Orion rising in Death Valley - Credit: Ben Burress

What brings this on? Well, the skies of Death Valley, actually, which I just returned from (Death Valley, not its skies!) over the holiday break. My daughter and I went down there, mainly to crawl around the sand dunes and canyons, visit sites of the Gold Rush pioneers who gave the valley its [English] name, and get another good, up-close look at the raw Earth….

…but, as always, at night, when the campfire sparks warmly, I end up looking to the stars, which are extraordinarily bright in the dark desert skies. And I just get to thinking…again….

My touchstone on the vastness of the Universe is the knowledge that all the stars we can see in the night sky, with our unaided eyes, are quite starkly the closest things to us in the Universe—and even from those objects, light, traveling at 186,300 miles per second, takes years, decades, even centuries just to reach us. These "local neighborhood" stars are all within our Milky Way galaxy, and all among the very closest of them.

So, the stars of the night sky are a sort of "front drop"—like a big sheet of paper with stars printed on it, held before us–and the stars and galaxies of the rest of the Universe, beyond this "front drop," are too far away for our eyes to perceive their light (without the help of a telescope).

Trying to put the scale into perspective (trying very hard!), if this "sheet of paper" with stars printed on it, held in front of our collective Earthly "face", was, say, 1000 light years away (6000 trillion miles—which is actually about the greatest distance that our unassisted eyes can detect individual stars, and only stars of the most luminous type at that), this would be analogous in scale to an individual person holding a star-printed sheet of paper about two tenths of an inch before their eyes (yeah, I know, too close to focus on the printed stars…), with the surrounding Bay Area representing "the rest of the Universe."

What? I didn’t hear you…. What I said was, if the entire Bay Area represents the Universe, then the stars we can see with our eyes are found within two tenths of an inch of our eyeballs…. Even the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object unaided human eyes can perceive (and which I did spot as a very faint smudge on the dark Death Valley sky!), at a distance of about 2.5 million light years, would be less than 4 feet away from you in your Bay-Area-scaled Universe.

It’s here that my mind boggles, and it becomes doubtful to me that our brains have the capacity to really wrap around the Universal scale. It’s hard enough imagining the distances to the "nearby" local stars, a space in which light spends centuries crossing; trying to see beyond that big sheet of paper, to the 13.7 billion light year extent of space and time…boggle…fail….

So, the next time you find yourself gazing at the stars, remember that those are just the spots flittering around in front of our collective eyeball, no more than an eyelash away….

And if that makes you feel small, cheer up; you live in a Universe that is altogether astonishing and magnificent, and not just a run-of-the-mill Universe of comprehendible size. I feel honored and proud….

Animals are doing surprisingly well in the radioactive areas around Chernobyl.

Imagine people’s worst fears are realized and the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon here in California has a Chernobyl-style meltdown. The effects on people are obvious: high rates of thyroid and other cancers, permanent resettlement elsewhere, increased rates of birth defects and so on. But as the area around Chernobyl is showing, the effects on the environment may be more subtle.

Over the break I watched a Nature special called, "Radioactive Wolves". This is a documentary about wildlife in a radioactive exclusion zone around Chernobyl.

Even though the area around Chernobyl is still so contaminated that humans can only go in for limited amounts of time, the wildlife appears to be doing surprisingly well. Birth defects are higher than in surrounding areas but life is thriving. Wolves are doing great, beavers have returned and everything looks hunky dory.

This seemed strange to me. I would think that so much radiation should be having pretty severe effects on these animals. And as noted in this in this NIH study, for certain individuals it definitely is.

The difference is in perspective. For the individual, the area around Chernobyl is terrible. Your kids have a higher rate of being stillborn or having birth defects, you have a much higher rate of developing various cancers, and so on. But for the species as a whole, things aren’t so bad. The higher background radiation appears to hardly be affecting their numbers at all.

Now this isn’t to say that the initial fallout wasn’t catastrophic to wildlife. It was. Untold numbers of animals died a terrible death in Chernobyl’s aftermath.

