California science news roundup

Week of July 19, 2019

Space

California’s unheralded role in Apollo 11

When we think about Apollo and attempt to localize it here on earth in our minds, we typically think about Apollo Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas. Who can forget Neil Armstrong’s famous words: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

But there’s more to California’s role in Apollo. In La Canada Flintridge, home of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the most important experiments of the whole mission was developed, and it changed the way we look at the moon and its relationship to our planet.

The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment consisted of a reflector that was positioned on the moon by Armstrong and Aldrin. It was aimed back at the earth, where lasers fired pulses of laser light that were then reflected and detected by special receivers here on the ground.

The reflectors are too small to be seen from Earth, and the task of actually hitting them was a major technical challenge. Even though a laser is a highly concentrated light, by the time the light reaches the moon, the beam is roughly four miles wide. Scientists back then likened the effort to using a rifle to hit a moving dime two miles away.

Here’s more of the story.

California Science Weekly

Environment

Wildfires, climate change, and atmospheric rivers

Let’s talk about the weather, water and climate change in California. Lots of stories this week on these subjects. First of all, a big report came out in journal Earth’s Future this week, and it says that the state’s wildfire issues are clearly being driven by climate change. It points to the fact that in the past decade, we have experienced half of the state’s 10 largest wildfires and seven of its 10 most destructive fires. That includes last year’s Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest wildfire ever. The study found that the area burned in California’s forest fires – the annual burned area – has increased in size by 500 percent. The cause, says the paper: more heat, more dryness, more fuel. All of these things can be tied to climate change, it says.

And then there’s this, which seems a bit contradictory, but here you go: another study from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego says that we will also be seeing more of those atmospheric-river storms that deluged the state earlier this year. It looked at 16 global climate models focusing on western North America and found that most of the heavy precipitation that the West will get in the future will come from these so-called atmospheric rivers. That is to say, when we have rain, it will be more intense and more deluge-like. So, start building those arks. The point here seems to be that when it’s wet, it’s going to be really wet. And when it’s dry, it’s going to be really dry. Like the American electorate today, everything is going to the extremes.

Ok, moving on. While this may seem contradictory, our big winter storms dumped so much snow that safety officials in the state are warning people about using the rivers that carry all that snow melt out of the mountains. The rivers are raging. This may be great for kayakers and rafters, it can also be dangerous. At least six people have died on the Kern River already this year. On a similar note, Mammoth Mountain, which is almost always closed by now, will be open until for skiing until July 28. Earlier the mountain had said August, but they changed their minds. That said, there is still 60 feet of snow at the summit. Wha?

Earth’s Future Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Ocean Science

Marine reserves are working even better than we thought

California has one of the largest, most robust marine protected area systems in the world, covering about 18 percent of the state’s waters. The system is vast, stretching down the entire coast from Crescent City to San Diego. It has been phased in over the years, but most of the areas are now firmly in place with severe restrictions on fishing and any kind of “taking”, like rocks shells, etc. And while many studies have been done to show that MPAs work to bring back animals life, there has long been a question whether they lead to a so-called “spillover effect”, that is, whether animals breed and multiply and then move out of the areas, enriching other zones.

Well, a new study shows that there is a spill-over effect. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Southwest Fisheries Science Center used genetics to track kelp rockfish, a species in California that tends to remain in the same location their entire adult lives. The key word here is “adult,” because the kids move around. By following counting fish and analyzing DNA, the scientists showed that juvenile kelp rockfish actually do move out of marine reserves sometimes as far as about 20 kilometers away. This suggests that there is, in fact, a spillover effect taking place in the reserves. This is very good news for ecologists, but also for fishermen, who could see more fish showing up in non-restricted areas.

