Photo of Ribbon Cutting by Christopher Lane

5/22/12 Update: I was just sent images from Christopher Lane, Assistant Director of Marketing at the Stanford Shopping Center, who helped produce this press event so I'm updating this blog with one of his images. (A link to all the images is given at the end of this blog.)

On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 15, 2012, I hitched a ride with my closest friend from San Francisco out to Palo Alto to attend the ribbon cutting for the first public fast charger in California for electric vehicles in Stanford Mall. This was definitely a green carpet event as it took place in the shopping mall’s garage within walking distance of the fast charger. Many people drove in zero emission cars to attend and the podium was lined on both sides with electric vehicles. Out of the many electric vehicles that were parked, most of them were Nissan Leafs, the same model we drove in from San Francisco. I counted 17 electric vehicles in all which I was told was a modest turnout at a EV event!

Now I’m not new to electric vehicles and the infrastructure. I tagged along with Obrie Hostetter, the Northern California EV Infrastructure Director at 350 Green, a developer of electric vehicle (EV) charging station networks. Her company, along with a partnership with the city of Palo Alto and John Ryan Company, Inc., was responsible for the permitting and construction necessary to place the Level 3 Fast Charger.

A level 2 charger will take about 7 hours to fully charge an EV battery; the Level 3 fast charger can charge the battery up to 80% in 30 minutes. Most EV owners do the majority of their charging at night at home and stay within a close proximity mitigating “range anxiety”. To give you an example: the ideal range of a Nissan Leaf for freeway driving is about 100 miles. With an infrastructure of fast chargers, that range can be increased without spending a lot of time to recharge the battery. This is just the first step in a fast charger infrastructure, as plans are in place to install 25 public fast chargers near retail locations by the fall of 2012.

EV drivers sign up for a payment card from 350Green to use the fast charger station. Use of the card and how to properly use the station was demonstrated after remarks from Palo Alto's Mayor Yiaway Yeh as well as the partners involved in making the public charging station possible. There were quite a few statistics that came out that were enlightening about this new technological movement: 1) There are over 3000 EVs in the Silicon Valley making Palo Alto a great corner stone for the EV infrastructure; the fast charger has already gotten quite a bit of use — since being turned on, it’s been used 3 to 4 times a day; 136 EV drivers have already signed up for the payment card to use at the station and the infrastructure to follow.

So what is the best ribbon to cut at such a green event? Applause went up when a gas hose was cut in front of the fast charger station and the Nissan Leaf it was charging with 100% renewable energy!

More photos of this event can be found here.

Earth in our hands for the future / Credit: Royalty-free image from Corbis

How did you celebrate Earth Day?  This year an estimated 1 billion people participated in Earth Day events world-wide around  April 22.  For the last 42 years, this international day of awareness-raising and festivities has provided a needed focus on the health of local ecosystems and our planet.  While a lot of good has come from the first Earth Day begun by Senator Nelson and his “teach-in” on the mall in Washington D.C. in 1970, much remains to be done.

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is accelerating at an unprecedented rate.  Some scientists at Stanford are taking a new look at geologic time and are proposing we’ve entered into a new geologic era: the Anthropocene.  Most scientists recognize the Holocene, our current era, in the grand scale of geologic time.  The Holocene is also called the Anthropogene, meaning the “Age of Man”. This geologic era spans from the last major Ice Age and includes ancient civilizations as well as our current time. There are fascinating interviews on the Anthropocene Generation website with professors and researchers from multiple disciplines exploring the question of when the era began. They're also trying to determine what’s been affected by our activities; evidently, there remains very little that we haven't impacted in some way.  Aldo Leopold had a saying that you shouldn’t throw away any of the parts if you “tinker” with natural systems. Predictions forecast that a stunning 20% of the world’s species will go extinct in the next 25 years, a serious loss of parts.

With our fingerprints present in every part of the earth — far-flung seas, the highest mountains and from pole to pole — we need to consider our sheer numbers and the impacts of our lifestyles. 

Blue Marble in the Balance by Tanner Embry

There’s hope when there are people concerned about the environment who take action.  President Obama said in 2010, "The true story of the environmental movement is not about the laws that have been passed.  It’s about the citizens who have come together time and time again to demand cleaner air, healthier drinking water and safer food -– and who have demanded that their representatives in government hold polluters accountable."  (Voice of America News)

So help keep the Earth Day spirit going: organize a beach or neighborhood cleanup, plant a tree or native plant garden, choose to live more lightly on the Earth (and here's a quiz that will help you find your environmental footprint). Keep encouraging our kids to get outdoors and help them connect with nature so they will also value our irreplaceable home planet.  Celebrate Earth Day every day, keep it alive and well for everyone’s sake.

