Rancho Corral de Tierra's nearly 4,000 acres overlook the Pacific, just south of Devil's Slide.

Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which includes Alcatraz Island, the Marin Headlands, Muir Woods and many other Bay Area landmarks, has added one more piece to its portfolio: a large chunk of the Peninsula south of Devil's Slide.

Negotiations to incorporate Rancho Corral de Tierra into the park took ten years and ended plans by a developer to build pricey homes in the Half Moon Bay area.

On the day I visited Rancho Corral de Tierra, a thick fog hung under the peak of Montara Mountain, blocking what might otherwise have been views straight out to the Farallon Islands and Mount Tamalpais.

But with 3,800 acres of Cypress trees and rolling hills, you could almost imagine what the California coast looked like when Spanish explorers wandered by just north of here in 1769.

Close Calls with Development

It was almost a golf course.

Audrey Rust, president emeritus of the Peninsula Open Space Trust, known as POST, says she’d been eyeing this piece of land since she began working at the trust 25 years ago. Flat in the lowlands with a scenic backdrop of ridges, it attracted development plans of every stripe, says Rust.

Courtesy of Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

“A golf course, housing, gated communities… everything,” says Rust.

Rust, and others, believed the ranch provided such valuable habitat and open space that it might qualify to become part of the national park system.

“It’s only seven miles south from the border of San Francisco,” says Rust, “and it's teeming with wildlife. Mountain lions are abundant. Deer. Every critter you can think of that's native to this area.”

Acquiring the ranch was a huge project, requiring fund-raising on a scale closer to what you might expect from a major hospital or university. POST launched a campaign called Saving the Endangered Coast with the goal of raising 200 million dollars and saving 20 thousand acres of land, including the ranch.

Audrey Rust helped raise $200 million dollars to save Rancho Corral de Tierra

They couldn’t have asked for a better fundraising moment. Rust raised $100 million from Silicon Valley: $50 million each from the Packard and Moore Foundations.

The funding let POST buy the sprawling ranch for $29 million and then hold onto it for nine years until the state government and Congress provided the money to acquire it for the same price. After much political wrangling, Congressional approval to add it to the national park system finally came through last summer. Rust was ecstatic.

“[We were] jumping around and sometimes crying. But now, it just feels right to know this beautiful place will be here forever.”

The land includes a working horse farm and Brussels sprouts fields.

A Southern Entryway to Golden Gate National Recreation Area

From the National Park’s perspective, the addition of the ranch is historic. Alex Picavet, with the GGNRA, calls the ranch “the largest land acquisition for Golden Gate National Recreation Area pretty much since it began.”

As national parks go, Golden Gate is a little unusual. Its 82,000 acres of parkland are scattered around the Bay Area, from Muir Woods to Alcatraz Island and Ocean Beach in San Francisco. But the new land on the Peninsula means that about half of the park — which was founded in 1972 — is now in San Mateo County, with this new chunk forming the southernmost border.

“We’re calling this the southern entryway to Golden Gate National Recreation Area,” says Picavet.

Now that Rust and others have taken the long view, people like Susie Bennett can focus on the small things.

As we hiked up the ridge, Bennett, a natural resource specialist for the GGNRA, stopped and pointed to a little yellow flower with heart-shaped petals, “this area’s local plant celebrity.”

The endangered hickman's potentilla has been found in only two places in the world.

Hickman's potentilla is found in only two places in the world: here, and in Monterey. It’s the ranch’s only federally recognized endangered species. “It’s a plant we’d like to focus some management on,” says Bennett.

In taking over this land, the National Park Service is doing a lot more than just putting up new signs.

There will be scientists studying the land, and workers clearing out invasive species. The system of informal trails that locals have used for years will get an overhaul.

Balancing the Needs of Habitat and Local Dog-walkers

And like any new neighbor, the park is going to have to win over local residents, especially on the topic of dogs.

Bill and Peggy Bechtell live in a comfortable ranch home in Montara, just across the street from the park. They’ve been walking their dog, Kalie, here for years. They say they're apprehensive about their new neighbors.

Montara residents Bill and Peggy Bechtell have been walking their dogs off-leash on the ranch for decades.

“We've had nothing but great community here for 32 years, and the minute they come, they ruin it,” says Peggy Bechtell.

Bechtell is referring to an incident, about a week ago, that made national headlines.

According to the GGNRA, Gary Hesterberg of Montara was walking his two dogs off leash, in violation of park rules. A ranger tried to give him a ticket, but he gave her a false name and refused to stop. Critics call it excessive force, and a local congresswoman wants an independent investigation.

National parks, as a rule, don’t allow off-leash dogs. It’s been a sticking point for some in the Bay Area for more than a decade and, as a result, the park has made exceptions in places like Fort Funston and the Marin Headlands. A final, formal dog policy has long been in development.

Officials had originally hoped that the new park addition at Rancho Corral de Tierra would follow the more restrictive National Park standards, with limited, leash-only dog areas. Park officials say dogs can interfere with efforts to nurture and restore the area's native ecosystem.

Bill Bechtell, who has been taking his dogs here since the 1980s, says that policy is unfair to Montara locals.

“There’s plenty of room for open space, animals, wildlife, everything. And recreation!” he says.

Last week, park officials announced their intention to include the ranch in the broader environmental review of off-leash dog areas in parts of GGNRA, which opens up the possibility that off-leash areas could eventually be established at Rancho Corral de Tierra.

