Tules on Twitchell Island in the Delta. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

With thousands of acres of rich farmland, the Delta has a long agricultural legacy. But farming there can be a risky business. Dozens of farms have been flooded over the past half century as aging levees have collapsed.

That became a reality for farmer Rudy Mussi on the morning of June 3, 2004. It was clear, sunny day. "You never expect a flood in the summer months," says Mussi.

Mussi was growing corn and asparagus on lower Jones Tract, an island in the Delta, 10 miles west of Stockton. That morning, he got a phone call. Water was flooding onto his farmland.

"Your heart stops for a second or two and then realism sets in. And you just start moving your equipment and get it to high ground," says Mussi.

How did a flood happen a on a sunny day? It's because of a basic rule of physics. Mussi farmed on an island below sea level, like a lot of the islands in the Delta. The Delta used to be a huge swath of wetlands, where two major rivers met San Francisco Bay. Today, earthen levees hold that water back – most of the time.

"Once a break occurs, you know, there's no way you're gonna stop that, not with 10 feet of water on the other side," Mussi says. Draining the island and repairing the levees around Jones Tract cost about $90 million.

The levee break on Jones Tract in 2004. (Photo: CA Department of Water Resources)

It wasn't an isolated incident. Over the last century, more than 150 levees have failed in the Delta.

Delta Infrastructure at Risk

"This is how we get ourselves in kind of an arms race between the water and the land," says Jeff Mount, professor with the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis.

Levee-building began in the 1850s, when settlers came to the Delta for the rich soil. More than a thousand miles of levees were built. "This network of levees through time had to get bigger and bigger for a very basic reason: the land has been steadily lowering," says Mount.

As farmers exposed the rich peat soil, it started decomposing. The land level dropped; "In some places they talked about four inches per year," says Mount. Today, it's less than an inch per year thanks to better farming practices.

Add up all those inches over the past century and some islands are now 30 feet below sea level. That puts a lot of stress on the levees. There are also other concerns: rising sea levels and extreme floods. "And then the big 800-pound gorilla in the room – we're due for a very large earthquake on the San Andreas system."

Add up all these risks and Mount says there's a two-thirds chance of a catastrophic levee failure in the next 50 years. That, of course, affects farmers and communities in the Delta, but it could also impact California's water supply.

"The raindrops that fall in Mount Shasta are consumed by people in San Diego. Water moves a great distance and this is one of the critical hubs in that system," says Mount.

Fixing the Delta's levees is estimated to cost billions. But on some islands, scientists are experimenting with a new fix.

Farming Carbon

Peat soil samples on Twitchell Island. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

On a windy day on Twitchell Island in the Delta, ecologist Lisa Windham-Myers of the US Geological Survey pushes her way through a wetland filled with a tall, reed-like plant known as tule.

"The plant grows… some of these are 16 feet tall. They're just huge," she says. That growth is changing the ground we're standing on. Windham-Myers pulls out a sample of the dark peat soil.

The wetland produces soil at a rapid rate – four inches a year on average. That's huge, says USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi, in a place where the land is sinking. "These islands are like bowls and the way we see projects like this is you want to fill up the middle of that bowl and help level out the whole island."

Planting wetlands like this one could raise the land level and water table on the inside of levees, relieving some of the pressure. But why would farmers want to replace cash crops with tule? Windham-Myers points to the soil.

"This is basically almost 100 percent carbon. These take up far more than a typical forest environment," she says. California is setting up a market for carbon, as part of the state's effort to cut global warming emissions. Early next year, companies that need to reduce their emissions could pay farmers to store carbon in wetlands like this.

USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi talks with Delta farmer Al Medvitch. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

Today, two farmers are here checking out the project: Steve Mello, a Delta farmer on Tyler Island and Al Medvitch, a farmer in the Montezuma Hills.

"The potential has been demonstrated well. You guys are standing in the middle of it. But in order to move from here to market, we need to develop a lot more techniques so people can come and verify that the carbon is stored," says Brian Bergamaschi, describing how wetland farming might work.

Both farmers seem open to the idea. But Mello says ultimately, it depends on the bottom line. "It would absolutely need to cash flow. While it could dovetail with levee stability, it would still need to generate enough to amortize your property value."

Still, Mello says assuming carbon prices are high enough, growing patches of wetlands could be a feasible way to improve the levees and to stay farming.

A map of the Delta created by the US Geological Survey in the 1910s.

As detective stories go, this sunny, spring day in the Delta isn't a typical backdrop. In the distance, tractors move slowly through dry fields of row crops.

"Once he got lost, they were wandering all over," says Alison Whipple of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a non-profit research group based in Richmond. Her colleague, Robin Grossinger, agrees. "They were all over this place." The two are trying to piece together the path of William Wright, a man who got hopelessly lost somewhere nearby.

I should probably mention: it happened 160 years ago. Whipple and Grossinger are historical ecologists. They use sources like old photos, hand-drawn maps and early land surveys to sleuth out what this landscape looked like before it was dramatically remade by Californians.

The Delta's landscape has been dramatically remade over the last 200 years. Today, it's a crucial part of the state's water system, supplying 25 million people and irrigating millions of acres of farm land. But with this re-engineering, the Delta's ecosystem has collapsed, harming the fishing industry and putting water supplies at risk. Little is known about what it once looked like.