Hakai

California science news roundup

The cracks left behind by the recent Southern California earthquakes have become tourist attractions. Of course they have. (SF Gate)

There are ten Apollo “moon trees” in California (N atGeo)

This very cool video shows what happens when scientists from MBARI shine blue light on the deep-sea squid Histioteuthis. Its green eye glows with fluorescence like something otherworldly. Scientists are not sure why, but think it may have something to do with absorbing light. (YouTube)

The Mount Wilson Observatory recently opened the doors to its 100-inch telescope to the public for stargazing. Get the kids and go! (Mt. Wilson)

A marine biologist who studies porpoises mating says one of the best places to observe them is…the Golden Gate Bridge. (MEL Magazine)

The U.S. Department of Transportation has selected San Diego as the location for a major drone testing program that will include high-altitude mapping of the U.S.-Mexico border, package deliveries, and first responder operations. (SDNews)

Speaking of cool video, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released this very impressively produced piece about their new climbing robot LEMUR, designed to work in extreme terrain. It can scale rock walls. Wow, JPL, keep it up. (YouTube)

A coal plant in Utah has been L.A.’s single-largest power source for three decades. The plant is closing in 2025 and the state will move to natural gas. But that has some clean energy folks upset. (LA Times)

Valley fever, a dangerous fungal disease, may be striking California farmworkers. Rates of new cases rose 10 percent between 2017 and 2018, according to the California Department of Public Health. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1017806

We loved this video about the recovery of the Channel Island fox by SkunkBear. (YouTube)

Lake Tahoe, the second deepest in the U.S., is 7/10 of an inch away from it’s legally allowed capacity. It’s risen 8 feet in 3 years, all thanks to this year’s big winter storms. (NNBN)

Elon Musk’s Neuralink made a big announcement about its brain-computer interface system, that will dramatically increase the number of electrodes that can connect to a brain. But one of the most interesting goals is that it may allow paraplegic patients to use their thoughts to type at a rate of 40 words per minute.

California produces the vast majority of the world’s sunflower seeds, but farmers in one county are asking visitors to stop taking selfies in sunflower fields because they are causing damage. (Guardian)

A potential crisis for stem cell research: since 2004, scientists have benefited from a $3 billion state research agency called the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. But now the agency says it is no longer funding new projects. (ScienceMag)

In a new 440,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Los Angeles, robots are working furiously to get stuff to you faster. (LA Times)

Not news: People are fishing in the LA River. News: they’re eating lots of them.

Remember that great story about the guy who killed the endangered fish in Death Valley? Well here’s a video of that same underwater pond called Devils Hole during the earthquake. (NPS)

That’s it! Have a great week, and please send your friends an invitation to sign up for the California Science Weekly newsletter.

Design by Luis Ramirez

Redwood poachers ruin majestic giants // LA’s air quality is deteriorating // Inhaled: new podcast series // California science news roundup

Week of July 5, 2019

Environment

Redwood poachers ruin majestic giants

Probably our favorite thing we read all week was this story from Bloomberg about the illegal theft of so-called Redwood burls from California’s Redwood National Park. Burls are the massive, swollen, misshapen growths that naturally occur on trees. Basically, the grain has grown from the tree in a deformed manner, a form of cellular misdirection. They look a little bit like tumors or additional appendages. But because of the strange patterns they exhibit when the fresh wood is exposed, burls are extremely valuable around the world. They are used to make tables and countertops and footstools, etc. A quick search online came up with numerous sites selling redwood burl tables for tens of thousands of dollars. Certain raw burl pieces are also extremely valuable. No wonder thieves go after them.

The problem is that choice redwood burls are very rare. They take many years, often hundreds of years, to grow and become large and complex. And if there’s one place large, ancient redwoods grow in abundance, it’s Redwood National Park in Northern California.

Poachers have been entering Redwood National Park in the night with saws and cutting off the burls to sell for big bucks. The trees usually survive, but they are permanently scarred. Burl removal is legal if the trees are in private hands and the owner gives the ok. But burl cutting is illegal in the national park, as you can imagine. And since we’re talking Redwoods National Park, we’re talking some of the tallest, finest, rarest, most beautiful trees on the planet, so the thought that criminals are burl poaching in these parks gets pretty infuriating.

Luckily, as the story explains, park rangers like Branden Pero are tasked with catching the burl poachers and they’ve brought some high technology to bear (including hidden cameras) to nab Derek Alwin Hughes, a 35-year old meth user who was charged with six crimes, including Grand Theft.