“It’s not going to be overnight that we all come together and speak the same language,” says GGNRA’s Picavet. “But we are looking forward to building that relationship together. We’re here for the long haul.”

Over the next year, GGNRA will be working out parking, signage, and other issues, including dog policy. The property is currently open to visitors.

It's a problem in hospitals, too. Just take the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of California San Francisco.

On a recent morning, Mardi Thompson was swaddling a baby the size of a burrito with firm assurance. She's been a nurse here for 13 years.

Some of the babies who come through here were born prematurely. Others were born with congenital defects; some part of their internal anatomy didn’t develop the way it’s supposed to.

"Maybe their diaphragm is missing, or part of their intestine is outside of their chest," says Thompson. Some suffer from a condition called esophageal atresia, in which the child's feeding tube isn't properly connected to her stomach. That condition affects roughly one in every 4,000 children.

Working with Tools Too Big for the Job

They are what Sanjeev Dutta refers to as "plumbing problems."

Dutta is a pediatric surgeon at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, in Palo Alto, where he operates on children with these and other problems. He says often, the instruments he uses when he does these surgeries weren’t built for tiny babies. They were made for adults.

"We struggle with instruments that were never designed for the type of patient we are working on, and we adapt."

Dutta says the issue here isn’t safety. Most of these surgeries are, by now, pretty routine. But pediatric surgeons have to improvise in ways other surgeons don’t.

Working with tools that are several times too large for his tiny patients, Dutta is sometimes forced to stand a foot and a half away from his patient.

Size isn't the only problem pediatric surgeons face. Many pediatric procedures are specific to infants and children, fixes to problems that, unaddressed, would be fatal. In such cases, often the right tools simply don't exist.

Partly because of problems like these, pediatric surgeons have a reputation as being mavericks, people who are particularly good at improvising the tools they might need to operate successfully. No one fits that mold as well as Michael Harrison, at UCSF.

A History of Improvisation and Innovation

Harrison is known as the father of fetal surgery. He says twenty years ago, when the field was just getting started, his team had to make almost everything from scratch.

"We had to make all the tools and devices that allowed the fetal surgery, [the tools for] the the mom, and opening and closing the uterus. All that stuff we had to make up, because the tools were ten times too big."

Harrison describes this era — the 1970s and early 80s — as a golden age of pediatric surgery, a time when you could rig up a new tool or procedure, run tests on animals, if necessary, and then bring it into the operating room. He says he never felt like they had a choice.

"It’s almost a moral imperative. It’s usually in a circumstance where this kid is going to die. The only way we think we might be able to save him is this new way. We’d have to have this thing. Let’s do it. And that’s what we can’t do now."

In the mid 1970s, the FDA began regulating surgical devices, much the same way it regulates drugs. It can take a decade to get a device through the regulatory process, sometimes longer for pediatrics.

Harrison says this — along with the fact that many pediatric surgical procedures are rare — has had a chilling effect on medical device manufacturers.

"The market is too small to justify the research and development for new devices," he says. "That’s the fundamental problem."

In 2007, Congress passed the Pediatric Medical Device Act, which set aside a small pot of money, administered through the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products, to spur innovation in the field of pediatric surgery.

The program was initially intended to receive $6 million for each two-year cycle, but appropriations have come out much lower: $2 million dollars for 2009-2010 and $3 million for 2011-2012.

The idea is to bring together doctors and engineers to solve problems in pediatric surgery. These are the kinds of partnerships that Mike Harrison has been trying to forge for a decade. He says it can be a culture clash.

"We’re, you know, sort of blood and guts. We're saying, 'hey we've got to have this device, we’re going into the operating room tomorrow.' And they were thinking nanotechnology and PhDs."

Developing Tomorrow's Kid-Sized Tools

But the FDA money is making these partnerships routine at a handful of institutions across the country, including Georgia, Michigan, and here in the Bay Area.

The Magnetic Mini Mover uses two rare earth magnets to slowly reconfigure a sunken chest, similar in concept to orthodontics. Courtesy UCSF.

UCSF has received about a million dollars since 2009. That money has supported the development of tools to treat scoliosis, kidney failure and sunken chest, among other conditions. The pectus, or sunken chest device, is in clinical trials.

In Palo Alto, Sanjeev Dutta has paired up with an engineer named Pablo Garcia, from SRI International, in Menlo Park. In 2009, he and Sanjeev Dutta received 500 thousand dollars to fund their collaboration.

Garcia says there was an adjustment period on both sides, as he and Dutta learned how to collaborate. "When you actually put yourself in shoes of surgeon, things you thought were important actually are not. And things that you overlooked turn out to be the driving factors."

At one of their first meetings, says Garcia, Dutta asked whether a certain robotic instrument could be made smaller. "Sure," said Garcia. "But it'll take five to ten years."

One of the projects Garcia has developed in collaboration with Dutta is a catheter used to deliver nerve blocks to kids who have broken, for example, an arm or a leg.

Current catheters, says Garcia, "are placed blindly, based on anatomical landmarks, and they often get dislodged. So the catheter we designed has some features in the tip that allow it to grab onto the tissue, lock onto it, and navigate it in a more effective way than the current catheters."

One of Dutta's favorite tools is a device used to treat esophageal atresia. The surgery is complex and often invasive. Dutta says many surgeons rely on the same techniques they've been using for decades. A newer, less invasive method is becoming more common, but it's technically very difficult. Dutta and Garcia have developed a tool designed to make the less invasive procedure much easier, so that more kids can recover faster, and with less scarring.