Lost in a Delta Marsh

Standing on a levee about 20 miles south of Sacramento, Whipple and Grossinger are discussing what they found a tattered, yellowing notebook uncovered in a state archive. It contains stories from William Wright, a duck hunter who spent a long, cold night lost in the Delta in 1850.

"On all sides stretched a vast wilderness of tules from ten to fifteen feet in height. The driving storm of sleet was bad, but the pitchy darkness was infinitely worse… Our situation was so miserable that no words can do justice to it."

It's not just the dramatic story they're interested in. It's passages this like one:

"The lakes proved to be from one hundred to three hundred yards in width, as near as we could judge. The water was very cold and often waist‐deep."

When Whipple and Grossinger read his account, they knew they’d found a Holy Grail source document. Its detail reveal a landscape that doesn't exist here today and hasn’t existed for some time.

"The Delta is probably one of the most intensively transformed parts of California and it was also changed really early on because of such fertile land," says Grossinger.

As California's Gold Rush boomed, farmers came to the Delta for its rich soil. Land went for a dollar an acre and settlers turned the wetlands into dry, agricultural land. 97% of the historic marshes were lost.

“We have here maybe one of the most important parts of the state's ecosystem and we don’t actually know how it used to work," Says Grossinger.

Alison Whipple and Robin Grossinger examine historic maps in the Delta.

He and Whipple have layered together thousands of historical sources that reveal an ecosystem of incredible complexity. “We would be in trees right here with a couple winding channels that were dry in the summer but had flowing water in the wintertime," explains Whipple.

Yearly floods from the Sacramento River inundated Delta marshes creating habitat for birds and young salmon. Closer to San Francisco Bay, hundreds of miles of small tidal channels branched out like capillaries in the wetlands. Today, most of those channels have been filled in.

Returning the Delta to this pristine state just isn’t possible, says Whipple, and that’s not the goal of the project. But knowing how the ecosystem once worked could improve the habitat restoration efforts that are happening.

Restoring Habitat

Liberty Island is one place in the Delta that looks as it might have 200 years ago. Not long ago, it was a low-lying expanse of farmland, protected by tall levees.

“The levees broke and it wasn’t financially worth reclaiming,” Says Carl Wilcox of with California’s Department of Fish and Game. The landowners gave up when the island flooded 15 years ago. After that, nature took over. Tules and cattails started sprouting and wildlife followed.

Returning vegetation at Liberty Island in the Delta.

Now, “some of the endangered native fishes, Delta smelt, longfin smelt are using this area,” says Wilcox. They're finding endangered Chinook salmon as well. "These are more productive areas for them, they’re more protected, they’re less prone to predators."

California Considers Ambitious Restoration Plans

California is using the Liberty Island project as a model for a proposal to restore 65,000 acres of Delta habitat. It's part of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan – a major overhaul of the Delta’s water infrastructure.

Leo Winternitz of the Nature Conservancy says bringing back habitat for declining wildlife could make the state’s water supply more reliable. Restrictions under the Endangered Species Act have limited how much water can be pumped from the Delta in recent years.

There is one big problem with restoration: most of the islands in the Delta are below sea level.

"Just south of here, some of the islands, they're in the 17 to 25 below sea level range. So if their levees broke, what you’d have is a large open body of water. You can’t create tidal marshes in those areas," says Winternitz.

That leaves only a few places where restoration is feasible. Winternitz says in those areas it’s crucial the state look to the past to create the same interconnected habitat that once was.

Governor Jerry Brown's administration is set to unveil the sweeping plan to restore the Delta later this year.

A canal in the Delta, heading to the Central Valley Project.

If you're not familiar with where the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is or why it's so important to the state, you're not alone. Polls show most Californians have never heard of it.

This relatively small part of California plays a crucial role in the state's water supply. And, as might be expected, it's become ground zero for a decades-long water war involving cities, farmers and fish. This year, the state is taking on an ambitious planning effort to break that deadlock.

Re-plumbing California

The reason the Delta has this starring role is thanks to a basic geography problem. Almost all of the state's water is found in the top third of the state. Most of the population lives in the bottom two-thirds of the state.

This issue was painfully obvious to state planners a century ago. The Central Valley promised rich soil for farmers, but had little rainfall. They knew for California to grow, they had to move water to drier parts of the state.

The Delta is where California's two largest rivers come together, carrying runoff from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. To water planners, it looked like the perfect place to tap into. California began building water infrastructure at a massive scale.

Water is exported out of the Delta primarily through two large pumping plants near Tracy, about 60 miles east of San Francisco. Each moves millions of gallons of water a minute. From there, the water rushes into concrete canals that reach Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and millions of acres of farmland.

This 700-mile system has made California the state it is today. But it's come with a cost…

An Ecosystem in Decline

On a boat in the western Delta, environmental scientist Julio Adib-Samii and team from California's Department of Fish and Game pull in a long fishing net.

A Delta smelt.

"Well, we have an adult Delta smelt," he says, holding a small, silver endangered fish that smells distinctly like a cucumber.

Fish and Game scientists have done these monthly fish surveys for decades. But starting in 2002, they noticed something strange. Where they once caught a lot of Delta smelt, now, they weren't catching any. The population had crashed, as well as populations of striped bass, threadfin shad, longfin smelt and Chinook salmon. In 2008, the commercial salmon fishery shut down completely for two years.

"Their decline is an indication of a changing environment and place they didn't evolve to be in," says Adib-Samii.