Bloomberg

Environment

LA’s air quality is deteriorating

If you lived in Los Angeles in the 70s, then you remember the days when schools closed due to poor air quality. With few Federal laws in place mandating controls on car exhaust, the city was often blanketed under a disgusting layer of brown smog.

We’ve come a long way since then. The 1970 Clean Air Act and the EPA’s strict regulation of exhaust emissions, improved LA’s air and made it breathable again. It’s been called one of the greatest successes in US environmental history. But according to a study published this year by scientists at New York University and the American Thoracic Society, we’ve been taken several steps backward, especially where ozone is concerned. Ozone can damage lungs, trigger asthma attacks and lead to other life-threatening problems.

The problem is particularly bad in Southern California, where researchers found a 10% increase in deaths attributable to ozone pollution from 2010 to 2017. While downtown and the westside have fared somewhat better, inland regions around Riverside and San Bernadino are experiencing the most dangerous levels of pollution. California regulators have been tasked with devising a plan by the end of the year to reduce ozone, and they say it’s going to be expensive, perhaps costing as much as $14 billion.

Los Angeles Times

Public Health

Inhaled: a new podcast series

Let’s stick with air quality and health for a moment. A powerful new 5-part podcast series by the Chico Enterprise Record called Inhaled looks at the health impacts of last year’s wildfires, with a particular focus on the Camp Fire, the deadliest, most destructive wildfire in California history. It turns out that the smoke from the Camp Fire, and numerous other fires around the state, has led to lingering health problems for many people. Smoke contains toxic particles that can lodge themselves into lungs and cause permanent health problems. Those health effects are now being felt by many people, many of whom are finding it difficult to get the health care they need. It’s an important story because we tend to think of the impact of wildfires as something immediate, with death and property damage occurring quickly, when the reality is the damage to personal health can linger for years.

Inhaled

California science news roundup

An interesting update on the Mars InSight lander, which has been experiencing lingering problems with its heat probe, an autonomous hammer that’s supposed to penetrate five meters down into the Martian soil to get all sorts of never-before-made measurements. The bad news: they haven’t fixed it. The good news: they HAVE been able to measure small Mars quakes, providing scientists with new data and clues about the planet’s interior. (Planetary Society)

A look at the problem of feral horses in California. Wild mustang populations are out of control, competing with cattle and native wildlife for resources. If the federal government doesn’t rein them in, ranchers may take matters into their own hands. (Alta Magazine)

California’s illegal pot farms are killing wild fish. Run-off, water diversion, and pollution from illegal cannabis farms are polluting streams where fish like steelhead and salmon thrive, killing many. (Bitterroot Magazine)

The tragically failed plan in Modesto to plant 5,000 trees. (Modesto Bee)

Hawthrone-based SpaceX faces challenges in launching thousands of satellites to provide space-based internet service. But the payoff could help finance the company’s bigger space ambitions. (LA Times)

Mothers in California are leading efforts to ban harmful pesticides. (Grist)

Another serial-rape suspect is nabbed (this time in Sacramento) with DNA testing technology. (SacBee)

A compelling argument that the iPhone may be reducing resource consumption rather than increasing it. Think of all the things you no longer own because smartphones have replaced them: calculator, camcorder, clock radio, mobile telephone, and tape recorder. (Wired)

Jupiter‘s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Caltech scientist Katherine de Kleer has been capturing the moon’s volcanic landscape in incredible detail. (New York Times)

Caltech scientists at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory have been able to pinpoint the location of so-called fast radio bursts to a distant galaxy almost 8 billion light-years away. (CalTech)

Some dude went snorkeling in Sausal Creek in Oakland. He saw some fish. Interesting, but kind of gross. (SF Gate)

There’s a new book out about how California’s longstanding role as a center for health, wellness, nutritional fads, and sunshine changed its architecture. (LA Curbed)

That’s it! Have a great week, and please send your friends an invitation to sign up for the California Science Weekly newsletter.

