problems are human-caused, like boat-propeller injuries or ingested fishing nets and hooks. Other times, it's cancer, domoic acid poisoning, or leptospirosis. Sometimes, it's hard to tell exactly what happened — hence the need for necropsies.

On the day that Quest intern Jennifer Skene and I visited the center, veterinarian Nicola Pussini performed two necropsies, both on sea lions. One animal seemed to have died from a tumor underneath his fin; the other was a suspected domoic acid intoxication.

Each necropsy takes about an hour and a half. First Pussini measures the animal, then he slices it open and inspects every part, from tongue to tail. He inspects the teeth, pulls out all the organs, checks to see how much fat the animal has. The data, along with tissue samples, are archived and shared with other research institutions. This is the kind of basic research that Marine Mammal Center staff cite when people ask why they devote so many resources (most of it from private donations) to animals whose populations are neither threatened nor endangered.

I should mention that I didn't exactly see this entire process firsthand. Let's just say that after my first strong whiff of sea lion intestine, I felt a compelling need to go check on things outside the necropsy room. Luckily for me, Jennifer has the stomach of a true scientist and managed to both hold the microphone and take photos. Luckily for you, we’re sparing you her gorier shots.

Listen to the Sea Lion Rescue radio report online, and watch our photo slideshow.

The renowned physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)
On July 16, 1945, the United States executed Trinity, the world's first nuclear bomb test, and for better or worse, the herald of the atomic age. The physicist Enrico Fermi recalled the following: "About 40 seconds after the explosion the air blast reached me. I tried to estimate its strength by dropping from about six feet small pieces of paper before, during and after the passage of the blast wave…The shift was about 2 1/2 meters, which, at the time, I estimated to correspond to the blast that would be produced by ten thousand tons of T.N.T."

If we can forgive Fermi for his sterility, it is hard not to marvel at his ingenuity. The official estimate of the bomb's power turned out to be only about twice as large, and it was this uncanny knack for being able to calculate unwieldy quantities that helped earn Fermi a reputation within the physics world.

The concept of the "Fermi Problem"–a hard question made readily accessible by back-of-the-envelope calculations and familiar knowledge–is still powerful in physics and beyond. Science teachers routinely use these types of questions as brain teasers. Economists at the World Bank have used the method to estimate the cost of a potential flu pandemic. The method has even been employed, in the form of the Drake Equation, to assess the likelihood of the existence of aliens. With a little effort, you can try it, too.

To illustrate, consider the classic problem, "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" The idea of the Fermi Problem is to break the questions down into a series of steps that you can estimate accurately. For example, I could start with the knowledge that Chicago has a population somewhere in the neighborhood of a million people. It seems reasonable that there is about 1 piano for every 100 people because I have about 200 Facebook friends, and of that group maybe 2 own a piano. This gives me 10 thousand pianos. Then I could assume that a piano needs tuning perhaps once a year, so there are 10 thousand jobs a year. If a piano tuner needs 100 jobs to stay in business, the city of Chicago has about 100 piano tuners. Amazingly, if you are careful you will almost always arrive at the correct answer to within a factor of 10.

The piano problem might be so obscure that no one cares about the answer even after you do find it. Here are a few perhaps more interesting questions, and my estimations:

Technology: At any given point in time, how many people are watching a Rick Astley sing, "Never Gonna Give You Up"? (YouTube shows about 20 million views for the video's current incarnation, posted 1 year ago. Given 30 million seconds in a year, and a typical patience level of perhaps 10 seconds, you can assume that 10 people are being Rickrolled right now.)

Energy: How many power plants does the City of San Francisco need? (It takes about a billion Watts, or 1 nuclear or coal power plant. As Richard Muller points out in his book Physics for Future Presidents, you can obtain roughly the same amount of power midday by covering a landmass the size of San Francisco with solar panels. Tempting.)