A prototype tool used to perform cutting and spreading functions in the treatment of esophageal atresia. Courtesy SRI International.

The tool is just a prototype now, with many stages of trials standing between it and the operating room. With Dutta and Garcia's FDA funding running out, they'll need to find other ways to fund their work on this and other devices. Dutta hopes that private philanthropy can bridge the gap between R&D and commercialization.

Dutta says he knows, from the perspective of a commercial manufacturer, that the market for a tool like this is just too small to be profitable. "Eyes glaze over," he says, "if they hear ten thousand cases a year."

But what people need to realize, he says, is that the market could be a lot bigger. What’s helpful to kids could be useful in adult surgeries, too.

"What we need to do is figure out how we can connect the two markets," he says, "and make them sort of symbiotic."

In other words, Dutta and others are learning how to be not just surgeons, but entrepreneurs. Their business will be nurturing these products to the point where someone else will see the profit in making them.

The new all-electric Nissan Leaf. (Photo: Josh Cassidy)

This week, California officials are voting on the toughest new regulations in the country to promote cleaner cars. If passed, by 2025, 15% of new cars and trucks sold in the state would have to be powered by batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or other technology that produces little or no air pollution.

These kind of tough mandates have been tried before and they failed. But officials are confident that era of electric vehicle as finally arrived in California. That’s becoming the case in the Bay Area, which has been a strong market for advanced cars since the first Prius came out a decade ago.

“This is a Prius V,” says Joe Testa at Downtown Toyota in Oakland, showing one of several new Prius models that Toyota is releasing this year. “It’s the longer, wagon style, so it has a little more room.” Testa says there’s already a waiting list for the new Prius Plug-in, which comes out in March.

Toyota came out with hybrids ahead of other carmakers, maybe because the company anticipated changes in the market. Or, as some believe, it was due to a California state agency.

“We have been at the forefront of encouraging, and some would people would say forcing, new technologies. The Prius hybrid electric vehicle is an example of that,” says Tom Cackette. Chief Deputy Director of the California Air Resources Board.

California’s Clean Car History

Cackette says to see California’s legacy of shaping national car policy, you have to go back to 1975. The state had a growing smog problem, so the air board required cars to have catalytic converters. The federal government followed. California then tightened air pollution rules for cars. And tightened them again. “And almost in every case, the federal government would follow two, three, four, five years later.”

Today, new cars emit 99 percent less smog than cars did in the 1960s. “It’s probably the most successful environmental program in the world,” says Cackette.

Now, California has a new goal: dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change. Transportation accounts for 40% of the state’s emissions. “The number one strategy to reduce greenhouse gases is these car standards,” he says.

The proposed standards would cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars in half by 2025. “We actually worked very closely under the federal government under the Obama Administration and we’ve jointly developed the standards. So they won’t just apply in California. But they’ll apply nationwide.”

Meeting these tougher standards will raise car prices by about $1900, but Cackette says those costs would be offset by fuel savings.

Jumpstarting Electric Car Sales

On top of that, California is taking an even bolder step, requiring automakers to sell increasing numbers of clean cars in the state. By 2025, they’d have to sell almost a million and half vehicles that run on electricity or hydrogen fuel cells.

The thing is – California has tried this before. And it didn’t work. “I guess I would call it a little too visionary perhaps,” says Cackette. In 1990, the Air Resources Board mandated that 10 percent of new car sales be “zero emission” cars by 2003.

“Obviously that didn’t happen. The price of gas was cheap in those times. The price of the technologies were high,” he says. The air board loosened the rules to include hybrid cars and cleaner gasoline engines, which he says drove carmakers to develop them faster.

Now, Cackette believes that technology has come of age. Nissan is selling the all-electric Leaf and Chevy is selling the Volt, a plug-in hybrid. And there’s another big difference.

Automakers Onboard

“The car manufacturers were adamantly opposed to the concept of government telling them they needed to build a new type of technology. That’s changed.”

“You are seeing more agreement between automakers and California and the federal government,” agrees Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington DC.

“Automakers have invested billions of dollars in these technologies. And so in some ways we have similar interests. Our interest in recouping our investment is now aligned with the societal imperative to get more of these vehicles on the road,” she says.

Bergquist says meeting the mandate calling for carmakers to sell a certain number of clean vehicles will ultimately depend on consumers. “There’s still a concern about what the consumer acceptance of these technologies is going to be and that can make a mandate very scary.”

Groups Push for Tougher Rules

“We think California could be bolder,” says Don Anair is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit group that supports even stronger clean car rules.

“We need that technology to advance for the technology cost to come down and make these vehicles accessible to more and more consumers. By having a more aggressive standard, that gives more certainty to investors that California is committed.” Anair wants to see tougher standards sooner rather than later, since it takes 15 years on average for the entire fleet of cars on the road to turn over.

If the new rules are successful, electric cars could be adopted at a much faster pace. Tom Cackette of the Air Resources Board says they’re doing all they can to encourage consumers to buy them, including funding a popular rebate program and working with companies to build an electric car charging infrastructure.

“Right now, you’ve got to sort of have a jumpstart to this whole process and in the absence of a jumpstart, there’s a chance that it will fail,” he says.

A projection of how zero emissions vehicles like electric cars will be 87% of all cars on the road in California by 2025. Source: California Air Resources Board.

This month may be the moment of truth for six Bay Area communities. Each one is vying to be the new home of a high-profile national research center. But when it comes to development in the Bay Area, there are no easy answers.

Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley, Emeryville, Albany, and Richmond are the six cities in the running for what you might call the 2012 Cadillac of Bay Area Development Projects: A new, second campus for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Will Travis – who, until recently, headed the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a state agency that regulates building around the bay – says, sure, big development projects happen all the time in the Bay Area. But Lawrence Berkeley labs is what he calls "a platinum level, marquee" project.

Since it was founded in 1931, thirteen Nobel prizes have been won on work done here. Sixteen elements added to the periodic table. World-famous innovations in medical science, alternative energy and atomic research that helped win World War II.

"It reflects who we are as a society, a knowledge-based society," says Travis, "and this is the epitome of that."

With a staff of 4,000 and a budget of more than $800 million, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab has been overflowing its headquarters in the Berkeley Hills for some time. Research on biofuels and other fields has spilled over to satellite offices in Emeryville and Walnut Creek. The idea is to consolidate those operations into a second campus.

For several Bay Area cities, this seems like a dream opportunity.

On a blindingly sunny day in November, Alameda city development manager Jennifer Ott took me on a tour of Alameda's contender in the race: a 50-acre waterfront property in the Alameda Naval Air Station.

Gesturing to what now looks like a concrete wasteland – albeit with a spectacular Bay view – Ott described a bustling campus and waterfront promenade. Retail shops and restaurants, a jogging path.

She says when the Navy decommissioned the Air Station 15 years ago, the city lost thousands of jobs. The lab would be a chance to bring this area back to life.

So, Alameda is offering the site to the lab for free, which says a lot, especially when you consider that – as because it’s a national lab – the campus will contribute nothing in local property taxes

Ott says It’s still worth it.

"They will shop in our stores," says Ott, "eat in our restaurants. And we also believe that they will attract other private development to the area that will bring tax revenue into the city and jobs."

The need for jobs unites all six of the possible sites. But here’s something else many of them have in common: They're flat and by the water.

And that presents a problem that no one has much experience dealing with says Will Travis.

"The fact that these areas are low-lying and vulnerable to sea level rise isn't something that's been integrated into regulatory process yet."

San Francisco Bay waters are expected to rise steadily in coming years: 16 inches by 2050, up to 55 inches by the end of the century.

But the more imminent threat, says Travis, is storms.

"The scientists are telling us that we will have more extreme events more often. And we’re seeing it.

Travis believes that sea-level rise is something that can be designed around with stilts, or artificial hills, setbacks. His former agency, the BCDC is charged with writing those guidelines.

But at a certain point, says Heather Cooley, of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, there will be places simply not worth developing. Places we will just abandon to the rising waters.

"We will need to have those sorts of conversations," says Cooley. But she adds that nobody in the Bay Area seems quite ready to have them yet.

Other hard conversations are taking place just north, near the Albany/Berkeley border at Golden Gate Fields.

On the day I visited, a thoroughbred named "I'm Tops" is getting a pedicure, his hooves filed down and shiny new aluminum shoes fitted with nails and a hammer.

"This is a dying art," said Peter Tunney, my guide and a member of the Stronach Group, the private racing firm that owns this racetrack and others.

Tunney has been in the racing business most of his adult life. But he said betting had declined in recent years. Sometime, the grandstands were only half-full.

Horse racing, said Tunney, "has become a television sport. We have all learned that we don’t need grandstands anymore."

If Lawrence Berkeley chooses this spot to put its new campus, the racetrack, built in 1941, would be torn down. The lab would either buy the property, or lease it from the Stronach Group.

Racing would continue, said Tunney, just somewhere smaller inland like Pleasanton.

"We're in the racing business. We’ll stay in the racing biz. We’re just following this through as a potential option."

If the lab chooses Albany, there will be some hurdles. Birders say the construction could damage precious habitat near the track.

And losing the track would cost the city of Albany about a million and a half tax dollars that it takes in from the track each year, money that funds its schools, among other things. By law, residents here would have the right to vote on whether to allow the lab or not, which could add time and risk to the process

There are no easy answers, says the BCDC's Will Travis. "And I think that’s what’s taking so long. We have a series of imperfect alternatives."

One final option is to build out the Richmond Field Station, off of I-580, and just north of the racetrack. The Field station, which Lawrence Berkeley Lab already owns, currently houses several scientific projects, including an earthquake simulator and UC Berkeley's Forest Products Lab.

A spokesman for the lab says a decision should be out within the month. They hope to have the new facilities up and running by 2016.

Changing behavior is no easy task, but Stanford University researcher BJ Fogg is working on a new technique. Fogg runs Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab. He says not to worry about New Year’s goals. Instead, he focuses on what he calls “tiny habits.”

What’s a tiny habit? Fogg demonstrates by picking up his ukulele and playing for 30 seconds. "I used to play ukulele a lot. But I stopped practicing for a while so to get back into it I thought I’m going to create a tiny habit of just practicing this cord sequence," he says.

“I set it right by the piano so right after I finish breakfast I go pick the ukulele up. That’s what a tiny habit is. It’s a very little thing that you sequence into your life in a place that makes sense and you work to make it automatic.”

Thirty seconds doesn’t seem like much when you compare it to goals like getting in shape or eating better. But these broad ideas are where Fogg says most people get into trouble.

Resolutions vs. Habits

“What a mistake – the whole idea around New Year’s resolutions. People aren’t picking specific behaviors, they’re picking abstractions,” he says.

