Artist's rendering of exoplanets around a star. (Credit: NASA)

The Earth may not be as unique as we think it is. That's according to findings announced today by UC Berkeley. Astronomers there believe that Earth-sized planets may be more abundant in the universe than previously thought.

For five years, a team of scientists lead by UC Berkeley watched 166 stars, similar in size to our Sun and all within 80 light years of Earth. In all, they discovered extra-solar planets or "exoplanets" orbiting 22 of the stars. Some are as large as Jupiter while others are about three times the size of Earth, the smallest planet they can detect. Smaller planets were found more frequently than the larger planets.

"We found smaller planets in spades," said astronomer Andrew Howard of UC Berkeley. Using the data, Howard and his team created a statistical model to predict what other planets might be present. "We extrapolated that trend down to Earth-sized planets."

Howard says the data shows that nearly one in four stars like our Sun could have Earth-sized planets. "This is really the first quantitative estimate of the fraction of sun-like stars that have Earth-like planets. Before, the guesses were all over the map. Some people thought it was 100%. Some people thought it was one in a million."

The 33 planets found in the study orbit very close to their stars, meaning temperatures there are most likely too high to support life. The discoveries were made with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii using 10-meter ground telescopes. The planets were found using the "wobble" of the stars – the subtle movement that occurs when a star is pulled by the gravity of its orbiting planets.

The announcement joins a number of exoplanet discoveries in recent months, including NASA's finding of two exoplanets in August. Today's findings were published in the journal Science.

Howard says while the ultimate goal is to find Earth-like planets that could have liquid water, this finding is an important first step. "People have wondered for millennia: is the Earth common or is it rare? And we're starting to learn that the Earth is not a one-off in the universe. It may have cousins out there."

For more on how scientists find exoplanets, check out this QUEST story.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Artist's rendering of the LCROSS spacecraft and its upper stage Centaur rocket. Image courtesy of NASA.

Reported for KQEDnews.org.

Last year, NASA scientists in Mountain View made international headlines when they crashed a rocket into a permanently shadowed crater on the moon's south pole and announced they had found water there.

On Thursday, they unveiled new findings about the amount of water on the moon and a "treasure trove" of gases and metals buried within the lunar soil, which along with the water, could be extracted to make rocket fuel on the moon. The research appears in the October 22nd edition of the journal Science.

"If you took the 10 kilometer region around the LCROSS site, that is said to have 5 percent concentration of water, that would be equivalent to a billion gallons of water," said Tony Colaprete, the principal investigator on the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission to search for water on the moon. A billion gallons is enough to fill 1500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The lunar scientists now suspect that there is 50 percent more water than they had previously estimated.

Colaprete also said that given the large number of craters on the moon, which function as "cold traps" that accumulate molecules of water over billions of years, "potentially, you could have 10 to 100 times that total amount of water."

"We found some of the coldest places in the solar system and they’re on our moon. These places have temperatures that are so cold that they can preserve water ice in a vacuum for billions of years," said Michael Wargo, a chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The lunar water is thought to exist in "oases," or deposits, instead of being uniformly distributed across the moon. It also exists mainly in the form of water ice crystals.

"That's good news because water ice is very much a friendly resource to work with. It's easy to extract and turn it into a resource, you don’t have to warm it very much, you can pull it out of the dirt really easy," said Colaprete, who described a process of extraction whereby the ice-bearing lunar soil could be heated to 100 degrees Celsius to collect the water vapor.

During the live NASA teleconference, the scientists said that the amount of other materials they detected on the moon – including mercury, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, sodium and silver – may make up as much as 20 percent of the lunar dust plume kicked up by the impact of the LCROSS rocket.

Both discoveries could be instrumental in one day making it easier to set up a lunar colony, the researchers said, because of the high cost of transporting materials to the moon, which can exceed thousands of dollars per pound.

Last year, NASA shot a Centaur rocket carrying the LCROSS and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and in October, they deliberately crashed the rocket at 6,000 mph into Cabeus, a cold, dark crater on the moon’s south pole that hasn’t seen sunlight in billions of years.

The impact sent up a plume of lunar soil and debris several miles over the crater’s rim, exposing it to sunlight. Meanwhile, the spacecraft collected data for four crucial minutes, allowing scientists to analyze the chemical makeup of the ejected lunar soil, before it too crashed into the crater. Since then, the LCROSS team has been sifting through the information to glean clues about earth’s 4.5 billion year-old neighbor.

So how did the water get there? According to Colaprete, it’s likely a combination of sources. One way it could have arrived is from solar wind depositing hydrogen into the lunar granules which contain oxygen atoms. Another way is from impacts by icy comets slamming into the moon, a theory supported by the observation of these other chemicals and hydrocarbons that also exist in comets.

The last manned lunar mission was Apollo 17 in 1972. In recent years, the U.S., along with Japan, China and India have launched various unmanned lunar mission. NASA is scheduled to launch two other lunar exploratory missions, GRAIL and LADEE in 2011 and 2012, respectively, to map the moon’s interior structure and further analyze the moon’s dust.

Sometime in the next several decades, a new generation of astronauts may return to set up a lunar outpost, setting the stage for future missions to Mars.