Food: How many people can the state of Iowa feed? (A bushel is roughly 35 liters, providing perhaps 10 people or more a day's worth of food. Iowa produced 2.4 billion bushels of corn in 2007, so given about 300 days in a year, that's 10 million bushels a day, or food for 100 million people, or 1/8^th of the world's starving.)

Inside the Bevatron. Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

Much as I tried to get Stewart Loken to wax poetic about the demise of the Bevatron, the truth is that he – and, I'll bet, a lot of scientists – just don't think that way.

As Loken put it, "science never stands still." However many Nobel prizes the Bevatron produced, this old, defunct particle accelerator is really just taking up space; its demolition, and replacement with a new, up-to-the-minute research facility, is, Loken feels, the best way to honor the work done here. Plans aren't finalized, but it's likely the facility to replace the Bevatron will forward work done at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Advanced Light Source (which, by the way, produces light a billion times brighter than the sun).

The new facility – described here – would allow scientists to watch "electrons joining forces, atoms snapping together within millionths of a billionth of a second, the real time of chemical reactions."

But that's a long way off. First, demolition workers must contend with a major disposal challenge, including getting rid of radioactive waste produced during experiments at the Bevatron. Some neighbors are concerned about the prospect of hauling the stuff through Berkeley's residential areas. Others have called for the Bevatron to be preserved as a national landmark.

But demolition is already underway, and picking up speed, thanks in part to $1.2 billion recently bestowed on federal research labs across the country under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Lab describes the environmental impacts of the Bevatron demolition project here.

See the Bevatron today and in its heyday - watch the "Goodbye to the Bevatron" slideshow online.

Go Bears! is more than a cheer, but a mantra to live life by…as long as you're a Berkeley alum like myself. On Saturday April 18^th, the University opens up to the public…lectures, interactive events, tours, all of the campus museums (most of which aren't usually open to the public)… and it's all free.

Many programs are geared for incoming students and their families. However, there are a few gems designed for everyone. This year's highlights feature hands on physics, discussions on energy & environmental issues, with the search for extra terrestrial life sprinkled in. For a complete listing of events, check out the Cal Day website. Here are my picks:

Darwin, Dover, and Intelligent Design: What's Next for Anti-Evolutionists?

10-11 am, 2050 Valley Life Sciences Building

Hear a national expert on evolution discuss the conflicts between evolution and creationism, and where this debate is headed.

Mobile Millennium: The System That Keeps Traffic Moving

10-11 am, Sibley Auditorium

This traffic-monitoring system collects data and sends it to your cell phone to help you take the best routes. Be an early adopter of this developing technology; learn how following the lecture or from 1:30 to 3 pm outside McCone Hall.

Are We Wired for Good?

11 am-noon, 145 Dwinelle Hall

Is the capacity for compassion, gratitude, and other positive emotions built into our nervous systems? Are such emotions the path to happiness? The founder of Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center has some answers.

What Is the Large Hadron Collider?

11 am-noon, 4 LeConte Hall

It's the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Hear how it works and discover the exciting things it might reveal about our amazing universe.

Will Water Be the Oil of the 21st Century? A Quest for Sustainable Water Management

11 am-noon, 502 Davis Hall

Water is a limited natural resource, and its importance can be compared to that of oil. Examine the parallels between these two resources, and the future of water sustainability.

How Global Climate Change Will Affect the Oceans

Noon-1 pm, 141 McCone Hall

Warmer surface waters, rising sea levels, more storms, and increased carbon dioxide - all will have an impact on marine ecosystems, coasts, islands, estuaries, and wetlands.

The Dark Side of the Universe

Noon-1 pm, 100 Genetics & Plant Biology Building

The universe is mostly made up of "dark matter" - what evidence do we have that it exists? Hear how we're searching for this mysterious component of the universe.

Genes in a Bottle

Noon-2 pm, Latimer Hall

Learn how DNA is chemically extracted from organisms for research applications. Then extract DNA from your own cheek cells, and take it home in a fashionable necklace!

How Do Cars Fit Into a Clean-Energy Future?

