Science/Technology blog

I hope some of our QUEST blog readers were able to attend the West Coast Green conference held September 19-22 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Home Energy magazine is a media sponsor for the event and our staff handed out well over 1,000 magazines, pressed a lot of flesh, and were involved in well over 100 hours of passionate, stimulating, exciting conversation with builders, contractors, architects, homeowners, and others about green home building and renovation. Wow, what a great time! Plus exhibitors there handed out free organic beer and wine, and really great swag like a cool LED flashlight from PG&E. You could sit on a couch made of grass and calculate your total carbon footprint at the PG&E booth.

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Posted in Geek at 4:00 pm by David Bradley — Click to comment

Earlier this week, I went to see “one” of my childhood musical heroes, progressively rocking Canadian three piece Rush. The band was on top form as ever and the crowd jostled to the music almost in synchrony like so many atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) as the band raised the energy levels. They played most of their latest album, covering themes of humanism and faith without religion as well as resurrecting some stonkers from their vast back catalogue including the epic Natural Science from 1980 album Permanent Waves.

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Coral reefs, often referred to as underwater rainforests, are the most diverse aquatic ecosystem on the planet. Often mistaken as underwater plants, coral are actually animals related to anemones and jellyfish. A reef can be made up of many different types of coral colonies and be thousands of years old. Each branch or part of is made up of hundreds to thousands of individual animals known as coral polyps. Like anemones, coral polyps are asexual and can produce identical copies to create a coral colony.

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Or rather, Wild Birds who Tried to Go Wild but Were Instead Captured for the Pet Industry.

Brock, a Yellow Naped Amazon Parrot
recused by the USDAWould you like a baby kinkajou? How about a little cougar cub or maybe a herd of giraffe? All is possible with the help of the internet and the booming illegal wildlife trade. A multi-billion dollar industry, the illegal wildlife trade is comparable in scale to the trade of illegal drugs or arms. From people needing to feed their families and finding no financial alternatives, to people who simply must have an exotic pet, this industry is alive and well. For example, there are about 5000 tigers in the wild and up to 10,000 PET tigers in the United States!

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Speed of What?

An artist’s concept of a “blasar”–a black hole
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If you’re like me, when you’re doing the dinner dishes you normally aren’t thinking about the fate of the delta smelt, the little native fish that is one of several in steep decline and facing extinction. And yet for millions of Bay Area residents the two things–dishwashing and delta smelt–are connected. In fact, choices we make everyday on dry land–in our homes and yards, on the road, and in our schools and offices–have implications for our aquatic neighbors. The good news is, by taking some simple steps in our day-to-day lives, we can make a difference for the Bay and its watershed… and the species that live in them.

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Posted in Chemistry at 11:31 am by David Bradley — Click to comment

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2007 goes to Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. Congratulations Professor!

We have the semiconductor industry of the 1960s to thank for the emergence of surface chemistry. Gerhard Ertl was one of the first to see the potential of the new techniques and has pioneered methodology for different experimental procedures that give us a clear picture of surface reactions.

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Would a gene doper get an asterisk?The last few blogs I have been talking about people adding genes to their DNA to make them better athletes. The reason they’re considering this sort of gene doping instead of just taking a designer steroid or two is that a DNA change will supposedly be more permanent, safer, and harder to detect. Well, one out of three ain’t bad.

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Posted in Chemistry, spectroscopy at 3:30 pm by David Bradley — Click to comment

Nature’s blowtorch is an enzyme system that oxidizes toxins, drug molecules, and other noxious molecules found in the body ready for excretion. But, understanding exactly how this molecular machinery has been an ongoing research job for many years. Now, Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy, Lucy Waskell, and Ulrich Dürr, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, have turned to the powerful analytical technique of solid state NMR spectroscopy, to reveal important structural details about the enzyme without removing from its native site in the cell membrane.

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At Point Reyes National Seashore, environmental ideology has run into hard science, with a tug-of-war for management of an estuary coming down to the question of what is the most ecologically healthy thing to do.

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