“In the next 20 years, next 10 years, you’re going to see the moon continue to expand in its diversity, and its complexity and its interest, among the communities of both laypeople and professionals and that’s going to pull us there,” said Colaprete.

Instruments currently orbiting the moon are allowing the scientists to map in much greater detail hydrogen-rich, lunar "permafrost" regions that may contain deposits of water ice and other compounds that could help support a future lunar colony.

But before that lunar colony can be set up, there has to be a more sophisticated understanding of where exactly the water is and how easy or difficult it will be to mine when it's found.

"The next step is to look at smaller and smaller scales at the lunar surface of the distribution of water as a resource," said Colaprete.

"If I were an astronaut walking along, how far do I have to walk before I find some water and how extensive are these pockets of water?"

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Removal of culverts at 12th Street will increase tidal flow into Lake Merritt (credit: Amy Miller)

Reported for KQEDnews.org

Excavators rumbled and dust filled the air in downtown Oakland this week as the demolition of a 12-lane stretch of roadway running along the south end of Lake Merritt got underway.

But the demise of the 2,000-foot long section of 12th Street, dubbed the “world’s shortest freeway” by locals, is more than just a road project. It’s part of the most visible and expensive phase of a multimillion-dollar rebirth of Lake Merritt, an Oakland landmark that gained renown as North America’s first wildlife refuge in 1870, yet which has been plagued for decades by environmental, architectural and public access problems.

For as long as most Oakland residents can remember, the water in the 140-acre lake has been stagnant and polluted. Many of the surrounding historic buildings and structures have been in a state of disrepair. And narrow trails around the lake have been pitted with potholes.

In November 2002, more than 80 percent of Oakland voters approved Measure DD, a $198 million dollar bond measure to fund water quality and parks projects throughout the city. Of that, $115 million was allocated for Lake Merritt.

“Our number one goal is to improve water quality and improve habitat in the lake,” said Joel Peter, the city of Oakland’s Measure DD program manager.

Measure DD Program Manager, Joel Peter (credit: Amy Miller)

“The number two goal is to re-establish connections at the lake. In addition to reconnecting the lake and the bay hydrologically, we’re also trying to reconnect people with nature — because people don’t even realize that the lake’s part of the bay.”

Peter’s task is to oversee more than 50 projects described in the bond. They include restoring creeks and wetlands, improving water quality in Lake Merritt, widening pedestrian and cycling paths and building better roadways to calm traffic around the lake. The project is scheduled to be completed in 2015.

The work on 12th Street is the most extensive piece of the restoration. Crews are reconfiguring the 12-lane road to a six-lane boulevard, lined with trees, a bicycle lane and footpath, all adjacent to a new 4-acre park.

And where an earth-fill dam under the street now restricts the flow of water by forcing it through narrow culverts, a bridge will extend instead, allowing the bay’s tides to flow in and out more freely through a wider channel.

All of this, combined with the other improvements to the area, makes the Measure DD effort what Peter calls “the most wide-ranging and complex series of projects ever undertaken by the City of Oakland.”

Not Really a Lake

Although commonly thought of as a freshwater, man-made lake, Lake Merritt is actually a tidal lagoon that formed after the last ice age where several creeks within the surrounding 4,650-acre watershed empty into San Francisco Bay. The “lake” is connected to San Francisco Bay by a half-mile-long channel, which allows its salty water to rise and fall along with the bay’s tides.

Peter said lack of public awareness about what Lake Merritt really is contributes to the misconception that the lake is actually dirtier than it really is.

“People expect a pristine, clear, Sierra-type lake,” he said. “It’s actually a tidal slough. And if they knew it was salt water and what they are smelling in many cases is just natural things you find around San Francisco Bay in terms of algae growth and mud flats and that sort of thing, actually the water quality in the lake is not terrible before we started this project. But I think that is the perception.”

The heady odor is exactly what Dr. Samuel Merritt smelled in 1854 when the successful San Francisco physician purchased 23 acres around the shoreline of the tidal slough that would later bear his name. Merritt, who became the mayor of Oakland in 1867, was also a shrewd businessman who realized the value of his real estate holdings would increase if the pungent marsh became a recreational lake. So, in 1869, he used his own money to build a dam across the mouth of the slough near where 12th Street is today so that the water level in the lake could be controlled.

The Lake Merritt Channel in 1908 at low tide (credit: Oakland Public Library)

The presence of more than a hundred different species of birds including ducks, geese, pelicans, egrets, herons and cormorants also proved to be a great draw for hunters. To alleviate the dangerous gunfire so close to town, in 1870, Merritt was able to persuade the state legislature to designate Lake Merritt as the first state wildlife refuge in North America.

Over the next century, the lake was dredged. Its surrounding marshlands were filled. And the city of Oakland rose up around its 3-mile perimeter. Bit by bit, the channel that connects the lake to San Francisco Bay, which had been up to a quarter mile wide in some places, was filled in.

Today, the channel is an average 110 feet wide — even narrower where it crosses under 10th and 12th Streets. The steady narrowing has restricted the flow of water in and out of Lake Merritt, which has meant less mixing of the water, and less tidal flushing of the lake, which impacts the health of fish and other aquatic organisms.

The Lake Merritt Channel today at high tide (credit: Amy Miller)

But the encroachment of automobiles may have done the most harm.