1-2 pm, 105 Stanley Hall

Can car lovers also be planet lovers? How will our favorite vehicle evolve as the need to manage global warming intensifies? Energy and Resources Group Professor Dan Kammen

Is Anybody Out There?

1-2 pm, 3 LeConte Hall

Hear about Berkeley's SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program at the world's largest telescope, the Allen array. Volunteers have a small but captivating chance that their computer will detect the first signal from a civilization beyond Earth.

Last year, QUEST visited the largest laser beam in world: The National Ignition Facility in Livermore. The goal is to create fusion energy, a potentially clean & sustainable source of energy. After $3.5 billion and a decade of work, that facility is now ready to fire up. Experiments are expected to begin in April as the laser continues to "warm up". The fusion experiment will most likely not happen until 2010, when the laser has achieved enough power.

In celebration of the operational launch of the NIF, engineers & scientists from the facility are presenting a series of talks and discussions geared for the general public.

Monday 4/20

Ed Moses, Principal Associate Director, NIF at Down to a Science in San Francisco

Tuesday 5/12

Ed Moses, Principal Associate Director, NIF at Café Scientifique Silicon Valley

Thursday 6/4

Richard Boyd, Science Director, NIF at Science Buzz Café in Sebastopol

Tuesday 6/9

Jeffery F. Latkowski, Chief Engineer for the Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy (LIFE) program at Ask a Scientist in San Francisco

A scale model of the LCROSS payload.

Update: LCROSS will now launch with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on Thursday, June 18thfrom the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. If the launch goes well, LCROSS would be on track to impact a target crater on the lunar South Pole in early October and then we may finally know if water exists on the moon, possibly buried deep as ice within the lunar soil. You can even watch a live feed of the LCROSS launch and hear from experts about the mission beginning at 1PM in the Exploration Center at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field.

With a price tag of 80 million dollars and a little more than two years in the making, the LCROSS spacecraft will begin its voyage atop an Atlas V rocket. Shortly thereafter it will shepherd the upper stage of the rocket in an orbit around the moon to position it in place for a colossal impact that will kick up a cloud of lunar dust forty miles high. The goal is to see if water exists on the moon and if it does, buried deep beneath the lunar soil, accumulating over millions of years of impacts with comets, it would accelerate our efforts to establish a permanent lunar base. Think of it as a rest stop to refuel (oxygen is an essential ingredient of rocket fuel) before arriving at the next closest planetary body, Mars, a journey which takes roughly 600 days, or 200 times longer than a trip currently to the Moon from Earth.

The avid QUEST viewer may recall that we covered the LCROSS mission in the first episode of QUEST back in 2007. A lot has happened since then, including most notably a change in the launch date which at the time of this post was scheduled for May 20th, 2009. Peter Schultz's vertical gun range has been outfitted with some dizzyingly high-tech cameras, which are capable of recording at tens of thousands of frames per second (one can record at one million frames per second) to capture the most minute progressions of the lunar impact simulations performed with the thirty-foot tall vertical gun. The suite of nine instruments aboard LCROSS, known as its "payload", has been mercilessly subjected to thermal, vibration and acoustic testing to make sure they can withstand the effects of launch and the harsh celestial environment. And then there's the spacecraft itself which we weren't able to show you in 2007 because the spacecraft still had to be transformed from a set of designs into a compact, robust structure the size of a small car by a team of sharp, young Northrop Grumman engineers. Moreover, amateur astronomers, armed with telescopes ten inches or more, are now being encouraged by NASA to share their images of LCROSS' historic lunar impact.

One of the most impressive attributes of the LCROSS mission is its rapid turnaround and cost containment which in turn highlight the innovative production model that was essential in making LCROSS a reality. Imagine the spirit of Silicon Valley, with its entrepreneurial zeal and efficiency, fusing with some of the sharpest minds in astrophysics and aeronautical engineering, and you have a glimpse of the unique nature of this small but nimble mission which just may forever change our understanding of the moon and its secrets.

Watch the LCROSS Rocket to the Moon" television story online.