Abstract goals don’t work, says Fogg, when they aren’t tied to specific behaviors. And to retain new behavior, he says it needs to be instinctual. The more you have to remember to do something, the better the chances are that you’ll talk yourself out of it.

“The strength of a habit is defined, at least the way I see it, is how much of a decision was that behavior. So if you’re deciding ‘yeah, I’m going to go to the gym today’ it’s a pretty good indication it’s not a habit. Habits are things you do without deciding,” says Fogg.

Classic behavior models focus on decision-making as a key component of behavior. Fogg is trying to get away from that by working on a new model of habit formation that’s built on baby steps.

Forming a Habit

Take something like flossing your teeth. Instead of trying to floss all your teeth every day, Fogg says start with flossing just one tooth.

Next, find a habit you already have and do your new habit immediately after. “For me and for most people, brushing your teeth is a solid habit. So that can serve as a trigger for the new behavior you want.”

Then, reward yourself. “You declare victory. Like I am so awesome, I just flossed one tooth. And I know it sounds ridiculous. But I believe that when you reinforce yourself like that, your brain will say yeah, awesome, let’s do that.”

And once the habit is formed, Fogg says you’ll find yourself flossing all your teeth. That’s a theory he’s testing out, at least, with several hundred volunteers. Fogg put out a call on twitter, asking participants to do three tiny habits for a week.

Testing the Model

One of those people is Charles Wang, a psychiatrist in Palo Alto, who picked flossing as one of his habits. “So right now I’m probably doing on average six or seven teeth, I think,” he says.

He’s also trying to do ten pushups as soon as he wakes up and to answer emails as soon as he opens them. “When I look at the email, then I just say, you know, I’m going to immediately hit reply and then send a response. There are still times where it’s just challenging to do that one so I don’t always do it.”

If the ideas of behavioral triggers and rewards sound familiar to pet owners, Fogg says there’s a reason. “If you really took the techniques for training dogs and applied it to yourself, you would have much better success. Now, I’m sure people are upset with me for saying that because people want to think we’re different from other animals. When it comes to behavior, we’re a lot more alike than people want to believe.”

Fogg is eager to see if a person’s habit-making ability improves with every new one they make. And he believes understanding habit formation better is vital to industries like medicine and healthcare.

“The mistakes that are being made are pretty predictable. Don’t create a system that assumes that people are going to make these big huge changes in their lives. The good news is there are a lot of things in the works to help people stay healthy.”

The San Francisco audio engineer rose early to spend a cold December Sunday taking part in the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count. During the last two weeks of every year, rain or shine, volunteers looking for birds spread out over 22,000 locations including such countries as Peru, Guam, Haiti, the U.S. and Canada. The count is one of the oldest, and largest, citizen science events in the world. The tradition has been taking place since 1900, when birders proposed a ‘kinder’ alternative to an annual bird hunt – a bird survey that scientists now rely on to determine how bird populations are changing.

Oyster catcher. Photo, Alan Krakauer

This year, as part of Oakland’s 71st count, group leader McKereghan and seven volunteers are surveying an urbanized swath of shore along I-80 from Emeryville to Albany. “We’ve got to cover everything, the good and the bad. We will spend a lot of time in parking lots and roadways,” explains McKereghan. A 10 a.m. check-in confirms the group already has spotted more than 30 species including six ruddy ducks, six mallards one great egret and one oyster catcher. McKereghan takes the numbers down on a new iPhone app, the first time he’s not using a pen and paper check list.

Tips for Counting Birds

Now you might wonder, as I did, how one actually counts birds. I mean, it’s not like they are exactly… cooperative. “Certain things like eagles, you take note of the direction and time they are headed. You have to assume that we are missing a huge number of birds so I think it sort of averages itself out nicely,” says McKereghan. He says that when it comes to large flocks, like black birds on a wire next to Golden Gate Fields race track, it’s best to count in groups of ten, rather than individuals. Part of McKereghan’s count area includes the horse track, and his group is given access each year prior to race time. As jockeys put their horses through early morning runs, these bird watchers gather at the top of the bleachers — oblivious to the race horses below. Peering through scopes and binoculars, all eyes are trained on the edge of one of two ponds in the middle of the track. A small brown marsh bird known as a Wilson’s snipe has been spotted. “It has little stripes on its head, oh I have a good view,” exclaims one birder.

A Popular Hobby

You may have noticed birders get really excited over things that non-birders would not even notice. But these folks are definitely not alone. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates there are about 48 million birders in the U.S. – that’s more than twice as large as the television audience for the World Series. These hobbyists obsess over birds the way some fans obsess about sports.

Audubon volunteer Phila Rogers. Photo Credit, Nancy Warren

80-year-old Phila Rogers has been birding since she was eight. She explains the hobby as a kind of ‘madness.’ “You know, I took time off to have children and have love affairs but the birding was always there it was ready to bubble up from everything else,” says Rogers. The long time birder has served her time slogging through rain and chilly temperatures to complete the Christmas Count. Now Rogers participates as one of a few feeder watchers who observe birds, in her case, from her living room through a window onto her backyard deck, high in the Berkeley hills. You would think Rogers has seen it all but this year offered something really exciting. “For the first time in almost sixty years of watching birds at these feeders on this hill I see a white-throated sparrow. This is so big. So I actually took pictures. For me it was really exciting because it’s count day,” she says. Rogers could hardly wait to share her find at the area count compilation dinner.

