Tag: "kqed"
Go Bioneers!
Over the past 8 years of being a Bioneer, I have learned that mushrooms might save the world and that Biomimicry was in action when a man who found a cocklebur stuck to his sock invented Velcro.
Post on Jul 16, 2008 by Amy Gotliffe
Producer's Notes: California's Water Future
Could the future of potable water in California be in recycling wastewater? The Orange County Water District thinks so. In February of this year it opened its advanced water treatment plant, which produces 50 million gallons of potable water per day. It took them 13 years to finish the project. They spent a lot of [...]
Post on Jul 14, 2008 by Gabriela Quirós
Reporter's Notes: Drugs In Our Drinking Water
It's tricky to talk about pharmaceuticals in the drinking water without risking two really unfortunate side effects: 1) Make people panic that their tap water is unsafe. 2) Send listeners running to Costco to buy pallet-loads of overpriced, highly packaged, and often dubiously-sourced bottled water. You can never really say enough about everything that's wrong [...]
Post on Jul 11, 2008 by Amy Standen
Quest Picks: Talking Elephants at the Oakland Zoo
Can elephants feel seismic waves? Scientists have known for years that elephants can communicate. By using low frequency vocals, called rumbles, elephants can 'talk' with eachother, sometimes communicating from very long distances. But the new question being asked by some scientists is: can elephants feel those rumbles in the earth? Biologist Dr. Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell from [...]
Post on Jul 11, 2008 by Shuka Kalantari
Water Becoming California’s Gold
For those in the East Bay, a lush green lawn for lounging may become a thing of the past. Photo Credit Michele Nikoloff It was the talk of my Wednesday morning Pilates class. "I'm letting my lawn die, but saving the plants. Plants are harder to replace." "We only lived in our house six months [...]
Post on Jul 11, 2008 by Jim Gunshinan
Weather Mystery: Warm Rain and Icy Hail?
For this past patriotic weekend, I was on the other side of the coast. Namely, driving from Washington DC into the rural wilderness of Virginia for a get away. It was not the man-made fireworks that grabbed my attention but the activity of thunderclouds. I was reading out loud as we drove down I-64 towards [...]
Post on Jul 10, 2008 by Cat
Why no Y? Gender-bending Transcaucasian mole voles
I've always been fascinated by weird animals. Especially those with out-of-the-ordinary genetics. Transcaucasian mole vole. Image Courtesy of Heike HimmelreichOne of my favorites is a little burrowing mammal called a Transcaucasian mole vole. These guys live in the Caucasus Mountains of Armenia, Iran, Turkey, and Azerbaijan. There they are born, live, have babies and die. [...]
Post on Jul 07, 2008 by Dr. Barry Starr
A fishy odyssey through the delta
Talk about a wild ride. Every year, millions of fish make a strange and harrowing detour through the Skinner Fish Facility, part of the State Water Project's facilities in the Delta. In my last post, I wrote about my visit to the Banks Pumping Plant, whose giant pumps slurp water from the Delta to help [...]
Post on Jul 07, 2008 by Ann Dickinson
Planetary Robotic Roundup
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury-artist concept. Photo by: NASA I've been waiting for the "whole story" on Martian ice at the Phoenix lander site to unfold more completely, but the chemical analyses have not yet run their full courses-so I've decided to widen the focus on this blog to give a status report on current [...]
Post on Jul 04, 2008 by Ben Burress
Reporter's Notes: California Ablaze
One thing you try to learn, covering these stories, is how to navigate around the tricky subject of climate change. The trickiness isn't if it's happening, but rather what, exactly, it's doing, what the effects are. Take this year's particularly nasty fire season, for example. We've had the driest spring in 80 years, and warm [...]
Post on Jul 03, 2008 by Amy Standen
Wire Snares in Africa
Photo by: Melissa Batson And how they put a snare in the plan for chimps and humans to live together. In the Budongo Forests of Uganda, a large group of Chimpanzees, named by researchers The Sonso Group, attempt to thrive in their natural habitat, eating plants and small prey. At the same time, humans who [...]
Post on Jul 03, 2008 by Amy Gotliffe
Reporter's Notes: Wildlife CSI
I knew I was in trouble when I saw the jars. Big jars, filled with tinted liquid, with weird things suspended in them. Things that definitely used to be alive, and that I would not have wanted to see when they WERE alive. "One of my favorites is this one here," says my host, Senior [...]
Post on Jun 27, 2008 by David Gorn
HERS It Is
Blower door equipment is used to measure a home's air leaks. A blower door test is part of the evaluation for determining a home's HERS Index. Photo by: D&R International Remember the day when most men knew the horsepower of their muscle cars? Now most of us are concerned about miles per gallon. But what [...]
Post on Jun 27, 2008 by Jim Gunshinan
Progress at the Park
Penguin-cams are now at the California Academy of Sciences. Upon writing this blog, the California Academy of Sciences is scheduled to open in 94 days. After years of planning, staff is contemplating two digits – literally three months until opening. It seems surreal. But progress at the park is moving along at a steady clip. [...]
Post on Jun 25, 2008 by Cat
Genetic Testing or Recreational Genomics?
Do you have a note from your doctor? So much information, so little understandingOn June 9, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) sent letters to 13 different direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies telling them that they were not in compliance with California laws and needed to stop providing testing. The two main issues appear to [...]
Post on Jun 23, 2008 by Dr. Barry Starr
Plastic not Fantastic
Humans produce 500 billion plastic bags annually. In China, they recently banned it. Australia, Bangladesh, Ireland, Italy, South Africa,Taiwan, Mumbai and India have either banned it or discouraged its use by raising taxes. And on March 27, 2007, San Francisco became the first city in the USA to ban it from large grocery stores. More [...]
Post on Jun 23, 2008 by Shuka Kalantari
Cameras that float through the air
Cris Benton inspects his kite aerial photography rig before sending it up in the sky. Credit: Jane Liaw. UC Berkeley architecture professor Charles 'Cris' Benton is a kite aerial photography (KAP) enthusiast. Benton is well-known in the KAP world for sharing his knowledge and love of the art. In this art form, a camera is [...]
Post on Jun 23, 2008 by Jane Liaw
Reporter's Notes: How to ID a Bullet
I was excited to be working on this story. After all, it's not that often that a primarily environmental reporter gets to spend a couple weeks focusing on forensics technology and the debate over gun control (let alone receive firearms training on a 38-special from a senior criminalist at the DOJ's California Criminalistics Institute). In [...]
Post on Jun 20, 2008 by Amy Standen
Turning Plastic Bags into Beautiful Bolsas
And how this metamorphosis saves Monkeys! Colombia: a beautiful country, with incredible forests and diverse wildlife, but like many other countries, a trash problem. With no formal trash collection system, the forests and villages suffer from scattered plastic bags, endangering wildlife and creating a mess on village streets. One such village was Los Limites, until [...]
Post on Jun 19, 2008 by Amy Gotliffe
A Village Takes on Global Warming
Each big storm with a high tide and an onshore wind takes a big bite out of Sarichef.Photo By Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition In an email this week from John Woodward, an Alaska builder and Home Energy author, he wrote, "I put together a working/management group to manage the relocation of the community of [...]
Post on Jun 16, 2008 by Jim Gunshinan
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