“The roadways kept getting pushed wider and wider,” said Peter, “and the lake itself and the park around it was less emphasized. And maintenance has fallen off due to budget issues. It became a bit shabby around the edges. People called it ‘the jewel of Oakland’ but felt it had lost its polish.”

Citizens Unite

By 2001, the problems had reached a breaking point. City leaders commissioned a study called the Lake Merritt Master Plan to look at possible solutions. But the plan excluded the problematic south end of the lake.

This exclusion was likely because at the same time, with the backing of then-mayor Jerry Brown, the Oakland Diocese began a campaign to purchase land in front of the historic Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center at the south end of the lake to build a massive cathedral.

With a group of citizens, graphic designer and longtime Oakland resident Naomi Schiff began to organize against more private development on the lake. “Some of us didn’t feel that it was a good idea for Lake Merritt to become a reflecting pond for a church. Any church,” Schiff said.

Schiff, along with a number of architects, community and historical groups, landscape architects and urban planners, founded the Coalition of Advocates for Lake Merritt (CALM). In the process of worrying about the cathedral, the group’s members made sure to be at the table for Lake Merritt Master Plan meetings. They’d done so much research and made so much noise that ultimately, the city asked them to submit a plan of their own for the south end of the lake.

“And so we did,” said Schiff. “And even though we didn’t have any money or source of funding, we cobbled together a proposal which was to narrow 12th Street to six lanes and put in a park.”

CALM member James Vann was one of the architects who worked on the proposal. “CALM felt that that end of the lake could become a destination if we figured out how to address circulation problems and created areas where people could congregate,” said Vann.

After dozens of brainstorming and outreach meetings, CALM came up with a proposal which had the community’s endorsement. “We also put pressure on the city because this was public land and it could not just be given away for private use. There had to be an open and competitive process,” said Vann.

Their proposal was approved.

“Sometimes you feel like you’re David and Goliath and you’re going to lose but somehow, we didn’t lose,” Schiff said. “Ultimately, it was a good thing that the cathedral people came up with this crazy idea because it galvanized all this creative thinking. And it worked”.

The Kaiser Convention Center and 12th Street demolition at Lake Merritt (credit: Amy Miller)

Frustrated by years of meetings and plans designed to address the problems at Lake Merritt with few results, Oakland City councilman Danny Wan and his successor, councilwoman Pat Kernighan and others got behind the citizen’s group proposal.

They all convinced Oakland to put a $198 million bond measure on the ballot.

Work Begins, Then Stops

After Measure DD passed in 2002, it took the city two years to complete the designs and coordinate logistics. Actual restoration work on Lake Merritt finally started in 2004.

One of the first jobs was to address the lake’s water quality, which “is better now than it has been, especially if you go way back to 120 years ago when the raw sewage came in,” said Richard Bailey, executive director of the Lake Merritt Institute, a non-profit organization contracted by the city to remove floating trash from the lake several times a week.

But the lake is listed as “impaired” under the federal Clean Water Act for trash and low oxygen levels, Bailey said.

“We also have high bacteria levels but we’re not listed for that,” added Bailey.

There are 62 storm drain outfalls that flow directly into Lake Merritt.

“The biggest problem with the lake is not litter, it’s not oxygen, its ignorance,” Bailey said. “People don’t realize that storm drains go directly to public water.”

Bailey and his group of volunteers remove between 1,000 and 5,000 pounds of trash from the lake per month, depending on the season.

Richard Bailey of the Lake Merritt Institute removes all kinds of trash from the lake (credit: Josh Cassidy)

To address the trash problem in the lake, Measure DD has funded the construction of four trash collection units on large storm drain lines to intercept and capture floatable debris and sediment before it gets to the lake.

In another project to improve the lake’s water quality, the Lake Merritt Institute installed three aeration fountains and Measure DD funds repaired one existing fountain around the lake to help reduce the stagnant water in some places. But each of the fountains only treats one acre of water. Lake Merritt covers 140 acres.

Planners are hopeful that the lack of dissolved oxygen in the lake will be alleviated after the completion of another key feature of the project: $27 million to improve the Lake Merritt Channel. Construction will involve removal of the culverts at 12th and 10th Streets that have restricted access for people and water between the lake and the channel for more than 100 years.

“The volume of water exchanged at every tide will be double what it is now,” Peter said. “We’re also creating a new tidal marsh by taking out some of the filled land and grading it very carefully down to the sea level and putting in tidal marsh plants to reestablish some of that original habitat.”

New pedestrian and bike trails will be built to pass beneath a new bridge on 10th Street to connect the 12th Street area with the Channel Park to the west. Funds will also go toward improving Channel Park, which teems with birds and fish yet, is virtually unused because of lack of access from Lake Merritt.

Work on the Lake Merritt channel improvements is scheduled to start early next year.

After getting off to what was perceived by many as a slow start, most of the restoration work around the lake has been moving along as scheduled. But in 2006, parts of the project hit a temporary road block when a group of residents called, “Friends of the Lake,” filed a lawsuit to prevent the city from cutting down dozens of trees around the lake to accommodate the new construction.

In late 2007, after an environmental review determined that the trees could be removed without negatively impacting the ecosystem, the lawsuit was dismissed and work resumed.