Compilation Dinner

About one hundred birders gather in the community hall of a church in north Berkeley. Tired and hungry from a long day in the field, the volunteers turn in their check lists and warm up on hot chocolate. Although these birders skewed older, there were a few counters under 12, one already asleep on his dad’s lap. I caught up with two members of my group from earlier, Kevin McKereghan and Alan Krakauer, both excited over their high species count for the day, 110 total. Says Krakauer, "We had nice weather which is sort of a double bonus. For me Wild Turkeys were a big surprise to see way down into the flats and the urban area.” Kevin McKereghan thinks for a moment about what sighting most surprised him, “I think the white-throated swift and the pygmy nuthatch.” This year was even more special for the local birders because of the release of the long-awaited Alameda County Breeding Bird Atlas.

Wild turkeys. Photo, Alan Krakauer

As the evening went on, Oakland Count leaders Bob Lewis and Dave Quady, who both got up at 2:30 in the morning to count owls, ran through a check list of common birds. Next, presentations were given on special sightings and omissions. While some species like peregrine falcons and wild turkeys have been growing in number, the bird count also has shown some troubling trends. The National Audubon Society has documented a 40 percent drop in migratory birds over the past four decades, some common bird numbers have dropped by half, and there has been a move by some species north which could be an indicator of climate change. With the data, Audubon tries to take steps to mitigate some of the changes.

Most of us don't think about risk. We think about randomness. That's illustrated by a scene in the 1982 movie, "The World According to Garp", where Robin Williams is shopping for a new house with his wife. They're standing in front of one home when a plane crashes into it.

Despite the crash, the Robin Williams character agrees to buy the house saying, "It's been pre-disastered! We'll be safe here."

That may not be a typical reaction, but climatologist Kelly Redmond says it reveals a lot about how we think about risk. "It has to do with how we describe rare things. We spend societally an enormous amount of resources and time and attention guarding against the very worst possibilities."

You've probably heard of the "100-year flood." That's a flood so severe that it has a one in one hundred chance of happening every year. But how do we know that?

"About the only way we can get at how rare a rare thing is is by looking at a past record," says Redmond. So for floods, government agencies look into the historical record to see when floods happened in the past. They use that record to predict future flood risk.

But this relies on a very basic assumption. According to Redmond, the assumption is that the statistics of the future will look like the statistics of the past.

There's a fancy term for this – it's called stationarity. But there's a problem.

"What we don't know but what we suspect with changes in climate is that those statistics, especially about rare things, may change," says Redmond.

The US is already warming. Climate models show that western states could see more extreme weather as the climate continues to change. So, Redmond says, chances are good the future won't look like the recent past.

Jeanine Jones of the California Department Water of Resources agrees, saying "a lot of California's existing infrastructure was designed on assumptions that are no longer valid."

History of Water Forecasting in the West

Jones says using the past as a guide for the future is a huge part of water planning and building codes. The idea was first adopted in the 1940s and 50s, when dams and infrastructure were built at record speed in western states.

"Congress was looking at all these water development plans coming in from the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation and wanting a common standard to compare all the projects," says Jones.

So they forecasted flood risk and water supply by looking at historical data. "But they had very short data records. Maybe they only measured records of 20 years, 50 years. And that's not really very long," Jones says.

Today, everything from building codes to home insurance is based on this short window of data. And so is another critical forecast.

During the winter, surveyors measure the Sierra Nevada snow pack every month, so they can crunch the numbers and predict the year's water supply.

"It is very widely used by reservoir operators, by water agencies, by farmers who are looking at what are my chances for having a full water supply," says Jones.

But climate models show that more precipitation will fall as rain in California, instead of snow. And that means spring runoff could behave very differently. "At some point, conditions will change enough that we've reached a tipping point where those statistical approaches really aren't valid anymore," Jones says.

An accurate water forecast is crucial to California's economy. So Jones says water officials are looking at using computer models to forecast spring runoff.

But when it comes to updating flood risk and building codes to reflect climate change, Kelly Redmond says that could take decades. "We have to get a buy in from the engineering community, the city planners. Because there's so much expense to goes into building a bridge or a culvert or a building."

A New Breed of Insurance Company

There is one industry that's taking note of climate change – insurance.

"The increased variability in climate is going to start to dramatically affect the profits of corporations worldwide," says David Friedberg, CEO of San Francisco-based The Climate Corporation.

The Climate Corporation is something of a next generation insurance company. They start with computer models that simulate weather and climate patterns. "We then use those sorts of models to determine what sort of price we should charge for certain weather events occurring," says Friedberg.

The company works mostly with farmers, insuring them against extreme weather for between 40 and 400 dollars an acre. "There's a range of things that can occur and that range is certainly widening. And as a result we should start to charge more for those sorts of events when we're insuring them."

Friedberg says this kind of insurance makes sense to a lot of farmers they work with, who are already noticing changing weather patterns. Investor Vinod Kholsa and Google have also noticed and put millions into the company. They're betting new software will be the answer when today's methods no longer work.

From hackerspaces to banana slugs, flying telescopes to cheese — it's been a quite a diverse year of storytelling here at QUEST. Here's a round-up of the top 10 video and audio stories and blog posts (based on page views) that you've enjoyed from the past year. Please let us know what other stories you've enjoyed in the comments section below, and if there's anything you'd like to see in the coming season!