Additonal Links:
Photos of Earth Day 2012 from around the Bay Area

Stanford has three classes up for online registrations: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Introduction to Databases and Machine Learning. Since opening registration this August, over 100,000 people have registered for these three courses combined.

All three courses begin on October 10th. As with the Introduction to AI course, there is a basic track and an advanced track. The basic track requires participants to watch lectures and complete quizzes while the advanced track also requires homework and exam participation. Both tracks provide a certificate of completion.

With everything free, there are some limitations. These classes do not count as Stanford university credit and do not provide direct access to the instructor. I might not be an expert in computer science, but I am definitely interested enough to follow at least one of these classes.

Let us know in the comments what you think of Stanford's offer and if you plan to take any of these courses!

Photo by Randomskk via Flickr

A group of Stanford engineering students channeled their love of Star Wars to create a 'JediBot', a Kinect-powered robot that is strong with the force. Check out the video here.

JediBot wields a foam sword (or light saber) which can effectively fight against attack by another foam sword in an epic battle between the powers of good and the forces of evil (insert maniacal laugh, mwahahahahahahahaha).

Kinect hacking has been extremely popular since the device was released last year for the Xbox 360. The Kinect includes several cameras and infrared sensors which allow it to detect moving objects with a great deal of accuracy.

Programmed into the JediBot are a series of attack motions. Under normal conditions, JediBot would only be able to fight if it knew what attack was coming and could plan out its next move. However, thanks to the Reflexxes Motion Libraries developed by Stanford visiting entrepreneur and researcher Torsten Kroeger, JediBot can react to events on-the-fly in less than a millisecond.

While we might not see JediBot's roaming the street anytime soon, the ability for the robot to interact in real time could have a lot of wide ranging implications for the future of robotics.

By one estimate, there are 10 million alcoholics in the US. Photo Credit: Ralf Roletschek

Joseph McHugh is an artist who lives in San Francisco. Like his father before him, Joe had always been a drinker. But recently, it started to pick up.

“It sort of got out of control,” he says. “It wasn’t starting at five o’clock, it was starting at noon, when I’d have a couple shots and so forth.”

He was having blackouts, he says. He remembered nothing, but people would tell him stories of what he’d done. “Like what?” I ask him.

“Things I don’t want to even mention, ok?”

What brought McHugh VA Medical Center in San Francisco was a heart attack. It literally terrified him into sobriety. He's been dry a month now, slogging through recovery with other men whose lives have also become simply untenable.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Search for Alcoholism's Miracle Drug

McHugh’s story is a familiar one to doctors who treat alcoholism, like Peter Banys, Director of Substance Abuse Programs at the VA.

“It's always a crisis,” Banys says. “And it can be a marital crisis, a family crisis, or job termination.”

Alcoholism is a very treatable disease, says Banys. Because of all the recent research, people like McHugh have more options than ever, including AA, therapy, and medication, which can be effective in preventing relapse.

Still, there are some challenges. First of all, the meds are a tough sell, Banys says. He says his patients often think of their alcoholism as a moral weakness.

“One of the things we hear a lot,” he says, “is I don’t want to depend on a drug. They’ve been depending on a drug for 25 years, they don’t want to depend on ours.”

Another problem is that drugs that once seemed promising have often fallen short.

Take Naltrexone, which was approved in 1995. Naltrexone blocks the brain’s opioid receptors, which make alcohol feel good.

“That was the great hope,” says Banys. “It kind of crumbled in our hands.”

On many people, Natrexone has no effect all. They’re just wired differently.

And that’s proven to be a useful insight.

“One of the things that we have to make clear is that alcoholism is almost certainly not a single disease or disorder. I believe that in the near future, we will be talking about “the alcoholisms.”

The fact of these “alcoholisms” means that researchers are now targeting specific kinds aspects of brain chemistry that might be involved in alcoholism.

Howard Fields directs Human Clinical Research at the Gallo Center in Emeryville, an institute devoted to alcoholism and addiction, affiliated with The University of California, San Francisco.

What interests him is something familiar to many of us: Impulsivity. Different people are impulsive to different degrees, just like rats, and other animals. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense.

“You want someone who would throw themselves on the hand grenade and save the lives of other people,” says Fields. “The same people who wind up in prison might be completely different in a battlefield situation. They might be the heroes.”