The Delta was once a massive tidal marsh, full of winding channels that spread out like capillaries. After the Gold Rush, settlers put up levees to create low-lying islands for farming. Ninety-seven percent of the historic wetlands were lost.

Multiple Stressors, One Big Question

"We've converted almost every scrap of habitat in the Delta to farmland and we need to return some of that to habitat," says Barry Nelson, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. The ecosystem has also been hit by pollution, invasive species – and by the pumping plants.

"The pumps in the south Delta are so powerful that they literally reverse the direction of flow. It's very easy for those fish to follow that water and get sucked right into the pumps," says Nelson. A few years ago, federal wildlife agencies issued decisions requiring the pumping to slow down during certain times of year to protect fish.

This brings us to the central debate in the Delta: how much water should be pumped out and how much should be left for fish?

"There's a limit to the amount of water you can pump from the Delta ecosystem and in the last decade it's become incredibly clear that we've exceeded that, and we've exceeded it by a lot," says Nelson.

Not everyone agrees. "There is, you know, always going to be shortages. But there's also a lot of years when we have absolutely plenty of water in the system to meet the reasonable needs that are out there," says Jason Peltier with Westlands Water District, an agricultural area in the San Joaquin Valley that depends on Delta water. He says limits on pumping have hurt the district's farmers.

"You can't get a loan to farm unless you can show the banker what water you have. And they don't have a lot of confidence in going to their bankers," says Peltier.

The battle over the environmental rules went to the courts. "There was lawsuit after lawsuit," says John Laird, California's Secretary for Natural Resources. "It got to the point that it made much more sense to look at the entire Delta as a whole."

A New Attempt at Progress

Laird's agency is trying to reach a compromise with the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The 10,000-page plan calls for a new way to pump water out of the Delta, through what's commonly known as the peripheral canal. Huge tunnels would take water from further upstream, bypassing the Delta, which supporters say would make the water supply more reliable.

This isn't a new idea. In 1982, California voters defeated a similar plan. "The real debate is not the tunnel itself. It's how much water and when can it flow through the tunnel," says Laird.

The massive project could harm the Delta's endangered species, but Laird says they'll restore thousands of acres of wetlands to compensate. California voters would be on the hook for that cost, while the $12 billion tunnel would be paid for by water users.

It's a tough sell but, according to Laird, a necessary one since climate change will make the state's water supply more unpredictable. The agency will release a full draft of the plan in July.

It was on November 18, 1936, that the two sections of the main span were joined in the middle. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

Fred Brusati. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

When it opened in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was the longest suspension bridge ever built, constructed in one of the world’s most challenging settings. For the men who poured the concrete, and drove in each steel rivet, it was a life changing experience.

In many ways, Fred Brusati was typical of the kinds of men who worked building the Bridge. His parents had emigrated from Milano, Italy to Montana, where Fred’s father worked as a copper miner. After Fred was born in 1911, his parents moved to San Rafael.

Fred spent a year in high school, then went looking for work.

“One day I heard they were going to start the Golden Gate Bridge,” he told interviewer Harvey Schwartz in 1987, as part of an oral history project conducted by Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University.

“And I says well, I’ll try it. I never been up 746 feet but I’ll try it anyhow.”

Tough work, in tough times

Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

It was the middle of the Great Depression. Mary Currie, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate Bridge District, says getting a job on the Golden Gate Bridge was like winning the lottery.

“The men would line up and wait for a chance to get a job, literally hoping someone would hurt themselves so they’d be the one to get the job.”

Slim Lambert, a cowboy from Washington state, was hired as a roustabout. He helped build a temporary railway to carry equipment across the bridge span, making about 10 dollars a day.

“Things were a lot different in those days,” he told Schwartz.

“You hardly ever slowed down to a trot. If you went to the restroom and stayed more than 30 seconds, the boss would come see what was wrong with you. Lots of men were fired right on the spot, if the boss thought they were malingering a little bit. There was men waiting right there for a job.”

Construction challenges

The Marin tower of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction in 1933. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge marked the first time anyone had built a suspension bridge support with a tower in the open ocean. The conditions, above and below the water, were harsh.

Divers faced powerful currents as they helped anchor the massive concrete bridge support onto the ocean floor.

And up on the towers, workers stuffed newspapers in their jackets to keep warm.

Martin Adams, born in Arkansas in 1912, called the bridge “the coldest place I’ve ever worked.”

“You put all the clothes on you had and worked, worked hard, or you’d freeze.”

Cold was the least of their concerns. Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie says workers on the bridge didn’t just fear death. They expected it.

Workers on the main cable of the Golden Gate Bridge. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

“At the time, the industry standard was that for every million dollars spent, there would be a loss of life,” says Currie.

The bridge was estimated to cost $35 million. But structural engineer Joseph Strauss, who headed the project, was determined to keep workers safe. Hard hats were required. And Strauss insisted on one feature that Mary Currie says was at the time completely novel: A safety net.

“It was a $130,000 expense at the time, which was considered an exorbitant expense. But he really fought for it and was able to get the board of directors to permit it.”

Over four years of construction, the safety net saved the lives of 19 men. They called themselves the “Halfway to Hell Club.”

For nearly four years, the Golden Gate Bridge project seemed charmed with an almost perfect safety record. And then, one day, everything changed.

For the roadway construction, Strauss insisted on the addition of the $130,000 safety net. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

The collapse

The task that day, on February 17th, 1937 was to remove a wooden scaffold that had been built underneath the bridge platform. To reach it, workers had hung a temporary catwalk. Each time they stripped off a section of wood, workers would move the catwalk another few feet.