Budget issues were also responsible for some delays. At a cost of nearly $54 million, the 12th Street project is by far the most expensive part of the plan. When it was originally bid out in 2005, the construction industry in the Bay Area was booming. The city only received one bid, said Peter, and it was significantly over budget. They had to find another way to raise more money.

It took a couple of years for Peter to make up a funding shortfall with matching grants from agencies such as the Federal Highway Bridge Program and the California Coastal Conservancy. During that time, the recession was hitting and construction bids became much more competitive. Peter had his choice of seven bids, all well within the original budget for the project.

“We had the incredible fortune that Measure DD passed when people were really flush and now we’re spending it when construction costs are low,” said Schiff.

The 12th Street project broke ground on May 6, 2010. It will transform south end of the lake by reconfiguring what was a dangerous and inaccessible 12-lane expressway at the edge of a lake into a 6-lane, tree-lined boulevard with signalized intersections and crosswalks.

The redesign will also create new parkland at the edge of the lake and remove unsafe and unsightly tunnels which have been locked and gated by the city since the early 1990’s.

The work on 12th Street will also establish direct pedestrian, bicycle and boat access from Lake Merritt to Channel Park — setting the stage for what will one day be a direct route from the lake all the way out to the bay.

Lake Merritt’s Road Diet

Many of the Measure DD projects already have been completed. A major part of the renovation involved reducing 4-lane roadways around the lake to two lanes, putting the lake’s major thoroughfares on what is in essence a “road diet” by reducing the number of traffic lanes in order to improve traffic flow. The concept is counterintuitive, planners say, but after running computer simulations of all the traffic around the lake, they figured out how to make it work with better-designed systems.

Two of the affected roadways are Lakeshore Avenue along the southwest side and Lakeside Drive on the southeast. Lakeshore was once a high-speed commute route. By November 2009, it had been reduced to two lanes and bicycle lanes were added in each direction. Better pedestrian crossings, and a 2-way left turn lane in the middle keeps the traffic flowing.

Lakeshore Avenue after going on a "road diet"; Bioswale within the median island (credit: Josh Cassidy)

Many of the historic buildings and structures around the lake already have received major upgrades with Measure DD funds. The Municipal Boathouse was completely renovated to LEED Gold certification, a top green building standard. It now houses the Lake Chalet restaurant on the top floor and public boating facilities on the bottom level.

Similarly, crews rebuilt the East 18th Street Pier and renovated the Pergola and Colonnade, a scenic row of roofed columns built in 1913 that mark the end of the eastern arm of the lake.

Lake Merritt’s beloved Children’s Fairyland received $3.1 million to build a new Children’s Theater and an addition to the Puppet Theater, which holds the distinction of being the oldest professional puppet theater in the United States.

And at several points around the lake, storm drain outlets were redirected so that water from the paved surfaces runs through a bioswale: a gently sloping trough of tall grasses, filtering the runoff through their root structures and a special permeable soil before it goes into the lake. Trails and bike paths also have been widened and repaved with long-lasting, sustainable materials.

Pride But Concern About Upkeep

On a recent sunny August afternoon, Melissa McDonald and Serena Speth, both from Oakland, were sitting on the lake’s edge with their toddlers.

“It’s fantastic, I love it!” McDonald said. “The pathways and the landscaping are so much better and it’s cleaned up a lot. It’s easier to convince people who don’t live in Oakland to come to the lake now.”

Retired Oakland natives Joseph Hardy and Anthony Lefall walk around the lake every day together from 8AM to noon.

“Everybody’s talking about it and it’s all positive from the citizens that frequent the lake, the taxpayers,” said Lefall.

Oakland natives Joseph Hardy (left) and Anthony Lefall walk around Lake Merritt every morning (credit: Amy Miller)

But both said they are concerned about what might happen in the years ahead.

“After they do all this remodeling, it’s the upkeep,” said Hardy. “These potholes, the birds using the bathroom all over the grass where you can’t lay and enjoy it. This graffiti, if you look all these containers all over the place. Why can’t they have someone maintain it? Maintenance, that’s what we’re concerned about. Maintenance.”

Naomi Schiff echoes their concerns. As part of the Measure DD Community Coalition, CALM’s next task is to try to find the funding to ensure that Lake Merritt continues to thrive and shine.

“I see that as the big challenge,” she said. “And the drawback is that we’re going to have to find money and there is never any government money for non-capital improvements.”

Overall, Measure DD will be a big win for Lake Merritt and the passionate residents who call it their own. Architect James Vann said he is looking forward to Lake Merritt finally living up to its potential.
“With the expanded new pedestrian facilities, family facilities that are coming online that it will become truly the gem of Oakland, Oakland’s jewel and we’ll see many more uses than are there today. That’s my hope.”

View Lake Merritt in a larger map
Google Map produced by Josh Cassidy

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The 2011 Chevy Volt at the 2010 Plug-In Conference. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

Originally reported for KQEDnews.org.

After years of stops and starts, electric cars and plug-in hybrids are on the cusp of a new era of mainstream acceptance, starting this year.

That was the message this week from automakers, government officials and utility operators at the Plug-In 2010 conference, a major international gathering of alternative vehicles at the San Jose Convention Center.