VIDEO:

Nanotechnology Takes Off

Stem Cell Gold Rush
Science on the SPOT: Banana Slugs Unpeeled
Berkeley Lab Physicist Shares Nobel
Science on the SPOT: Open Source Creativity – Hackerspaces
Super Laser at the National Ignition Facility
The World's Most Powerful Microscope
The Science & Art of Cheese
Mt. Umunhum: Return to the Summit
The Fierce Humboldt Squid

AUDIO:

Up All Night on NASA's Flying Telescope</a>

The Lost Lagoon
Energy-Saving Windows Get Smarter
The Amazing Transformation of San Francisco's "Sludge Puddle"
Supercomputers Hit an Energy Wall
From Tunnel to Tap: Quake-Proofing Our Water Supply
"A Big, Captivating Idea": The Bay Area Ridge Trail
Architecture for the Birds
Gulls Threaten South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Work
In a Sea of Energy Data, Utilities Try to Inspire Conservation

BLOG:

Explosive hypothesis about humans' lack of genetic diversity
Diet Sodas May Not Be As Harmless As You Think
Health Officials to Consider Tightening Vaccine Exemptions
Scientists Understand Heart Disease Better, Still Give Bad Advice
The Megalodon's Descendants
Famous African American Scientists & Innovators: Part II
Swine Flu – A Virus or a Bacteria?
Cyber Wolves in (Fire)Sheep Clothing
Why Do Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears?
15 Months Later, Rediscovered San Francisco Plant Thrives

A woody grass called Miscanthus is one of the biofuel feedstocks being examined.

Despite all the buzz around biofuels, commercial production has been slow to scale up. As a result, the EPA scaled back its goals for advanced biofuels earlier this year. Still, some Bay Area scientists recently made a breakthrough that could move us one step closer to a day when our cars run on fuels from plants.

The idea behind biofuels is pretty simple. Plants take sunlight and use that energy to make sugars. The biofuels industry wants to transform those sugars into fuel. That requires some molecular rearranging, so they’re looking to microbes to do the job.

At the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville, e.coli is the microbe of choice. Researcher Greg Bokinsky shows me racks of glass tubes that are home to e.coli cultures that have been biologically engineered. They’ve created e.coli that munch on a woody plant called switchgrass.

If you’ve heard anything about biofuels, you’ve probably heard about ethanol that’s made from corn, which you can buy at gas stations today. But ethanol can’t be transported long distances because it corrodes pipelines. And using corn for fuel has also raised some concerns.

“Corn is used extensively to feed animals. Corn is also used for some food as well, human consumption. So we want to be very careful about using corn itself,” says Jay Keasling, CEO of JBEI.

Engineering Microbes

JBEI was founded 5 years ago with a $125 million grant from the Department of Energy. It’s a partnership between UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and other groups with the mission of creating biofuels from plants that aren’t used for food – also known as cellulosic biofuels.

“Switchgrass is one that gets mentioned a lot,” says Keasling. “Switchgrass is a native to much of the Midwest. It grows without a lot of water and fertilizer.”

But unlocking the energy inside switchgrass is no easy task. “Plants have evolved to be tough. There are beetles, there are fungi that want to attack them all the time and get access to those sugars. So they’ve evolved defense mechanisms,” he says.

The first line of defense is like a barbed wire fence. Plants protect their sugars with a tough material called lignin. Keasling’s team breaks through it using a liquid salt solution.

Once it’s gone, the sugars still have to be broken down further. Most companies use industrial enzymes to do that. But this is where Keasling’s engineered e.coli comes in.

“What we’ve done is we’ve gone to places like the rainforest in Puerto Rico and to compost piles. We’ve sequenced the organisms that are breaking down that biomass and then cloned those genes into e.coli,” Keasling says.

The e.coli break down the sugars for themselves, saving an expensive step in the process. Using the sugars, they produce fuels. “Really they’re pooping out fuels,” says Keasling. “And these are fuels that can be put directly into gasoline engines, diesel engines or jet engines.” These microbes are an exciting breakthrough for Keasling, since they could help bring down the cost of production.

Federal Goals Scale Back

The federal government was once excited about cellulosic biofuels, too. In 2006, former President George W Bush included them in his State of the Union address, saying “we'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switchgrass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within 6 years.”

Congress set up tax credits for cellulosic biofuels with a goal of seeing 500 million gallons produced in 2012. Since then, the industry has faced a harsh reality. The goal for next year has been cut back to just 12 million gallons.

“It was oversold. There was a lot of hype around it. It’s a tough problem. We can’t expect this to happen overnight,” says Keasling.

Keasling says if there’s anything that casts a shadow over biofuels, it’s the price of their biggest competitor. “If oil is under $100 a barrel, we’re not going to see many advanced biofuels on the market. They’re just not going to be able to compete. It’s virtually impossible,” he says.

Chris Somerville, director of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), agrees. “The costs are still not where we need them to be.” EBI is also run by UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, among other collaborators. It was started with a $500 million grant from BP.

Like JBEI, EBI’s mission is also engineering cellulosic biofuels. They’ve developed specially engineered yeast that eat feedstocks like miscanthus. “It’s going to be another 10 years before it really scales up. And it’s not because there’s a big problem. It’s just takes time to build and bring online big industrial facilities that are first of a kind.”

Companies, including BP, are now building commercial-scale biofuel plants. But the science is evolving so quickly, Somerville says it’s hard for companies to commit. “If you’re a company that has to lay down some hundreds of millions of dollars for a new facility and you look around and everyday, there’s new advances, you think, well maybe I’ll wait until next week and build a better facility.”