“And as they started to move it,” recalled Martin Adams, who was standing nearby, “that’s when it went down. 9:20 in the morning, it went down.”

The catwalk hadn’t been attached properly. It broke off and plunged into the ocean, dragging the safety net with it.

Dummatzen's family after their son's death. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU

Fred Brusati was working nearby when he heard someone shout that the catwalk had fallen. He rushed over to the side and saw a man clinging to a piece of steel. Brusati and a few others threw the man a rope, and hauled him up to safety.

“The man had a pipe in his mouth,” recalled Brusati. “He didn’t drop the pipe or nothing. He just started to walk toward San Francisco and I never did see him back there again.”

The real tragedy was below. Twelve men had fallen 220 feet into the water. One of them was Slim Lambert.

“People ask me what went through your mind? The only thing that went through my mind was survival. I knew that to have a prayer, I had to hit the water feet first.”

But when Lambert hit the water, his legs tangled in the safety net.

“That’s the only time I panicked during that whole thing,” said Lambert. “I was caught in the net and the net was headed for the bottom.”

Fred Dummatzen. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

Lambert plunged so deep that when he surfaced he was bleeding from his ears. Bridge debris was everywhere.

“I got a couple of planks together for my self first, and then I saw Fred thrashing about. So I got him.”

Fred Dummatzen was 24 years old. Lambert pulled him up onto the planks and waited.

“I heard this power boat coming in. Put put put.”

It was a crab fisherman, coming in from sea. Lambert says there was so much junk in the water, he worried the driver would pass right by.

“He took another look around and his eye hit me. What I relief. I figured, by gosh, we’re gonna make it.”

Dummatzen died on the crab boat. But Lambert and another man, 51-year old carpenter named Oscar Osberg, survived the fall. Today, there’s a plaque on the south western side of the bridge at the entrance to the west sidewalk dedicated to the ten men who died that day.

Mary Currie says the workers she’s talked to don’t really remember the cold, or the danger. They felt lucky to be there.

At a time when the rest of the country was struggling to get by, six Bay Area counties agreed to spend what seemed like a fortune on a suspension bridge longer than any the world had ever seen.

“It was the people who had to rise up and see this as a symbol of hope, imagination, stick-to-itiveness,” says Currie. “They saw this bridge as something that would change their lives.”

And that, she says, was a pretty gutsy thing to have done.

The Golden Gate Bridge turns 75 on May 27th.

Dan Sudran explains a gray whale's baleen plates to kids at Mission Science Center in San Francisco.

Dan Sudran grew up a good Jewish kid in Kansas City, Missouri. He went to college then law school. But he says there was always a sinking feeling that he wasn’t really cut out for the world he’d been born into. “I couldn’t really figure out what I was or what I wanted to be. I didn’t go to college because I wanted to. I went because that’s what you were supposed to do,” says Sudran.

Discovering Science

It wasn’t until his late 30s that Sudran finally had his revelation. It happened in a garage. He had started taking apart electronics, collecting bones from the beach. In school, science had held no interest for him. But in the real, hands-on world he says, it turned out to be the thing he’d been missing all along, “My life is immeasurably better since I got into science.”

There are few rules at the science centers, but one is that kids must sit down while handling animals.

And this gave Sudran an idea. What if he could give kids the same experience he’d waited 30 years to discover? A local college donated some space and soon a small, non-profit organization called Community Science Workshop Network was born. Sudran says the idea was to be the opposite of a big science museum, "It's your own dream garage, in a sense, just a bunch of stuff you can play around with without being nervous that the curator's gonna have a nervous breakdown. There are no curators.”

Community Science Workshops Take Off

Today, there are five community science workshops around the state, funded by private grants. One is in Greenfield, about 30 miles south of Salinas. It’s a farm town – lettuce, broccoli, apricots – mostly Spanish speaking. It’s one room, in the back of the former Greenfield City Hall. Every inch is crammed with stuff: Bones, microscopes, power tools, a turtle, a snake. And above all, there’s noise. A lot of noise. As kid’s bang away, Jose, a middle schooler, builds a submersible robot. “It’s the submarine type of thing. It runs on little engine things that would spin,” says Jose.

As someone strums a guitar, an 11-year old named Eduardo scoops tadpoles out of a bucket of pond water to look at them under a microscope. “We have to take it out of the water, he explains.” Meanwhile, spread out on the floor, some older kids trim the outlines of a future hot air balloon and another kid plays the ever appealing, though not terribly scientific, Casio keyboard.

The Greenfield Community Science Workshop, near Salinas, runs on a budget of $50,000 a year, with one full-time employee.

Running this place costs about $50,000, paid for by a grant from Bechtel and the Packard Foundation. But Sudran says grants can be sort of a mixed blessing. For instance, not long ago he came across a stranded gray whale on a beach near his house in Pescadero. “It was lifted up by the tide high on the beach. And it was completely recoverable. And there was no loss. I couldn't believe it, says Sudran.

Sudran has a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service to collect specimens and he thought the skeleton would make a good teaching tool. Although it would have been nice to get some funding, Sudran says there was no time for something like that. “You say these bones are gonna be lost. I can't let that happen. I'm not gonna waste time writing a grant. That takes months.”

Bones from a gray whale that beached in Pescadero, Ca.