For the lucky survivors and new immigrants, though, Chernobyl is a different story. It is a chance to live a life without human interference. At least for now it looks like the high background radiation is preferable to man for these animals.

It is important that scientists keep studying this ecosystem though. The DNA of the animals in this area are under constant attack from the radiation. There may come a tipping point where the genetic burden becomes too high and populations start to crash. We’ll have to wait and see.

Additional Reading: NY Times Review of Radioactive Wolves

Asteroid Vesta - Images from the Dawn Spacecraft

With the New Horizons spacecraft hurtling toward its 2014 encounter with Pluto, and with the Dawn spacecraft now at its most up-close and personal encounter with Vesta, we are in the process of learning scads of information about two objects that are among the poorest understood and least explored bodies in the Solar System.

Before NASA's Dawn settled into orbit around the asteroid Vesta—the second largest object in the Main Asteroid Belt, after the Dwarf Planet Ceres—we knew very little about it. That it is mega-mountain of rock 330 miles across that rotates rather quickly in space and is slightly egg-shaped, these things we knew—but not much more.

What Dawn has revealed to us, however, is a tiny world with unexpected complexities, inside and out.

Inside, Vesta's anatomy may not be unlike Earth and the other Terrestrial planets, which all developed cores heavy with iron and mantles and crusts made of lighter silicate rocks when they were young and molten. This "differentiation" occurs for the same reason that gold particles sink to the bottom of a gold-pan as a prospector shakes the water-sand slurry back and forth: the gold is denser, the sand lighter, so the materials separate.

Outside, Vesta's surface offers amazing landscape vista opportunities for a future robot lander or astronaut: complex topography of valleys, cliffs, troughs, ridges, and a huge mountain, with elevation differences deviating above and below the global average elevation by as much as 15 miles—that's three Mount Everests, or two Marianas Trenches!

Parts of the surface resemble some of the basaltic formations of cooled lava in Hawaii, suggesting that, long ago, there may have been active volcanoes on Vesta, spewing out lava to shape the young surface.

What a sight it must have been—and it makes me smile when I think about the children's book "The Little Prince." My favorite part of that story was the description of how the Prince, on his little asteroid world (which was only twenty or thirty feet across, I'd guess), cooked his meals on a frying pan held over a miniature volcano, which he made sure to keep clean and functional with a periodic cleaning using a giant Q-tip….

All of these revelations—the core/mantle differentiation, complicated geography, possible tectonic features, and signs of past volcanism–have prompted some scientists to ask, should Vesta be reclassified as a Dwarf Planet, along with Ceres, Pluto, and the others thus dubbed?

I have on my desk at work a letter from a 3rd Grader. It starts, "I think Pluto should be a planet (not a Dwarf Planet)…." The letter continues in richer detail and quite a bit of passionate defense of Pluto, but I was struck by the fact that this 3rd Grader was, at the time Pluto was originally "demoted," three years old. (And some thought the Pluto controversy would end with the previous generation of kids….)

But it did get me wondering. If Dawn has changed our view of Vesta from a mere large asteroid to something maybe worthy of promotion to Dwarf Planet, what might New Horizons do to our current view of Pluto? I'm not suggesting the International Astronomical Union will reinstate Pluto as a planet when we get our first up-close images of its surface—after all, no matter what Pluto's surface may hold in store for us, this Dwarf Planet can't meet one of the three conditions for planethood: being massive enough to clear the region of space in which it revolves. Alas, Pluto shares its orbital space with other objects.

But I fully expect that New Horizons will change our perspective on Pluto, as Dawn is doing for Vesta. The more we learn of the rich details of mysterious places like these, the more, I think, we regard them as "worlds"—regardless of their classification as asteroid, dwarf planet, or planet.

"Attack of the Alien Invaders," produced by WVIZ/PBS, was first created as an educational series called "LSI: Life Science Investigation."