But in regular life, impulsivity can be a dangerous trait to have, says Fields. “If you score high for impulsivity, you are at greater risk to actually become an abuser or an addict. There’s no question about that.”

Fields says that in some people, impulsivity can be traced back to a specific gene. If you have it, you’re more likely to be impulsive. And it turns out, there is already a drug on the market that targets a function of this gene. It’s called tolcapone, and it’s prescribed to people with Parkinson’s disease.

So what Fields aims to find out is whether tolcapone might actually make people less impulsive. And if that’s true, whether it can help people limit their drinking. This research is now in human clinical trials.

Of course, even if the drug works for some people, it won’t work for everyone. The fact that there are “alcoholisms,” as Peter Banys put it, means that there may never be a single miracle drug.

But whatever the future holds, the goal of treatment will always look more or less the same: More people like Joseph McHugh, who have made the life-changing decision to get and stay sober.

McHugh says it’s hard to know what things will be like, once he’s out of rehab and back with his family. But he’s optimistic.

“I’m sort of glad that everything is where it is now. Because it is a change. It’s a necessary change."

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The nose of the star-nosed mole is much more sensitive than the human hand. Credit: Dr. Ken Catania, Vanderbilt University

Pain is the most common reason for trips to the doctor's office. So it makes sense that pain treatment is a huge part of our healthcare system, costing more than 100 billion dollars a year. But how exactly pain works is still a mystery in many ways.

Like any normal 9-year-old, Maddie Burkhardt was playing outside with her friends last summer, racing around in a pedal go-cart.

"And my foot slipped and it went under the go-cart. Like it got bent backwards," she says.

Maddie broke a bone in her foot. So, her mom, Danielle, took her to see a podiatrist, who put her in a series of casts.

"And every time he took the cast off, he said 'ok, you should feel much better now.' And she was just like 'no, it's killing me," says Danielle.

As the weeks went by, it became clear that Maddie's pain wasn't normal. "She would not allow anything to touch her foot at all. And we didn't really know what was going on," says Danielle.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Science of Pain

Even a light touch, like the wind blowing, was incredibly painful. "It felt like there was knives in my foot. Like a big elephant smashing on your foot or something," says Maddie.

Maddie was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome and ended up in a special treatment program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto.

Dr. Elliot Krane, who heads the program, says "most of the time, pain is the signal that there's a problem and it's a useful sensation to have and a protective one."

But sometimes, our body's warning system goes haywire, like in Maddie's case. Nerve cells send out pain signals even when there's no reason to.

"It's a terrible pain problem," says Dr. Krane. "And it's one that we really don't understand the origins of. And because we understand so little about it, our therapy of it is also very rudimentary.

Krane says Maddie, like most patients, went through a slew of treatments, like physical therapy and pain medication. It took months to recover. "I can't exactly run really yet, but I can walk faster and I can play with my friends and do a lot more," Maddie says.

For the most part, doctors rely on opiates like morphine to control pain. But those drugs aren't very targeted. The challenge is that pain is very difficult to study. "There's other things and other processes in the body which are measurable in some objective fashion: heart rate, blood pressure, temperature. But how do you measure pain?" asks Dr. Krane.

Looking to Nature for Solutions

In a lab at the University of California-Berkeley, Diana Bautista has the same questions about pain. "Many people are trying to figure out how to do this. And we decided to look to nature to solve this problem."

Bautista is an assistant professor of biology at the University of California-Berkeley. She's peering into a large plastic tub filled with dirt.

A star-nosed mole at UC Berkeley. Photo: Kristin Gerhold, Bautista Lab.

"So, if you look here in the corner of the dirt, you can see that there's a star-nosed mole. Pretty interesting looking, right?"

Star-nosed moles have a very unique look. Their large pink nose has 22 finger-like tentacles that they use to feel for food in the dark tunnels where the live.

"What we don't see, that you need special high-speed video to see, is that they're actually tapping very rapidly the surface," says Bautista.

Compared to our fingertips, the mole's star has 10 times more nerve cells. "It's much more sensitive than the human hand."

That lack of sensitivity in human skin makes it difficult to study pain, because our nerve endings are so spread out.

We also have about 20 different kinds of nerve cells. Some detect pain, some detect light touch. Others detect hot and cold. "And so it's very difficult to study one in isolation or to separate the pain cells from the light touch cells."