“Now the rubber hits the road”, said Craig Childers, an air resources engineer with the California Air Resources Board. “This is the last conference where we don’t have the cars. When we do this again next year, there’s going to be thousands of people driving these cars and it’s going to be great to see how that happens. We’ll learn from it and continue to evolve.”

A large amount of attention at the event went to two vehicles: the battery electric Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid. Both groundbreaking cars will begin appearing in showrooms in December.

At Tuesday’s conference, GM announced the Volt’s sticker price will be $41,000. A federal tax credit will bring the cost of the vehicle down by $7,500. The Volt also be available to lease for $350 a month for 36 months, assuming a down payment of $2,500.

GM calls the Volt an “extended-range electric vehicle,” which means that the car can go 40 miles on a single battery charge, using no gasoline. An additional 300 miles can be driven as the car uses gasoline to power an on-board generator to make more electricity and power the engine.

Tony Pasowatz, the Volt’s Vehicle Line Director, said that distance is key for getting consumers to overcome their “range anxiety” and trust that the Volt will get them where they need to go without being stranded with an empty battery.

“The Volt gives you an extended range capability that no other electric vehicle can provide you,” Pasowatz said. “So we have a good, solid confident proposition of 340 miles, whereas many electric cars will not achieve the range that they claim because their range is on a city cycle which no one drives, it doesn’t account for running the heating and air conditioning, and it doesn’t account for the degradation of the battery. And if you really only get 50 miles, the question is can that be your everyday car?”

The Nissan Leaf, an all-electric vehicle, which has a range of 100 miles on a single charge, will be made available to consumers by December in five states initially, including California.
To date, there have been 20,000 pre-orders for the Nissan Leaf, with more than 3,000 of those orders coming from prospective buyers in the Bay Area.

Mark Perry from Nissan standing next to the Leaf, an all electric-vehicle. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

For Mark Perry, Director of Product Planning at Nissan, the consumer acceptance of the new generation of electric cars in the state resonates nation-wide. “If there was a barrier to adoption called affordability, that’s been knocked over. If there was a barrier to adoption called charging infrastructure, it’s been knocked over here in CA. There are no barriers now. The entire country is looking at California as a lead.”

The Leaf will cost $32,780, but after the federal tax credit of $7,500, and a California state rebate of $5,000 – which the Volt is not eligible for – the actual price will be $20,280. The Leaf also will be eligible for drivers to take into California’s carpool lanes without having more than one passenger, while the Volt will not.

Ginny and John Pauksta of San Jose paid $99 to reserve a Leaf. “The tipping point for me was the BP oil spill, the frustration of what we’re doing to the environment,” said John Pauksta. “It made me very angry. The fact that we’re fighting wars to protect our oil reserves just got to me. Electric cars were like toys, like glorified golf cars and now major car companies are coming out with electric cars that look like real cars.”

“You can fit five people in it and haul stuff around and the driving range is within a level of tolerance”, added Pauksta, who commutes 44 miles daily to his job in Palo Alto.

Instead of the lead acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries that powered the first generation of electric cars like GM’s EV1 in the 1990s, today’s electric car batteries are made of lithium-ion cells, which are now small enough that they can be easily assembled into battery packs and charged using a simple 120-volt outlet, as Pasowatz did with his Chevy Volt, charging it overnight at the conference center.

With the purchase of a Volt, consumers will get a 120-volt portable charge cord set and the option of GM’s 240-volt cord set, which would cut the charging of the vehicle in half, from eight hours to four hours.

Apart from the advancements in battery technology, a perfect storm of factors seems to brewing to usher in a new, more hospitable climate for electric cars, experts at the event, which runs through Thursday, said.

“The technology is moving ahead. The recognition of getting off of oil is important and I think the car is part of the larger energy environment ecosystem, it’s come to that realization that it is time to solve these problems in a systemic way”, said Pasowatz.

According to the Air Resources Board, there are roughly 20,000 pure electric vehicles in California, including roughly 15,000 small neighborhood electric vehicles that aren’t designed to drive on highways.

Utilities, regulatory agencies and environmental organizations expect those numbers to rise as long as gas prices continue to be high, which makes electricity as a fuel source a particularly attractive option.

“Gasoline is about $3, plus or minus, per gallon,” said Sunil Chhaya, a senior manager at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto. ”Electricity is about 75 cents per gallon, so when you compare operating costs per mile, it’s about a fourth or a fifth the cost of gasoline.”

As the economy improves and worldwide demand for oil grows, gasoline prices may not stay at the current level.

“We’re not sure what gasoline prices are going to look like in the next five to 10 years and it’s widely expected that those will get on an upward trajectory again and start climbing up and beyond four a gallon,” said Childers. “In that case, we’re talking about a very big price difference for electricity. We actually need that because these electric cars are more expensive to build and buy and the only way consumers can afford it is by saving money on fuel."

Moreover, California’s grid, with its mix of hydroelectric power, nuclear power and renewables like solar and wind power, is also cleaner than the nation’s grid — which relies more heavily on power from coal-fired plants. So environmental benefits accrue when drivers plug-in to the grid to charge their vehicles. Chhaya said that “50 to 60 percent of the CO2 emissions can be reduced by using a battery electric vehicle plugged into the state’s grid.”