Lake Erie is considered to be the most productive of all five of the Great Lakes.Within its waters are diverse and interdependent plants and animals that make up an intricate web of life. Mostly due to human carelessness, the lake has become home to an increasing number of non-native plants, animals, and micro-organisms which threaten the balance of the entire ecosystem.

In the WVIZ/PBS program, Attack of the Alien Invaders, Dante Centuori, Director of Creative Productions at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio, traveled in and around Lake Erie visiting with scientists and government officials who are investigating Lake Erie’s ecosystem, the challenges it has faced in the past, as well as those it may face in the future. Of particular interest was one of the biggest potential threats to the lake- a voracious invasive species collectively called “Asian carp.”

Bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis) and Silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) were first introduced to the U.S. in the 1970s as a chemical-free and “environmentally friendly” way of cleaning up algae in southern fish farms and water treatment plants. During the Mississippi River floods of the early 1990s, these fish escaped into “The Big River” and its tributaries. Since then, these big, hungry, and prolific fish have made their way north all the way up to the back door of the Great Lakes. If they enter the Great Lakes, it is feared that these fish will continue on to Lake Erie where they could further disrupt the Great Lakes’ most productive ecosystem, with unknown long-term consequences.

John Hageman from Ohio State's Stone Laboratory shows Dante Centuori an invasive Silver Carp.

Dante first visited Stone Laboratory, a research facility located in the Western Basin of Lake Erie in Put-in-Bay, Ohio. There, he met John Hageman who displayed, and dissected a Silver carp; revealing an anatomical structure that makes these fish particularly threatening to the food energy balance so important to Lake Erie’s native inhabitants. Dante then accompanied another Stone Lab researcher on a good old fashioned Lake Erie “fish trawl” where he came across many of the lake’s native and invasive species– such as the omnipresent zebra mussel and the abundant quagga mussel, two detrimental invasives brought in to the Great Lakes by the ballast water of ocean-going vessels.

Dante continued on to Old Woman Creek, a national research center and fresh water estuary in nearby Huron, Ohio, where he encountered some frisky common carp (Cyprinus carpio) whose behavior may help scientists predict what may happen to Ohio’s interior rivers and streams, if their distant relatives from the east choose to join them. Next, he returned to Stone Lab to investigate how the Bighead and Silver carp have influenced and impacted the native species of the Mississippi and Illinois River ecosystems. He next traveled to Lake Erie’s Central Basin- to Cleveland, Ohio for a rendezvous with a federal employee who explained how Asian carp are being monitored and controlled in one of the most probable points of entry into the Great Lakes, Chicago’s Shipping and Sanitary Canal at the southern end of Lake Michigan.

Lastly, Dante returned to Put-In-Bay where he talked with Jeff Tyson of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, who described the management techniques used to control one of the harmful invasive species in Lake Erie; the Sea Lamprey. Could techniques similar to those used to control the Lamprey be applied in the event of an Asian carp invasion? What other plans are in place if these strange and dangerous "jumping fish" make it to Lake Erie? If they do, and these strategies don’t work, what’s next? Even though each expert interviewed had his or her own theory, in the end, they all agreed that it is not a scenario that they’d want to see play out.

Before Attack of the Alien Invaders was broadcasted to a general audience in January of 2011, WVIZ Education produced “LSI: Life Science Investigation,” a multi-media resource created for the classroom. Scott Barber, a teacher in Berea, Ohio, explained how this “fish story,” presented as an interactive mystery, and accompanying classroom resources on the web, has helped his students learn core life science concepts.

Be amazed at the Bay Area Science Festival! Photo: Bay Area Science Festival.

The Bay Area Science Festival, a 10-day celebration of science, starts this week. There are over 50 exciting events throughout the Bay Area, including hikes, lectures, and concerts. From a day of hands-on activities with Stanford’s Genetics department to a hawk talk in the Marin Headlands, from an exploration of food at the farmers’ market to a screening of the movie Contact with astronomer Jill Tarter (on whom Jodie Foster’s character was based), there is something for everyone.