That's where the star-nosed mole comes in. Its star is densely packed with light touch cells, but not a lot of pain cells. So Bautista says, studying tissue samples of the mole's star can reveal the differences between nerve cells.

"How does one cell feel the prick of the pin and the other feel the feather? We don't know what happens in those nerve endings," says Bautista.

Bautista says knowing what happens in normal nerves can tell a lot about when nerves don't work normally – like when diabetes patients experience numbness or cancer patients have hypersensitivity. That comes down to the biochemistry inside the cells. For that, Bautista is also studying another organism.

Peppers Targeting Nerve Cells

"These are Szechuan peppers that are from the Chinese prickly ash," Bautista says, handing me the peppercorns.

"Chew them a little bit in the front of your mouth."

As I chew, my tongue becomes slightly numb. "It feels like a little buzzing, tingling sensation," says Baustista.

The peppercorns aren't hot, but they do have chemicals that are working on my sense of touch. "We know that they target special receptors and cause those nerves to be excited just as if somebody was tickling your tongue," says Bautista.

That's a trick that humans could copy. "By indentifying the molecular mechanisms, we could really go in and design better drugs and come up with better therapies and alternatives for treating conditions like chronic pain," she says.

Bautista hopes the research will lead to more targeted pain drugs, so patients like Maddie Burkhardt will have an easier recovery.

Check out the star-nosed mole in action:

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Photos by L.A. Cicero

Stanford researcher Zhenan Bao is on the quest to develop "super skin" that could help us detect disease and other biological functions.

Bao's built a flexible sensor that is so sensitive to pressure it can feel a fly graze down on it. Bao is now working to have this artificial skin be able to detect chemicals and other biological functions that would otherwise go unnoticed. The skin will eventually be solar powered, using super stretchy and durable polymer solar cells that generate electricity.

"You can imagine a robot hand that can be used to touch some liquid and detect certain markers or a certain protein that is associated with some kind of disease and the robot will be able to effectively say, 'Oh, this person has that disease,'" Bao told the Stanford Report. "Or the robot might touch the sweat from somebody and be able to say, 'Oh, this person is drunk.'"

The "brain" of the artificial skin is a flexible transistor. The skin is touch sensitive due to the transistor containing a thin, highly elastic rubber layer, molded into a grid of tiny inverted pyramids. As pressure comes down on the transistor, this fine layer changes thickness, altering the current flow through the transistor. The sensors have from several hundred thousand to 25 million pyramids per square centimeter, corresponding to the desired level of sensitivity.

In using the super skin to detect a particular biological molecule, the surface of the transistor has to be coated with another molecule to which the first one will bind when it comes into contact.

"For any particular disease, there are usually one or more specific proteins associated with it – called biomarkers – that are akin to a 'smoking gun,' and detecting those protein biomarkers will allow us to diagnose the disease," Bao said.

To learn more about Bao's research, visit Stanford Report.

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UC Santa Cruz plant biologist Jarmila Pitterman studies an albino redwood tree

How many times do we parents of preschoolers hear that question each day? "WHY do birds fly? WHY does the wind blow? WHY do bees buzz? WHY are trees green? WHY do I have to eat my broccoli?"

"Because I SAID so."

"WHY??"

Science begins with our curiosity. The first step is to start asking questions, probably most often “Why?” and “How?” And as much as we wish it were different, in science, "because I said so" is never answer enough. You have to back up your case with some proof, or at least some compelling evidence. And even then, your case will likely not be accepted on its face as truth, but tested and re-tested, re-asked and re-proven via a time-tested set of agreed-upon steps. This is known as the Scientific Method: 1) Ask a question. 2) Construct a hypothesis. 3) Experiment. 4) Analyze your results 5) Repeat if necessary and draw your conclusions. 6) Communicate your findings. While we all come into our questions with personal or cultural beliefs, the scientific method attempts to remove the beliefs of the scientist when testing a hypothesis point the way towards a verifiable fact or facts.

Which, brings us to the rare and unusual albino redwood trees. We already know the facts about trees, right? We can usually answer the preschooler's question about why trees are green. But what if the tree is anything but green?

We don't actually have all the answers to that one. We can hypothesize that these ghosts of the forest must be mutants, and lack chlorophyll. But that’s the easy part. What we don't know, is WHY they lack chlorophyll, and survive. That's a trick that few trees anywhere in the world — if any– can pull off. So right now, we're guessing. And we can do better.