Sudran got some volunteers to pull up the bones, then brought them to his backyard and spent months cleaning them off. Now he brings the entire skeleton to schools where kids can put it together. "There ain’t no budget. No time for a budget, we just gotta go do it.”

The dream, Sudran says, is to take this model all over the state, “So many places, I could reel them off. Oxnard, Bakersfield, el Central. We don’t want to make our place any bigger. We want more of them.” The small southern California desert town of Coachella is in the works, so is Vallejo, and Sudran hopes soon to open a center in Daly City.

Now, scientists in San Francisco say a more effective treatment might be on the way.

Three months after being injected with three genes, the hearts of mice that had suffered a heart attack pumped as much blood as a normal heart. Credit: Gabriela Quirós, QUEST

The researchers from the Gladstone Institutes, affiliated with the University of California-San Francisco, reported today that using a new genetic technique, they have succeeded for the first time in repairing, from within, the hearts of mice weakened by heart attacks.

“There are a variety of approaches we use right now to help people who are left with damaged hearts,” said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, senior author of the paper and director of cardiovascular research at the Gladstone Institutes, “but none of them actually get to the root of the problem, which is replacing that damaged heart muscle. And that’s where our focus has been.”

The scientists injected three genes into the hearts of research mice that had been given mild heart attacks. Within three months, the genes transformed non-beating cells in the heart into cells that looked and acted just like beating heart muscle cells. These new beating cells restored the heart’s ability to pump blood to the rest of the body.

Human hearts have billions of non-beating cells, which support the beating cells by forming the heart’s structure, Srivastava said. Mice have millions of these support cells too. When a heart attack happens, the support cells rush to the site of the damage and form scar tissue, which preserves the heart’s structure, but doesn’t help it pump blood.

“We’ve found a way to take these support cells that should normally never become muscle, and convert them into new muscle cells that actually integrate with the rest of the heart, contribute to the force that it generates, and allow us to regenerate the heart from within the organ itself,” said Srivastava.

Non-beating heart cells became beating heart cells like these. Credit: Li Qian, Gladstone Institutes

The new research appears in the April 18 online edition of the journal Nature and was led by Li Qian, also from the Gladstone Institutes.

Heart attacks and other heart disease kill 600,000 people each year. Many more survive, yet lead diminished lives. Some 5.7 million people live with damaged hearts that pump less blood, making it difficult for them to climb a flight of stairs or walk across a parking lot.

During a heart attack, clots block one or several coronary arteries and cut off blood flow. By rushing patients to the operating table and unclogging their arteries with catheters and stents, doctors are able to save all but 5 percent of victims who make it to the hospital.

“While we’ve been doing better at saving lives, each time we save a life the patient still loses some of their muscle,” Srivastava said. “So the number of people who are left with damaged hearts is actually growing, even though the number of people who die from heart attacks is getting smaller.”

Treatments for humans could be six to seven years away, he added. The next step will be to test the treatment on pigs. Scientists still need to figure out if cell reprogramming is safe for humans; how to deliver the genes into the heart, and how to produce enough new beating heart cells to repair a human – rather than a mouse – heart.

Nevertheless, the research is drawing the attention of other heart researchers.

“It’s a major discovery and certainly suggests a new approach to treat injury that previously had been thought to be irreversible,” said Dr. Eduardo Marbán, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles.

Marbán said it’s been “a long-held dogma” that once scar tissue has formed in the heart, it can’t change into heart muscle. This finding in mice, and recent research by Marbán’s team on a small group of human patients, challenge that belief, he said.

Although the cell reprogramming research doesn’t involve stem cells, the Gladstone scientists used techniques that were discovered through stem cell research.

The scientists said their work was inspired by the discovery in 2007 that a few genes can transform an adult skin cell into a cell with the properties of a human embryonic stem cell. Researchers have been intensely interested in embryonic stem cells as a possible source of treatments for diseases like Parkinson’s because they can be coaxed to turn into virtually any type of cell in the body. But because embryonic stem cells are plucked from embryos left over from fertility treatments, and require the destruction of these embryos, their study has been controversial.

An alternative to embryonic stem cells came with the skin cell breakthrough five years ago. Then, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, of the Gladstone Institutes and Kyoto University in Japan, inserted four genes that are present in embryonic stem cells into adult skin cells. The four genes reprogrammed the skin cells to become embryonic-like stem cells.

That led scientists to look for a way to transform one type of adult cell into another type of adult cell without the need to create stem cells at all.

“Yamanaka opened up the idea that adult cells weren’t permanently fixed,” said Srivastava. “That led us to ask whether or not we could convert one of these heart support cells into a heart muscle cell.”

Bypassing the creation of stem cells has several advantages. Though stem cells are versatile, when they’re introduced into the body they can behave as cancer cells and form tumors.

“It’s a dramatic and heady possibility that vindicates for the first time the idea that we might be able to harness truly regenerative medicine,” Marbán said.

Artist's concept of mini planetary system. Credit: NASA

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has been given more time to look for life-supporting planets outside our own solar system. The project, which has found more than 2,000 planets since it was launched in 2009, recently edged out several popular space programs to secure an extension in funding. Geoff Marcy is one of the world’s most prolific planet hunters. He’s an astronomer at UC Berkeley and works on the Kepler project. KQED’s Andrea Kissack asked him for an update and his thoughts on the odds that the project may help find life somewhere else in the universe.