Still, a big factor for consumers is the sticker price of electric cars. Palo Alto-based Tesla motors offers currently only one electric vehicle line, its sporty Roadster that retails for more than $100,000.

Availability of public charging stations has also been a challenge.

Earlier this year, however, Campbell-based Coulomb Technologies received a $37 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build 4,600 charging stations in nine metro areas, including San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and Los Angeles by September 2011. The charging stations will also feature a new connecting standard adopted in January by the Society of Automotive Engineers so that any electric car can be charged at the charging stations.

For consumers like Kadife Besir-Dunlap, a schoolteacher from Woodland, neither the Chevy Volt nor the Nissan Leaf can compare to her beloved EV1 which was reclaimed by GM in 2002 when her two-year lease expired and GM refused to renew the lease for her or other EV1 owners.

“The Volt is a plug-in, it’s not full electric,” she said. “The car of the future is powered by the fuels of Jurassic time. My frustration is renewed right now. GM could have produced another electric vehicle. They had the technology and a really nice car with the EV1 and they could have reproduced something like that, a more affordable full electric car. A hybrid car is not progress, it’s stagnation.”

Since the tow truck took away her family’s EV1, Besir-Dunlap has been driving an all-electric Toyota RAV4. Earlier this month, under a partnership with Tesla Motors, Toyota announced plans to start production up again on the all-electric RAV4 in 2012 at the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont.

Still, some people at the conference couldn’t wait to plug-in and drive.

“I see nothing but increases in gas prices so I want to get out of the polluting, expensive internal combustion world and into the less expensive, less polluting world of electric vehicles,” said Jared Alaqua, a 28 year-old Novato resident pursuing his M.B.A. “And I hear that they actually perform better.”

Check out these QUEST resources for related information:

Waiting for the Electric Car

Plug-in Hybrids

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Artist's rendering of the LCROSS spacecraft and its upper stage Centaur rocket. Image courtesy of NASA.

Originally reported for KQED News.

Last year, NASA scientists in Mountain View made international headlines when they crashed a rocket into the moon and announced they had found water there.

On Tuesday, they revealed that the water – which exists as ice and vapor – isn’t spread out in vast oceans, but rather is concentrated in oases, and that the lunar surface appears to contain a wealth of other materials, from mercury to magnesium.

Both discoveries could be instrumental in one day making it easier to set up a lunar colony, the researchers said, because of the high cost of transporting materials to the moon, which can exceed thousands of dollars per pound.

“It’s water and much more,” said Anthony Colaprete, an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. “The others, from a scientific standpoint and a resource standpoint may prove to be as important or more important.”

Colaprete is the principal investigator on the mission to find water on the moon, which is known as LCROSS or the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. Last year, the scientists shot an unmanned spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and in October, they deliberately crashed its rocket at 6,000 mph into Cabeus, a cold, dark crater on the moon’s south pole that hasn’t seen sunlight in billions of years.

The impact sent up a plume of lunar soil and debris several miles over the crater’s rim, exposing it to sunlight. Meanwhile, the spacecraft collected data for four crucial minutes, allowing scientists to analyze the chemical makeup of the ejected lunar soil, before it too crashed into the crater. In the nine months since then, the LCROSS team has been sifting through the information to glean clues about earth’s 4.5 billion year-old neighbor.

How wet is the moon?

“As wet as the Sahara, perhaps wetter in some places”, said Colaprete.

On Tuesday, at the third annual Lunar Science Forum at NASA Ames, researchers discussed everything from the physics of the LCROSS impact to the complex chemistry of the moon. Among their findings:

- The distribution of water on the moon is not uniform, but “chunky”, occurring in deposits in dark craters like the one LCROSS struck.
- The range of chemicals found on the moon is wider than once thought and includes mercury, magnesium, sulfur dioxide and possibly, formaldehyde, along with sodium, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide and methane.
- The total amount of water in the target site and the plume observed by LCROSS: 26 gallons

So how did the water get there? According to Colaprete, it’s likely a combination of sources. One way it could have arrived is from solar wind depositing hydrogen into the lunar granules which contain oxygen atoms. Another way is from impacts by icy comets slamming into the moon, a theory supported by the observation of these other chemicals and hydrocarbons that also exist in comets.

The last manned lunar mission was Apollo 17 in 1972. In recent years, the U.S., along with Japan, China and India have launched various unmanned lunar mission. NASA is scheduled to launch two other lunar exploratory missions, GRAIL and LADEE in 2011 and 2012, respectively, to map the moon’s interior structure and further analyze the moon’s dust.

Sometime in the next several decades, a new generation of astronauts may return to set up a lunar outpost, setting the stage for future missions to Mars.

“In the next 20 years, next 10 years, you’re going to see the moon continue to expand in its diversity, and its complexity and its interest, among the communities of both laypeople and professionals and that’s going to pull us there,” said Colaprete. “There’s a lot you can do with the moon. It’s fundamental to understanding our place in the solar system and we’ve always appreciated that and recent studies have accentuated it.”

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The Thirty Meter Telescope would be built in Hawaii, atop Mauna Kea at around 13,000 feet. Artist's interpretation courtesy of TMT Observatory Corporation.

Originally reported for KQEDnews.org.

Scientists from the University of California are working with a team of international researchers on one of the most high-profile science projects of this decade: an effort to construct the largest optical telescope on Earth.