That’s what the research scientists at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz are out to discover. Believe it or not, until now the Redwood genome has never been sequenced. Stanford geneticists want to pinpoint the mutation or mutations that cause these trees to be albino. Plant biologists from UC Santa Cruz seek to determine how these trees survive and grow without chlorophyll and its instrumental role in providing energy for the plant.

In the QUEST Science on the SPOT story "Revisiting Albino Redwoods, Cracking the Code," we follow Stanford geneticists Ghia Euskirchen and Barry Starr from the redwood forests to the lab as they work to uncover the root of the mutation that causes albinism in redwood trees.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

In another Science on the SPOT installment, "Revisiting Albino Redwoods, Biological Mystery," we meet UC Santa Cruz plant biologist Jarmila Pitterman and tag along as she and her students study the inner workings of the unusual albino redwoods.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

This story is just beginning. They’re only in step 3 in the process; experimentation. But in time, the redwood genome will be sequenced. We will know where the mutation is. We will know how these albino trees survive and grow. And in the process we may learn things about the genetic heritage of redwood trees. We may learn more about how all redwood trees live and grow. We may learn how redwood trees adapt to things such as disease or climate change. The answers are endless. They are just waiting for someone to ask: why?

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Stanford and Intel take on visual computing.

To hear Stanford Professor Pat Hanrahan tell it, computer simulation of human behavior and appearance could someday become so life-like that a trip to the mall will be replaced by trying clothes on a virtual 3-D model of yourself.

That day may come a little sooner thanks to a research partnership Stanford has made with chip maker Intel. The technology company will fund research at the new science and technology center with $2.5 million a year for five years.

This center is the first of half a dozen science and technology centers that are being opened across the US, focused on driving innovation in computing and communications that could help make Hanrahan's vision a reality.

The center at Stanford will focus primarily on visual computing. The other universities in the Stanford-based center are the University of Washington, Cornell, Harvard and Princeton, as well as University of California campuses in Berkeley, Irvine and Davis.

"As high-end visual interfaces have become commonplace, our expectations have risen. A few years ago no one knew what multi-touch smartphones, tablet computers, Internet-enabled 3-D high-definition television, e-readers were, now they do," Hanrahan said during a press call to announce the program. "We will focus on visual computing, user experience and user interaction, with a range of devices that will emerge in the next decade."

Cell phone cameras could become tools in new forms of sculpting and drawing. Games will become more collaborative, with more life-like settings.

Take a common problem such as not being able to place a face with a name. Hanrahan envisions a time when you'll be able to use your camera phone to take a picture and look up the name. For governments, there are also major implications for this kind of technology. Law enforcement may be able to discern the law-abiding from the lawless using computers that analyze images.

"In the future, our smartphones, laptops and personal cameras will be doorways into augmented realities," said Hanrahan. "Our whole lives will be augmented and social networking will get more social. Facebook might become a virtual world where we meet with friends online."

Stanford students will get the real-world experience of working on campus with Intel scientists; Intel, in turn, will benefit from the creative ideas of these bright young researchers.

To learn more about this project, visit: http://visual.stanford.edu/

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Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse. Photo by L.A. Cicero

Games are practically omnipresent in our society, filling our social networks, computers and phones. A team led by Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has taken gaming to an entirely new level, introducing life itself into games.

Riedel-Kruse and his lab have developed the first biotic video games. The player's moves directly influence the behavior of living micro-organisms in real time as the game is being played.

Players are able to influence the basic biological functions of single-celled organisms. The team's goal is for players to learn about biological processes and interact with them without having to go through the rigorous process of formal experimentation.

In total the team has created eight different games that allow players to interact with paramecia (the single-celled organisms used in numerous biology experiments). In one of the games, paramecia move around a small fluid chamber. A camera collects images of the paramecia moving around and sends the images to a video screen that has a game board of a soccer field superimposed on the image. A microprocessor tracks the movements of the paramecia and keeps score as the paramecia "kick" the virtual ball around with their movements in the chamber.

In Biotic Pinball, the player injects a chemical into the fluid at calculated moments, causing the paramecia to swim in one direction or another.

If you're worried about the effects these games may have on single-celled organisms, Riedel-Kruse assures that these organisms have neither a brain nor any ability to feel pain, so they are not causing any harm.

Riedel-Kruse tells the Stanford University News:

"We hope that by playing games involving biology of a scale too small to see with the naked eye, people will realize how amazing these processes are and they'll get curious and want to know more…the applications we can envision so far are on the one hand educational, for people to learn about biology, but we are also thinking perhaps we could have people running real experiments as they play these games."

To learn more about the biotic games being developed, check out this video.

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