I met with Marcy in his office in the astronomy building on the south side of UC Berkeley. If anyone is going to find alien life, it will be Marcy. He has spotted more extra solar planets than most astronomers and he now has taken on yet another project as the new chair of the SETI program at UC Berkeley. Marcy sees his work with Kepler, and the ground based radio receivers of SETI, dovetailing nicely. As the Kepler project continues to find earth like planets, the next step, he says, will be to see if there are intelligent civilizations out there. The way to do that, Marcy says, is to use Kepler to narrow down the choices and then use SETI to point radio receivers at those specific planets, rather than just listening to broad swaths of the sky.

More on the search for exoplanets

Californians didn't just invent iPads and commercial microprocessors; they brought to life laws promoting clean water, clean air, laws that eventually went on to become national policy, credited with cleaning up vast swaths of the country.

An average-sized sofa can contain two pounds of flame-retardant chemicals.

But sometimes, the picture is less clear. That’s the case with TB 117, a pioneering California law that many scientists now say was a big mistake.

One of those scientists is chemist Arlene Blum, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and founder of the Green Science Policy Institute, a non-profit group in Berkeley.

I met Blum at a furniture store in Berkeley. Standing in front of a three-seated sofa, she lifted a cushion and read aloud from the small white tag sewn into the fabric.

“This article meets the flammability requirements of the California Bureau of Home Furnishings Technical Bulletin 117."

A California law's mixed legacy

TB 117, as it’s called, is a state law passed in 1975. It says that the foam inside upholstered furniture must be able to resist a flame, for example, from a cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without catching fire.

Manufacturers meet this law by treating the foam with several different kinds of chemicals, up to two pounds of flame retardant chemicals in an average-size sofa, according to Don Lucas, a flammability expert at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Even though the law is specific to California, it affects furniture sold across the country. Major furniture dealers sell California-compliant products in all 50 states, and Canada.

The problem, say Blum and others, is that the chemicals don’t just stay inside the sofas. They turn up in household dust and can be detected in human blood and breast milk. Toddlers often have higher levels of the chemicals in their bodies than adults do.

"One study found that the levels of PBDEs found in bodies of toddlers are similar to what you'd find in people who work in a recycling foam factory. That's two to ten times what you'd find in adults," says Ami Zota, a researcher with UCSF's Program on reproductive Health and the Environment.

"There's a growing body of evidence demonstrating effects in animals, and not just lab animals, but birds and marine mammals," says Linda Birnbaum, who directs the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.

Birnbaum says while effects in humans are less certain, there is good evidence to suggest that some flame retardants, particularly a class called PBDEs, which have been largely phased out sine 2004, can affect the reproductive system, nervous system, as well as learning, memory, and behavior in children.

Some flame retardant chemicals cause cancer in lab animals. Observational studies of humans suggest connections between the chemicals and infertility, low-birth weight and abnormal brain development in kids.

One chemical, known as tris, was used widely in children's pajamas until the 1970s, when scientists, including Arlene Blum, campaigned successfully for a phase out. Tris is considered carcinogenic under California's Proposition 65 but is still used widely in furniture and also turns up in baby products, such as nursing pillows and changing pads.

Industry fights change

State lawmakers have tried — and failed — five times to change California's law in ways that would reduce or eliminate the use of flame retardant chemicals in furniture.

Four of those attempts came from one lawmaker, State Senator Mark Leno, who represents Marin and San Francisco.

Leno’s last bill, SB 147 had the support of furniture makers, firefighter groups, and doctors. All of them wanted the chemicals out of furniture. But the bill was killed in committee by a vote of seven to one.

Each of the lawmakers who voted on the bill had received campaign contributions from the chemical industry.

Leno says it's not hard to see those lobbying dollars in action.

Whenever one of his flame retardants bills would come up for a vote, he says, he’d pay a visit to each of the committee members, just before the vote, to make his case. But the lobbyists outnumbered him.

“Repeatedly, as I would leave a colleague’s office, an hour or two before the committee hearing racing to get to another office, in the waiting room of the office I’m leaving is a lobbyist for the chemical industry. So they’d have the last word,” says Leno.

In February, a state lawmaker, Assemblywoman Holly Mitchell, from Los Angeles, introduced — and then quickly withdrew — her own bill on the topic. A spokesperson said Mitchell decided she was too busy, but would pick it up next year. Since 2011, Mitchell has taken $3,500 from the chemical industry.

It’s hard to find supporters of TB 117 who aren’t in some way connected to the same companies that produce flame retardant chemicals.

Joe Lang is a former tobacco lobbyist with the firm Lang, Hansen, O'Malley & Miller, in Sacramento, whose clients include the American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry group.

At a hearing last April, Lang argued that changes to the California law are unnecessary because many of the most harmful flame retardants, a group called PBDEs, have already been banned. Newer alternatives, he said, are safer than the old ones. He said that over-regulating this industry would squelch innovation.

“If we continue to ban chemicals that are developed before they're used, we won't have any chemicals to be used. We won't be able to create the jobs we want to create in California.”

Do flame retardants in furniture prevent fires?

Lang and others in the industry say that flame retardant chemicals, and the law that requires them, TB 117, serve a critical purpose: They prevent fires.

Donald Lucas, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist, and his colleague Vyto Babrauskas researched exactly this question: Do flame retardant chemicals prevent fires?

“Our conclusions were that we really don’t need the flame retardants in the foam in home furnishing," said Lucas. We don’t think the TB 117 standard is very good.”