The $986 million project is planned for the summit of Mauna Kea, on Hawaii’s Big Island, and will feature a primary mirror 98-feet in diameter.

Scientists working on the project hope to begin construction next year and complete it by 2018 or 2019. They say the facility, dubbed the Thirty Meter Telescope, will allow astronomers to observe with much more clarity some of the earliest stars and galaxies of the universe and investigate what they’re made of.

“We’ll be able to look back at the baby pictures of the universe and trace how it developed,” said Michael Bolte, director of the University of California Observatories and a member of the board of directors for the new telescope.

The telescope won approval last month from the University of Hawaii Board of Regents, which holds the lease to the site.

In addition to exploring the farthest reaches of the universe, the telescope also will be able to routinely and easily produce images of the more than 450 planets that have been discovered orbiting stars outside of our solar system.

Today, the existence of these so-called “exoplanets” can only be inferred by measuring the gravitational tugging forces exerted by the stars they orbit. The telescope also could help determine if some of them have atmospheres similar to Earth’s – the precursor to finding life on another planet.

“It will be one of the most important scientific facilities of the 21st century,” said Bolte, who is also a professor of astronomy at UC-Santa Cruz. “When we look back, it’s going to be the Large Hadron Collider and the Thirty Meter Telescope and I’m not sure what else.”

The project is a joint effort of the University of California, the California Institute of Technology and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy.

A sizable amount of its funding is coming from the Bay Area. The Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation, in Palo Alto, has pledged $200 million toward the telescope’s construction. The University of California and Caltech each plan to raise $50 million. And contributions are expected from the Canadian universities, as well as the governments of China, India and Japan. But 10 to 20 percent of the telescope’s budget still remains to be raised, said Bolte.

The new telescope’s 98-foot (30 meter) mirror would be three times as big as the mirrors on the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii, currently the biggest in the world, and also owned by the University of California and Caltech. The telescope would produce images three times as sharp as the 33-foot Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, and would be able to look at objects that are nine times fainter. This would make it possible for scientists to better understand the origins of the universe.

“The universe is 13.7 billion years old and we can see objects that are 13 billion years away, but all we get is fuzzy blobs,” said UC-Santa Cruz astronomer Garth Illingworth, chair of the telescope’s Science Advisory Committee. “We’d like to learn more about these stars and galaxies.”

In January of 2010, Illingworth and his team announced that they had observed the most distant galaxies ever seen. Looking back in time 13 billion years, they found galaxies that were just 600 or 700 million years from the Big Bang. Photographs of these galaxies, which appear as several tiny dots, were made by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Space-based telescopes like Hubble have an advantage over ground telescopes because they don’t have to contend with the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. But they’re more expensive and therefore, smaller. Hubble’s mirror is less than 8 feet in diameter.

Bigger ground-based telescopes can gather more light than small space-based telescopes. So they make objects that once were faint appear brighter. And the additional light gives researchers information on the chemical composition of objects like stars.

When astronomers understand what a star is made out of, they can better establish its age. And this allows them to plot out the history of the universe more accurately. What’s understood now is that the Big Bang was followed by a period of darkness that astronomers call the Dark Ages. But it’s not clear how long that period lasted.

“There’s controversy about the period before which there were no stars,” said Jerry Nelson, UC-Santa Cruz astronomer and project scientist for the telescope. “The idea is to establish bounds on this. The question is when do you get stars forming that burn holes through this opaque stuff?”

In addition to answering questions about the history of the universe, observers say the telescope could also eventually lead to new energy sources based on the nuclear fusion that fuels stars.

“All those points of light are nuclear furnaces,” said bestselling San Francisco author Timothy Ferris, who wrote “Seeing in the Dark” and other books about astronomy and telescopes. “And they have something to teach us.”

The telescope’s mirror will be made out of 492 closely fit individual hexagonal glass mirrors. The Keck telescopes were the first to use these segmented mirrors to get around the problems created by gigantic individual mirrors. The Keck telescopes were so successful, said Illingworth, that UC and Caltech envisioned the Thirty Meter Telescope as a way to scale-up the Keck model.

TMT Fly-Through from Thirty Meter Telescope on Vimeo.

But big ground-based telescopes have their limitations. Though they can give astronomers more light to study, they can’t by virtue of their size alone make objects appear sharper. To reduce the blurring caused by the atmosphere, scientists use a series of techniques called adaptive optics.

“Adaptive optics is like putting glasses on a big telescope,” said Nelson. A telescope with adaptive optics not only sees sharper images of stars, it also sees more stars.

An expensive and technically complicated process, adaptive optics was used on telescopes for the first time to correct distortions on the Keck telescopes. The technique takes advantage of a layer of the atmosphere that starts about 50 miles above the Earth. This layer is made up of sodium atoms brought in by small meteorites that vaporize as they enter the atmosphere.

Scientists point an orange laser toward the sodium layer. The laser excites the sodium atoms, which become like artificial stars, radiating light back toward the telescope. The process allows researchers to correct for atmospheric turbulence, which causes phenomena such as the twinkle that we see around stars.