Here are some of the highlights: MythBuster Adam Savage will talk with author Mary Roach about her book Packing for Mars. Science writer Carl Zimmer will talk with two UCSF scientists about tiny friends and foes in Gut Check: The Hidden World of Microbes. RadioLab will be live at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

Check out Dinosaurs vs. Robots at the Lawrence Hall of Science on Sunday, October 30.

At Dinosaurs vs. Robots at the Lawrence Hall of Science, you can do hands-on activities to see for yourself which is the most awesome: paleontology or engineering. KQED will moderate a discussion, The Challenge and Promise of Artificial Intelligence, with researchers from Microsoft and Google at the Computer History Museum in San Jose. And there are three Discovery Days, packed with free shows, exhibits, and games. The Discovery Days are at Cal State East Bay (10/29), Infineon Raceway (11/5), and AT&T Park (11/6). If you go, keep an eye out for QUEST’s table! Find more fun stuff on the calendar—be sure to click over to see the events in November, too.

The Bay Area Science Festival is part of a growing movement to celebrate science in the community. The festivals bring together different organizations and individuals to engage diverse audiences in science. The Bay Area Science Festival is organized by the Science and Heath Education Partnership at the University of California, San Francisco—along with dozens of partners. Science festivals started in the UK; now there are annual festivals in Philadelphia and Cambridge, Mass. And last year the first USA Science and Engineering Festival descended on the National Mall in Washington DC. To find a science festival near you, check out this map.

I’ll be representing the Lawrence Hall of Science at the Discovery Day in AT&T Park on Sunday November 6—the Festival’s finale. Hope to see you there!

Right on the heels of California Wine Month and the beginning of grape harvest, comes Ken Burns latest documentary: Prohibition. The six hour series, which airs on PBS stations October 2nd, takes us back to an infamous thirteen year time period in our nation’s history when the commercial production and sale of alcohol was banned. For those not glued to the prohibition era TV series Boardwalk Empire, the 18th Amendment was passed in 1920 at the urging of the temperance movement.

Prohibition agents. Photo: Library of Congress

California’s wine industry, which had recently rebounded from a major pest infestation and was poised for great things, was devastated by Prohibition. Vineyards were ripped up and a majority of the more than six hundred wineries were shuttered. The few that remained open did so by producing wine for religious purposes. Beaulieu Vineyard was one of them. Founder Georges de Latour was a Catholic and a friend of the archbishop of San Francisco. Latour cut a deal to sell wine to all the priests in the diocese.

Prohibition was supposed to curb alcohol consumption, but instead the party went underground, giving rise to a thriving criminal economy run by bootleggers and gangsters. Port cities, like San Francisco, managed to stay pretty wet during those dry years, thanks to illegal liquor brought ashore in the dead of night, carried on ships from Canada. The roaring twenties saw the rise of a new breed of young women, known as "flappers," while beer, wine and spirits—some bootlegged, some made in basement stills flowed in hundreds of backroom speakeasies.

Flappers in the prohibition era. Photo: ©Scherl / Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / The Image Works

After years of lawlessness, the 18th Amendment was eventually repealed. You can still visit remnants of the prohibition era throughout the Bay Area. Some former San Francisco speakeasies still remain and dozens of wineries survived Prohibition.

Called “Ghost Wineries” some have become homes, others used as barns or shopping complexes in Yountville and St. Helena. A handful of wineries have been restored and now have a second life including Freemark Abbey, Far Niente, Hall Wines and Storybook Mountain Vineyards in Calistoga.

Freemark Abbey 1898. Photo courtesy of Freemark Abbey

We’ve come along way since the dry days of Prohibition, in just seventy five years the state’s award winning wine industry has built itself up to be a world leader with more than 3,300 bonded wineries. But a new threat looms — this one from mother nature. Research shows that California's prime wine producing areas could shrink dramatically over the next three decades from climate change.