The chemicals don’t work, he says, because fires don’t start inside sofas. They start on the surface of the sofa, on the fabric. California's flammability law, TB 117 law says nothing about the fabric, just the foam.

“Once the fabric catches on fire, the flame that the foam is exposed to is much larger than the flame in the test,” says Lucas.

At that point, there’s nothing chemicals can do. It’s too late.

“The foam is going to burn anyway.”

In fact, there are far fewer fires today than there were in the 1970s, when TB 117 was written. Fewer smokers, as well as laws requiring smoke detectors and sprinklers have made homes safer. These days, most fires start in the kitchen, not on a sofa.

That’s one reason even fire fighters have had a change of heart on the subject of flame retardants.

Tom O’Connor, a fire fighter in San Francisco, says fires these days are a toxic soup of chemicals, thanks, in part, to chemically-treated furniture.

O'Connor, and others, believe they're seeing an epidemic of cancers among firefighters. San Francisco's Fire Department is one of several around the country participating in a study of firefighters and cancer run by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

If flame-retardant chemicals in furniture are part of the problem, says O'Connor, "then obviously we want them out of the products of combustion, once we go into a burning building."

Given recent events in Sacramento, that change is unlikely to start happening, at least this year.

One California official could sidestep the legislature and change the law: Tonya Blood. She was appointed just last week as the new chief of the California Bureau of Home Furnishings. It’s the same agency that established TB 117 back in 1975. Blood’s office didn’t answer requests for an interview.

Two-hundred eVgo electric car fast-charging stations, like this one in Houston, will be installed in California over the next four years. EVs can add 50 miles or more in less than 30 minutes. (Photo courtesy of eVgo.)

Electric car drivers cheered last week when the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and NRG Energy announced plans to invest $100 million in the state’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure. NRG will invest in EV charging infrastructure in exchange for settling claims for overcharges during the 1999 California energy crisis. For the past several months, CPUC and NRG Energy worked behind closed door to establish the terms of the settlement. Opinions on the deal’s fairness are divided.

“The most benefit to rate payers would have been a direct cash settlement,” said Eileen Tutt, executive director of California Electric Transportation Coalition. But instead, NRG proposed an in-kind deal, and CPUC agreed. At first glance, the settlement gives NRG, a New Jersey-based energy industry behemoth, a near-monopoly on California’s electric car charging. The majority of the $100 million investment will go to installing at least 200 480-volt EV fast-charge stations—resembling traditional gas stations in appearance and refueling times. The company will own and charge fees for using these locations, which it calls “freedom stations.”

Something Today

Nancy Ryan, deputy executive director for policy at the California Public Utilities Commission.

“We did not have the total cash option,” said Nancy Ryan, deputy executive director for policy at CPUC. “The choice we had was to get the best deal today that was primarily in-kind with a cash component, versus continuing to litigate for years and years, and still maybe coming up with nothing.” The CPUC insisted on two key provisions: serving the state’s policy goals for electric transportation, and getting at least some cash for ratepayers. The final settlement includes $20 million in cash.

NRG is pleased with the outcome. “The settlement guarantees EV investment at a much higher rate and a much higher speed than would otherwise be done,” said David Knox, NRG’s director of communications.

Jay Friedland, legislative director for Plug In America, an electric car advocacy group, also likes the settlement. “At first, we questioned whether or not CPUC negotiated well.” After learning more, Friedland said the CPUC “got a pretty darn good deal, but the devil is in the details.”

Restrictions Apply

Those exact terms will not be known for another month or so, but there are clear signs that CPUC put teeth into the deal.

For the first five years after installing a station, NRG can’t require EV drivers to pay a monthly subscription fee, as it does with its eVgo Network in Texas. Instead, the public will have open access on a pay-as-you-go basis. Fees for fast charging are capped at $10 per session during off-peak hours, and $15 during peak hours.

NRG can put stations where it likes, but within constraints: 55 stations in the Bay Area, and 110 stations in and around Los Angeles. The rest will be divided between San Diego County and San Joaquin Valley.

Approximately $40 million must be spent on preparing workplaces, multi-family dwellings and other locations allowing people without garages to gain access to EV charging. These so-called “make readies” lay groundwork—such as conduits, power upgrades, and stubs—for equipment installation to occur later. Property owners, not NRG, will own the locations. NRG has the exclusive right for 18 months to sell equipment and related services to the property owners, after which those locations are open to competition.

CPUC acknowledges that it will receive some criticism for allowing NRG to earn a profit. However, the agency insists the settlement is consistent with CPUC policy. “If NRG puts charging stations where people use them, and drivers are willing to pay to use them, then we’re getting value for ratepayers,” said CPUC's Ryan. “We’re building a network to make it attractive and appealing to buy and drive electric vehicles.”

See other posts from this series.

East Brother Island boasts a treasure missed by most boaters passing by: its 1920’s-vintage foghorn.

For commuters who whisk past it aboard the high-speed ferry from Vallejo to San Francisco, East Brother Island is a quaint dollop of history, plunked near the Richmond shoreline. The 1873 lighthouse is a popular subject for snapshots on the fly.

But my destination on a clear day in March was the smaller structure that few people notice. That’s where lightkeeper Peter Berkhout is taking me to see a genuine rarity: one of perhaps two or three remaining vintage foghorns anywhere in the U.S. that’s still in working order.