Although some in Congress are impatient over the progress of advanced biofuels, Somerville is confident that it’s just a matter of time before the industry scales up. “What we’re really trying to do is change the world. And we have this huge entrenched energy sector. And so there’s lots of entrenched players that don’t welcome change.”

And he says, if we care about addressing climate change, we won’t be able to do it without remaking the fuels that go in our cars.

In many PTSD patients, sleep problems such as insomnia and nightmares are the most common complaint. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kreep" target="_blank">Kreep</a>.)

Sam Brace doesn’t want to talk about what he saw when he was a soldier in Iraq eight years ago. Brace is an inpatient at a PTSD treatment center run by the Department of Veterans Affairs in Menlo Park, and that trauma is something he’s actively trying not to dwell on. But what he can’t control are his dreams.

"When I was overseas we hit an IED, um…" he says, trailing off. "When I have a nightmare normally it’s something related to that. "

In the past, scientists who study PTSD thought of nightmares and insomnia as byproducts of the disorder, side effects that could only be targeted through daytime interventions, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. But that view is changing.

In Sam Brace and others afflicted with PTSD, nightmares and insomnia lead to alcoholism and drug abuse, and the inability to function well during the day. Doctors who treat PTSD say that sleep is central to the disorder, and that restoring it may go a long way toward helping patients return to normal lives.

"Wacky" dreams are healthy dreams

Steve Woodward, a psychiatrist with the National Center for PTSD in Menlo Park says the hallmark of a healthy dream is that it seems kind of random.

"They’re wacky," says Woodward. "They associate things that are not normally associated."

PTSD dreams, in contrast, are like a broken record: the same, real-life event, played over and over again. Woodward says he's seen patients haunted by the same true-to-life nightmare for twenty years.

The question scientists had was: why? Why can't people with PTSD sleep normally?

Healthy sleep as therapy

Matthew Walker is a sleep researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. One of his particular interests is in rapid eye movement, or REM. It’s the stage of sleep where a lot of dreaming occurs.

REM sleep is also the only time of the day that the brain stops producing a kind of adrenaline called norepinephrine. That fact struck Walker as an intriguing mystery. Why would rapid eye movement sleep suppress this neurochemical, he wondered. Is there any function to that?

What Walker and his colleagues found is that in healthy people, REM sleep is kind of like therapy. It's an adrenaline-free environment where the brain can process its memories while stripping away their sharp, emotional edges.

"When you come back the next day," says Walker, "yes, you can better recollect [the memory]. But also, it doesn’t trigger that same visceral reaction that you had at the time of learning."

Emotions are useful, says Walker, because they show us what really matters to us. But it's not useful to hold onto what he calls the "emotional blanket," that accompanied the original event. The emotions, he says, "have done their job. Now it’s time to hold on to the information of that memory, but let go of the emotion."

"Broken" REM sleep

Walker believes that in many people who have PTSD, REM sleep is broken. Something about PTSD either causes the brain to be overly sensitive to norepinephrine, or forces the brain to create too much of it. The brain's adrenaline system is effectively out of whack.

As a result, REM sleep is no longer theraputic. The PTSD brain can't process tough memories, so it just cycles through them, again and again.

Which begs a question: What if you could change that? What if you could make the adrenaline go away?

An old drug finds a new role

Murray Raskind directs Mental Health Services for the Department of Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System. About a decade ago, he became interested in a drug called Prazosin, which was traditionally used to treat high blood pressure.

Prazosin can be bought generically for about ten cents a pill. It can have the side effect of making people dizzy. For the most part, it's been supplanted by other, more recent hypertension drugs, whose effects last longer. But Prazosin turned out to have another use: It makes the PTSD brain less receptive to adrenaline.

As a result, as Raskind discovered, prazosin can change the way those patients dream.

Raskind tells the story of one of the first vets he ever treated with prazosin, a veteran Raskind calls Charles, who spent 13 months in a combat infantry unit in Vietnam.

What haunted Charles was one specific event from his service: Under an ambush by Vietcong forces, Charles and a fellow soldier, his closest friend, found themselves trapped in a landing zone in the jungle. Charles watched as his friend was killed by a mortar round. Fragments of the round pierced Charles' right knee, leaving him unable to run. Charles was saved at the last minute by troops in a Huey helicopter, just as Vietcong forces climbed through the wire to reach him.

"This near-death experience," says Raskind, "and even more distressing, the death of his best friend, whose death he felt he was unable to prevent, haunted him most nights, every week, year in and year out."

After a few weeks of Prazosin, Charles came in for a follow-up appointment. He told Raskind that he didn't think the drug was working. He was still dreaming, just about something else.

According to Raskind, the dream went like this: "I'm in my fifth-grade classroom. And there’s a test, and if I don’t pass the test, I’m not gonna be promoted to the next grade. And I never even got the assignment!”

It was the stress dream, says Raskind, of a healthy brain, trying to work things out. "I said 'Charles, that’s MY nightmare!'" Raskind recalls.

So far the studies on prazosin have been small (abstracts can be found online, here and here and here – as well as of a 2008 round-up of data, here) but promising in decreasing nightmares and helping people sleep longer.

Other small studies involving non-combat PTSD – people who had been victims of crime and sexual assault, as well as refugees – found an improvement in the quality of their dreams, and overall sleep, as well.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is undergoing its own study on prazosin in PTSD, which is taking part in 13 medical centers across the country. But is already prescribing the drug to about 15 percent of its PTSD patients — about 70,000 people.

Murray Raskind, for one, would like to see that number rise.

"For us," he says, "it's a simple thing that works."