Find out much more about the past and future of California wines at California Academy of Sciences Prohibition NightLife this Thursday evening. You can purchase tickets online for the event or buy them at the door. QUEST will be screening the segment on wine and climate change featured below and serving up wines for warmer temps. Also, Cal Academy will be leading mixology classes and screening a sneak peak of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new documentary on Prohibition. Can you think of a better way to commemorate the end of the 18th Amendment than with a cocktail party and wine tasting?

This post was originally published on KQED's Bay Area Bites.

"Napa Wineries Face Global Warming"

California Academy of Sciences
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This post was originally published on KQED's Bay Area Bites.

 Jim Wolpert’s Alternative Varietals - References ( pdf ) Jim Wolpert’s Alternative Varietals - References

Ernie Majer, a staff scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, tests seismic monitoring equipment.

In California, more renewable energy comes from geothermal energy than solar and wind, combined. Today, a new technology known as Enhanced Geothermal Systems has the potential to extract even more heat and consequently energy to power steam turbines, but it’s not without challenges, including man-made earthquakes which are a consequence of breaking up rock more than a mile below the earth’s surface. Such earthquake activity is referred to as "induced seismicity" and can occur in other fields of energy production, including oil and natural gas production and hydropower.

Although most of these earthquake events are miniscule, registering less than a 2.0 in magnitude, occasionally, they can result in larger magnitude earthquakes, especially when the engineering activity which precipitates them occurs within the proximity of active fault zones.

In the U.S., the buzz over Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) started ratcheting up after the publication of a 2006 Department of Energy study investigating its potential, spearheaded by researchers at M.I.T. Among their findings was that EGS could meet 10% of the U.S.' electricity supply by 2050. Ten percent doesn't seem to be that much but it would represent a 40-fold increase over the current amount of geothermal power being harnessed nationally and if realized, it could significantly boost the nation's efforts to wean itself off its carbon-heavy diet, with more than 60% of energy consumption in the U.S. currently coming from coal and petroleum.

Today, the Department of Energy is spending millions of dollars to fund seven demonstration EGS projects, including a grant of $5.5 million Calpine's to develop the EGS field featured in our QUEST story on induced seismicity. Calpine has invested $9.5 million of its own money on the project, an impressive sum it's willing to spend to demonstrate the success of this green, renewable technology.

Here is how Calpine Senior Vice President Mike Rogers described the project's energy potential to me: "We expect to produce between 5 to 7 megawatts of additional steam (which is) enough for a small city, say, 6,000 people (and) depending on what we find, possibly up to 50 megawatts in that part of the field." Calpine has measured a temperature of 725 degrees Fahrenheit at a depth of 11,000 feet at their new enhanced geothermal project site. That's roughly 300 degrees warmer than their other geothermal fields at the Geysers, and with more heat comes more energy potential.

Calpine is working with Ernie Majer of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to monitor the risk of induced seismicity with additional, around-the-clock seismic monitoring next to their EGS production and injection wells located in the northwestern region of the Geysers.

The company is proud of their efforts to reach out to nearby communities such as the town of Anderson Springs that are impacted by the year-round geothermal activities at the Geysers. Not only has Calpine created a seismic monitoring committee comprised of representatives from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USGS and community members to review recent earthquake activity in the vicinity of the Geysers, they also have set up a hotline to report earthquake activity and an annual fund which communities can use to pay for repairs to buildings and homes possibly damaged by earthquakes.

It should also be noted that Calpine has the support of some prominent members of Anderson Springs for the development of their EGS demonstration project. Jeff Gospe, the President of Anderson Springs Community Alliance, wrote a letter of support for the project in September 2010 to Sonoma County District Supervisor Paul Kelly. Although Jeff and other community members still have concerns about seismicity in the southern portion of the Geysers, Jeff maintains that the work on the EGS demonstration project is an example of "pro-community geothermal development" that is far enough away to pose little risk to residents of the town.