Design by Luis Ramirez

Blocking offshore drilling // Finding clear skies for stargazing in California // Amazing moon shots // Black abalone recovery // California’s Central Valley as art

Week of June 21, 2019

Environment

House approves a measure to block offshore drilling for a year

The House passed a spending bill late Thursday that would block offshore drilling along most U.S. shores, including a ban on seismic testing used to find oil and gas reserves. Unfortunately, it only lasts a year. Many groups, particularly in California, have long sought an end to drilling, and there was immense hope that would be the case in 2016 when President Obama permanently ended oil and gas leasing in parts of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. However, President Trump issued an executive order in April 2017 that would roll back these protections, and in January 2018, now former U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke proposing opening up nearly all federal waters to oil and gas extraction. The new measure potentially restores the safeguard that protected California’s coast for more than a quarter century.

Press-Democrat

Astronomy

Finding clear star-gazing skies in California

It’s not easy to find great places to gaze up into the night sky and take in the grandeur and awe of the universe. Light pollution from cities has obscured the skies in so many places around the state, that you are often lucky, even on a clear night, to see more than a dozen or so points of light. Of course, this is a problem everywhere, not just California. In June 2016, it was estimated that one-third of the world’s population could no longer see the Milky Way.

For California residents seeking dark spaces to escape with their telescopes or just a blanket to lie on, there is some hope. Many municipalities are installing less light polluting LEDs or passing ordinances to turn off certain lights during the night to reduce light pollution.

There are a few places where you can still go to find clear night skies. The light pollution map offers a very handy resource to find California’s best star viewing opportunities. Not surprisingly, desert areas and sections of Northern California offer some of the best locations. For example, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in southern California was made a dark park in 2018. Also, two weeks ago, the Grand Canyonwas named an International Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association.

Light Pollution Map

Space

Amazing moon shots

Speaking of dark skies, let’s talk astrophotography. Take a look at Sacramento photographer Andrew McCarthy‘s images of the moon.McCarthy has spent many hours transforming some 50,000 individual images of the night sky into one very large and detailed photo of the moon. It’s breathtakingly beautiful and exquisitely detailed. Each crater and lunar sea on the side facing us looks like it was shot up close, when actually they were taken with McCarthy’s two camera setup 239,000 miles away. His process involves shooting photos and then stacking them at different exposures. He switches between an astronomy camera and a Sony A7II with a 300mm lens. Using Photoshop and special software, he aligns and adjusts the images to create the final product. You can see his marvelous Instagram feed here.

Andrew McCarthy

Marine Science

California black abalone making a comeback

Back in 2017, ride-sharing company Uber held its second Uber Elevate Summit in Los Angeles to push the idea of flying taxis. To most Los Angelenos, the thought of soaring over traffic is almost too good to be true, a Jetsons cartoon fantasy. But it may not be as far fetched as it seems. Numerous companies are working on the idea, and the technology is getting closer and closer to reality. One of the big obstacles at the moment is battery power, since most flying cars will have to be electric and the systems will need to carry a lot of redundancy (flying cars will not be able to glide much), which adds tremendous weight.

Another obstacle is infrastructure. Where are all these flying cars going to take off and land? Well, Uber has been thinking a lot about this subject and just released plans for various “skyports” that will be built around Los Angeles. Uber says that both LA and Dallas will be the pilot cities for the new service it calls Uber Air. Uber also unveiled renderings of the vehicles themselves, which include four passenger seats and a small storage space for baggage. The company says we may be riding in flying taxis, perhaps starting with service from LAX to downtown, by 2023.

S anta Barbara Independent

Agriculture

California’s Central Valley as art

Aerial Photographer Mitchell Rouse takes aerial photos of agricultural lands in the Central Valley, making works of fine art that are not only lovely, but highlight the incredible diversity of forms and patterns that only an eye in the sky can see. Interestingly, he doesn’t use drones, but rather small planes and helicopters. In particular, he favors the Bell 407 helicopter and shoots with a Shot Over F1 Gimbal housing a Phase 1 Industrial 15oMP pixel camera. His portfolio of the central valley is called Agricultural Project #1.

Mitchell Rouse

California science news roundup

California officials and seismologists are saying the swarm of small quakes they’ve measured are probably not anything to be worried about. Probably.