Other telescopes in the range of the Thirty Meter Telescope are in the works. An 80-foot mirror called the Giant Magellan Telescope is being spearheaded by a group that includes the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, Harvard University, the universities of Texas and Arizona and the government of Korea. That telescope is scheduled to be completed in 2018. And Europe is working on the aptly named Extremely Large Telescope, which would have a 138-foot mirror.

“They’re strongly complimentary,” said Bolte. “The Giant Magellan and the European telescope will be in the southern hemisphere, in Chile. So we’ll have access to the entire sky.” Having several of these instruments, he said, would make valuable telescope time more readily available to astronomers.

The Thirty Meter Telescope, which would be built at an elevation of about 13,000 feet, has not been without controversy. Environmentalists say its construction would harm the wekiu bug, a native species that lives atop high Hawaiian peaks. Some Native Hawaiians have come out in opposition, saying that the summit of Mauna Kea is sacred and should not have any more construction.

Scientists hope that the Thirty Meter Telescope will provide answers for many current astronomy questions: What is the invisible matter that makes up 25 percent of universe? What is the mysterious energy that is making it expand faster and faster? But Bolte suspects that just as telescopes in the past surprised scientists by revealing that the planets orbit the Sun and that the universe is expanding, the new telescope’s contributions are impossible to fully predict.

“Every time you build a new telescope with significant new capabilities, you usually solve the problems of the day and find new things you didn’t even know were there,” Bolte said. “The Thirty Meter Telescope will be a bigger jump than any other jump we’ve had, so the new discoveries will be all the more unexpected.”

***

TMT Overview from Thirty Meter Telescope on Vimeo.

Check out these QUEST TV and Radio stories about other University of California astronomy projects:

Illuminating the Northern Lights

Exoplanets

SETI: The New Search for ET

The Planet Hunters

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For those following the controversy (background: Oysters on the Outs, Sep 28, 2007) – and few Marin County land use issues have ignited local passions the way this one has – the report may seem to settle some scores.

Speaking to KQED Public Radio, the study’s lead scientist, Charles Peterson, said "We evaluated all the science in Drakes Estero… and from that concluded that there is no major impact of the Drakes Estero mariculture on the ecosystem of Drakes Estero."

This is contrary to initial findings from the National Park Service, which had sought to shut down the longstanding oyster operation. According to the Park Service, oysters, a non-native species, coat the bay floor in feces and harm other, native wildlife such as eelgrass and harbor seals. After protests from the oyster company and many of its neighbors, the Park Service and Senator Diane Feinstein tapped the National Research Council to take an independent look.

Now, it's up to the Park Service to decide how to react to the NRC's study.

You may listen to the original "Oysters on the Outs" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also see additional photos for that radio report.

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Is there a link between childhood vaccines and
autism? Recent news says no. Credit: James Gathany

February was a big month in the debate about the possible role of vaccines in causing autism, a subject we covered in last year's TV story, Autism: Searching for Causes, and several blog posts. The claim-–that there might be a link between the immunizations children receive and the onset of autism–-has recently taken some hard hits.

First, on February 1, two Philadelphia researchers published a scientific literature review that summarized a number of studies from around the world, all of which refuted the claim that there was a vaccine-autism link.

Then on February 8, the news came out that the doctor whose 1998 research had sparked the initial autism-vaccine scare had manipulated his data. Finally, on February 12, a special federal court ruled against three families who argued that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had caused autism in their children, saying that the evidence was "overwhelmingly contrary" to the claims.

No doubt there will be more debate about this issue in the future, as families and researchers continue the search for the cause.

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Science in Action is metamorphosis of creating a "un-museum" through multi-media as well as a tie with the Academy's past. Our in-house news program filmed at the Academy was branded the same name. Today, Science in Action exists on the floor as a breaking news exhibit. The exhibit contains four screens that scroll through four breaking stories about science. One story is changed out every week, thus all stories revolve out within a month's time. Science in Action will not end there. The production team is working on the next phase of uploading content on the Internet along with surveys and special clips to facilitate interaction. Once a month, evening programming beginning in mid winter will use content in Science in Action for programming. The experts will be here in person to go more in depth. The stories are not just for the screen but spread out through the museum as well as through community partners and experts.

I was asked recently to join the content team for Science in Action to get a real feel for the production side in order to better deliver programs for the evening events. The production team consists of staff from research, the aquarium, production, public programs and education. We meet once a week to brainstorm and once a story is chosen the production team works in collaboration with the content team to make an idea into a news story with a week turn-around. Last week, we did a piece on the Cosco-Busan oil spill for its year anniversary. I was able to help edit the script through the mock up, rough-cut, interviews, and final visual edit. A colleague and I drafted a summary and survey of the piece to be used in connection. It was a great team effort. This team effort will take place every week to turn out more than 60 stories per year. It is also an evolving process with equal input from the content and production team and will generate not only content for the floor, but for the web, partners, iTunes, and public programs.

It is projects like this that make me love where I work, as I am challenged to be informed and enmeshed in all the amazing discoveries in technology and science. Natural museums in this day and age must be cognizant that information is available everywhere. Museums that strive to be current have to embrace the information age and be comfortable updating content on a more regular basis as well as interacting with their virtual audience. Exhibits and multi-media were designed for the Academy with this in mind and will change accordingly. Like research expanding with new discoveries, our public floor will change in pace with science.

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