In the course of my research on the story, I discovered several international EGS projects, including two that are online in France and Germany. Given the concern with nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan, and the phasing out of nuclear energy programs in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, the need for more renewable energy sources like geothermal power becomes more pressing.

But as nuclear energy also reveals, no matter how green the energy source is, its exploitation must be safe for the public to get behind it.

As Ernie Majer of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory told me, "Over the past 20 years, it started out as the (geothermal energy) industry almost ignored induced seismicity. But as the recent issues have come up, the industry has finally said, 'Alright, we need to deal with this properly and we need to take it very seriously.'"

Here's a recent photo from "Music and Games Galore", part of The Tech Museum's new adults-only monthly event, "After Hours".

Please vote on your favorite caption by Friday, September 2. The winning entry will receive (2) free tickets to their upcoming After Hours event, "DNA With A Twist", on Wednesday, September 7. The winner will also receive a QUEST prize package.

UPDATE: The contest is now closed. Congrats to Arlene, the winner of the contest, with her submission: "Just a little further now, all that Yoga gotta to pay off. All TECH considered."

Here's a recent photo from "Music and Games Galore", part of The Tech Museum's new adults-only monthly event, "After Hours". Put your creative hats on and participate in our photo caption contest with The Tech Museum. Submit only (1) caption for this photo in the comments section below by Friday, August 26. Then we'll take all the submissions and have you vote on which one you like best. The winning entry will receive (2) free tickets to their upcoming After Hours event, "DNA With A Twist", on Wednesday, September 7. The winner will also receive a QUEST prize package.

Image by Leon Brocard

In May, I went to a Down to a Science Café. The topic was Attached: The Science of Romantic Relationships. The speaker was psychologist Rachel S. F. Heller, M.A who is one of the authors of Attached; the other author is psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Amir Levine. Heller was wonderful in showing that adult romantic partnerships have patterns similar to those one has as a child attaching with parents. Humans have a need for attachment that is hardwired from eons of biological evolution; however, that need for attachment is expressed differently. Heller used snippets from Sex in the City to exemplify the three main attachment styles: anxious, avoidant and secure. Needless to say, I was greatly intrigued after seeing Heller talk and I set out to buy the book. It took me awhile as it was sold out when I went to look for it. After reading it, I have discussed it with family and friends, my mom is reading it now and I’ve recommended it to countless people. It not only made me understand my romantic relationships and needs more clearly; it also helped me finally understand family dynamics and limitations of certain friendships.

I was impressed by Attached because it was written by two doctors and based on over 25 years of case studies championed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby in the field of attachment psychology. Case studies, evolutionary biology and brain activity was alluded to throughout the book. Both authors presented research in order to show biological and neural reactions to attachment and relationship needs as well as defense behavior. The book is laid out in order to identify your own attachment style and those of loved ones while giving pointers for more effective communication and approaches for gaining intimacy.

Since reading this book, I have found it much easier to identify attachment styles in others and how I can better relate to them. I’ve also seen certain relationships improve and deepen with this understanding. I identified my attachment style as "anxious," which means that I’m preoccupied with relationships, tend to worry and need validation from partners on where I stand. The two other styles are "avoidant," which guard their independence and see intimacy as an attack on their space. They often will distance themselves from attachment to guard their independence. While these two styles are polar opposites, the last attachment style, "secure," falls in the middle of the two. Secure types feel comfortable with intimacy and take attachment in stride without needing validation or distance. A quiz is given at the Attached website to determine which type you are your partner falls into. A quiz and tips and tricks are also given in the Attached book and also the dynamics between each style is explained.

Other relationship experts having lauded playing the role of coquette or being independent and downplaying the need for intimacy. Yet attachment research has uncovered that forming close relationships is a part of our evolutionary history. Like other pack animals, we are hardwired for attachment because it has been an effective survival adaptation. On a very basic level, we all strive for closeness starting from children and into adulthood as a means of survival. Attached was a wonderful book in addressing how this need can be fulfilled.