“Normally for the first blast I advise our guests to cover their ears,” Berkhout tells me, as he pull-starts a small gasoline engine in the signal house. The pony engine in turn, starts up a diesel-powered air compressor that fills enormous cylindrical tanks against the wall. That’s where the air starts its journey up to the roof-mounted horns. “It is startlingly loud,” he warns, “and it's loud enough that you can actually feel the sound wave going through your torso.”

Technically this is a “diaphone,” so-named because it generates two separate tones that constitute the iconic “BEEE-ohhh” that most Americans still connect with foghorns. When the air pressure comes up and the sound is released, you jump out of your skin no matter how prepared you think you are, even though the second note presents as more of a grunt. The sound wave bounces off the Richmond bluffs and lingers. “I guess you can learn to sleep through anything but I'm glad I haven't had to learn to sleep through this,” Berkhout tells me.

And they don’t. He and his wife, Dina are the caretakers of the Victorian bed & breakfast on East Brother Island, so they live there full-time. But Berkhout only fires up the 1920s-vintage monster for occasional demonstrations. East Brother still has a foghorn that operates from October to April, but it’s three-second “booop” every 30 seconds is almost soothing by comparison.

For decades, though, virtually all major fog signals were diaphones. When the Bay was ringed with diaphones like East Brother’s, they had to be loud.

“Navigating the fog is like driving your car down the highway with your hood up,” says Greg Waugh. And he would know. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, he spent more than 50 years on the Bay, aboard tugs and then piloting merchant ships through the Golden Gate, which he and his fellow pilots calculated gets 1,500 hours of fog in a year’s time. That could help explain why the Golden Gate Bridge has three foghorns. Waugh got to know all of them like family. “Center span of the Golden Gate Bridge is two blasts every 40 seconds,” he recounts, though he’s been retired since 2007. “South tower is one blast every 20 seconds. Lime Pt. on the north tower is one blast every 30 seconds.”

Peter Berkhout prepares to start up the air compressor that powers the diaphone.

Waugh's not quite old enough to remember the first fog signals, like the method used at the original Point Bonita light, in the Marin Headlands.

“When it started gettin' foggy this guy'd get up there and he'd load up a cannon and fire the cannon–boom… and that was the fog signal.”

Present day foghorns are electronic and apart from being less jarring, are considerably low-maintenance. The “new” horn at East Brother is about the size of a fire hydrant, powered by a small solar panel and 12-volt battery. Members of the Coast Guard’s Aids to Navigation Team tell me the biggest maintenance headache with the new horns is people stealing the batteries, thinking they can use them in their boats (they can’t).

Waugh says the present-day foghorn at Point Bonita was dialed back to be audible for only one mile. Otherwise, he says, residents across the Bay in San Francisco would complain.

At Point Bonita Light, in the Marin Headlands, the first fog signal was a cannon, fired every 15-to-30 minutes. It didn’t last long, followed by attempts to use bells, sirens, and finally horns.

Tim Lynch chuckles at this. “I think the iconic sound that we associate with foghorns, while it might be nostalgic, was upsetting to a lot of residents.” Lynch is a historian at the Cal Maritime Academy in Vallejo. “There are newer and some might say better ways to skin the cat,” he tells me. “The amount of technology that mariners have available to them — the global positioning satellites, and all sorts of aids to navigation have largely rendered foghorns obsolete.”

But try telling that to Duncan MacLean, who skippers a commercial salmon boat out of Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay. “A lot of those old navigational things, when all else fails, are still there,” he tells me, while tinkering with some fishing tackle aboard his boat, the Barbara Faye. “And that can be critical.”

Like most modern fishermen, MacLean’s wheelhouse is crammed with a laptop computer and all kinds of electronic navigation aids. But not everybody has those, explains MacLean, who says he still uses his eyes and ears. For one thing, urban development near the harbor has created a kaleidoscope of lights competing with the visual aids that mariners use. Traffic lights onshore can mimic the critical red and green buoys that mark safe channels.

The present-day solar-powered East Brother foghorn is less impressive in both sight and sound than its compressed-air predecessor…but also less jolting.

“You've got all of these lights going off everywhere and sometimes it can be a little bit tricky.” He argues that it's made the audible signals even more important. “They're critical pieces of information,” he says. “There will never not be a need.”

Today, young mariners don't have to risk lives and property to learn their way around. At Cal Maritime, a computer-driven walk-in simulator puts students in the virtual wheelhouse of “vessels” ranging from a 60-foot jet boat to a supertanker.

And yet, with all this technology Academy instructors still train students to use a sextant, a centuries-old instrument for navigation, because you never know when modern technology will fail you.

The Walter Fanning fog signal on East Brother Island. Its roomful of apparatus dates back to the 1920s.

And speaking of that, remember that cannon that served as the first Pt. Bonita fog signal? Somebody had to fire it, of course–every 30 minutes, 24-7, as long as the fog was in. They hired a certain "Sergeant Mahoney" for the job.

“Well the fog was always in, says Drew Van Winkle, a volunteer at the Point Bonita light (remember those 1,500 hours). “And poor old Sergeant Mahoney couldn’t get a rest. Mahoney put in a request for relief but there was no budget for that. Request denied. Van Winkle says, “The day must've been relatively nice and they gave him a little leave.”

And leave he did. “They never saw Sergeant Mahoney again,” says Van Winkle. “That was the end of that.”

But it was just the beginning of a whole new soundscape for the Bay. One that’s still changing.

The estimated annual hours of fog in the Golden Gate has been corrected from an earlier post.