About
As a radio reporter for Quest, Amy's grappled with archaic maps, brain fitness exercises, albino redwood trees, and jet-lagged lab rats, as well as modeled a wide variety of hard hats and construction vests. Long before all that, she learned to cut actual tape interning for a Latin American news show at WBAI in New York, then took her first radio job as a producer for Pulse of the Planet. Since then, Amy has been an editor at Salon.com, the editor of Terrain Magazine, and has produced stories for NPR, Living on Earth, Philosophy Talk, and Pop Up Magazine. She's also a founding editor of Meatpaper Magazine.
All Contributions by Amy:
Postpone that Home Depot trip, Household appliances are getting a makeover
This is old news to many of the folks at California Energy Commission , who have pushed for such changes for decades. But the real news is that these aren't just recommendations anymore. They're policy, or soon will be.
Post on Jul 22, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Depression Advancements
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.
Post on Jul 17, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Stem Cells and Horses
Performance horses at his level can be worth $60,000 and more. Training, too, is an enormous investment. "Gretchen," as we call her in the piece, has spent years training Disney in English dressage.
Post on Jun 19, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Cash for Clunkers
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.
Post on Jun 05, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Sea Lion Rescue
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 [...]
Post on May 22, 2009
Breaking News on the Drakes Bay Oyster Controversy
Today, the National Research Council issued its long-awaited report on the Drakes Bay Oyster Company… is their operation harming the environment or not?
Post on May 05, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Swine Flu and You
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.
Post on May 01, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Let's Weatherize!
Since people seem to nod off a bit when I say I'm working on a story about energy efficiency, I've had to re-tool my pitch. "It's a story about how installing solar panels or a wind turbine is the last thing you should do to green your house," I say, perhaps a little over-dramatically.
Post on Apr 24, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Goodbye to the Bevatron
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.
Post on Apr 17, 2009
Medicine from the Ocean Floor
Ever thought about using medicine from the ocean floor? Well, scientists are using robots to sort through millions of marine chemicals in hopes of finding a cure to all kinds of diseases from cholera to breast cancer. Amy Standen has more.
Audio Report on Mar 23, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Medicine from the Ocean Floor
Scientists gather samples on the ocean floor. Credit: Roger Linington.There's nothing new about looking to nature to cure disease – we've been doing it for thousands of years, with good results. (Two recent examples: The active ingredient in aspirin was first identified in the bark of the willow tree. And we have the Pacific yew [...]
Post on Mar 20, 2009
Reporter's Notes: Changes at the Pump
You'd have to be a real gas pump aficionado to notice the new gear that gas stations across California are required to have installed by April 1. California's gas nozzles have been outfitted for some time with vapor-capture devices, designed to cut back on the amount of volatile organic compounds – those smelly fumes – that escape when you pump gas.
Post on Mar 13, 2009
Food Safety
Recent scares over melamine-laced cookies from China and salmonella-tainted Mexican jalapenos have raised stark questions: Who's monitoring the safety of imported food? And does the system work?
Audio Report on Nov 10, 2008
Reporter's Notes: Food Safety
We put this story on the calendar back in September, before melamine-tainted milk started making headlines in China. We'd been planning to focus on criticism of FDA's handling of imported fresh produce, and had to recast the piece when it became clear that the concerns around food safety were much broader.
Post on Nov 07, 2008
Reporter's Notes: Closing the Science Gap
Stacy Morrow, who teaches fourth grade at Fair Oaks Elementary School in Redwood City did not need to tell me about her students' enthusiasm for science. It was obvious. Working in teams with a FOSS kit on magnetism and electricity, they could barely contain their excitement at powering a light bulb with a simple electrical circuit.
Post on Oct 24, 2008
Reporter's Notes: Sea Lion Rescue
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.
Post on Sep 26, 2008
Reporter's Notes: Beyond Alzheimer's
This is the second of two stories born out of an afternoon at UCSF's Memory and Aging Center, where a team of scientists, led by Dr. Bruce Miller, is trying to tease out the differences between as many as 200 dementias that affect aging brains.
Post on Sep 12, 2008
Beyond Alzheimer's – Blog Video
When we think about what happens to our brains as we age, one disease tends to dominate our thoughts and fears: Alzheimer’s. In fact, Alzheimer’s only accounts for about half of degenerative brain diseases. Many others are far tougher to diagnose and treat. Amy Standen reports on one under-diagnosed brain disease, frontotemporal dementia, and its often baffling effects.
Video on Sep 12, 2008
Reporter's Notes: Air Conditioning Reinvented
A confession: When I first got the assignment to do a story about air conditioner efficiency, I didn't exactly leap from my seat in excitement. (Which is why extra kudos go to those who've made it as far as this web page!) But, really, I should have known better.
Post on Sep 05, 2008
Reporter's Notes: Decoding the Emotional Brain
Being a neurologist in the era of fMRI scanners must feel like being a kid in a candy shop. What's going in there while we're, say, shopping? How about reading? Watching campaign ads? Now that we have a way to take real-time images of the brain at work, the scientific possibilities are endless. On the [...]
Post on Aug 15, 2008