California officials are investigating an Oakland-based “biohacker”, accusing him of practicing medicine without a license.

ABC News did a nice feature on California’s Channel Islands, sometimes called “North America’s Galapagos.”

NASA has made available a library of 140,000 high definition files filled with photos, videos, and sound clips, all free and available for download.

Blue states are adopting aggressive climate policies. Red states, not so much.

Research oceanographer Jules Jaffe at Scripps Institute of Oceanography talks about how underwater drones (some of which his lab builds) are changing our understanding of the oceans.

Surfer Kevin Cunningham makes surfboard skags out of plastic trash.

A new California wildfire fund would put aside $21 billion for damage claims to help those whose property was destroyed.

A Stanford team is developing a privacy-minded alternative to Alexa and Siri. They call it almond.

California based CEO Elon Musk says his company has designed a submarine car like the one from the 1977 James Bond movie, “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

Nestlé, the world’s largest bottled water company, has been accused of taking millions of gallons of free water from the San Bernardino National Forest 17 months after California regulators told them they had no right to much of what they’d taken in the past.

A century-old cypress that may have inspired some of the imagery in Dr. Seuss’ Lorax story has collapsed. Geisel lived in La Jolla from 1948 until his death in 1991 and the tree lies close to his old home.

DOLA has a nice feature on the best opportunities to see exotic animals in California.

Scientists sequenced the almond genome, perhaps opening up a way for growers to cultivate varieties that lack cyanide, a potent poison.

California mental health officials are working with Mountain View-based Mindstrong to test apps for people getting care in CA’s mental health system. The idea is to create an early-warning system to flag the user when an emotional crisis seemed imminent.

Stanford Earth system science professor Kate Maher on how reactive transport modeling is used to better understand the chemical reactions in Earth’s subsurface that impact water supplies, energy waste storage, and climate change.

The heavy snows and deep snowpack have been great for skiers, and will benefit farmers who were coping with a seven-year drought. But researchers are warning that the ample rains and snows might lead to a very serious increase in wildfires.

That’s it! Have a great week, and please send your friends an invitation to sign up for the California Science Weekly newsletter.

Design by Luis Ramirez

Towing an iceberg from Antarctica isn’t a new idea.

It was proposed 70 years ago by a maverick California scientist at Scripps.

A year ago, Cape Town, South Africa was suffering one of the worst droughts in its history. The city of 4 million made headlines by being one of the first major cities on the planet to run out of municipal water, and entering a so-called Zero-Day status that seemed a harbinger of things to come for many other cities (Los Angeles included) facing dire water shortages.

Cape Town averted disaster by orchestrating a series of conservation and water diversion measures that helped in the short term. However, the water supply situation is still tenuous, and many people believe that similar Zero-Day scenarios could become a part of the new normal, an era when drastic, some might say crazy solutions enter the realm of the possible.

Enter the Antarctic iceberg idea. Bloomberg has a wonderful story this week about Nicholas Sloane, a 56-year-old South African marine-salvage expert who is developing a plan to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to the South African city, where it would be moored off-shore and hacked and “mined” for fresh water.

One problem with the idea is that to make any dent in a large city’s water supply, the iceberg will have to be big. Very big.

“To make it economically feasible,” Sloane tells Bloomberg. the iceberg would measure about 1,000 meters (3,281 feet) long, 500 meters wide, and 250 meters deep, and weigh 125 million tons. “That would supply about 20% of Cape Town’s water needs for a year.”

As outlandish as the idea seems, some scientists think it’s possible, or at least worth a try. Sloane’s company Iceberg Towing International has hired some of the most reputable names in iceberg transport (not a long list), and feasibility studies are underway.

John Isaacs: Scripps Oceanographic Institute

But one interesting footnote to all of this is that the idea of towing icebergs is not new. In fact, one of the early proponents of towing icebergs was an iconoclastic ocean scientist from the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego. In the late 1940s, John Isaacs proposed transporting an 8 billion-ton iceberg to San Diego to relieve California droughts.

The idea was to capture “an eight-billion ton iceberg, 20 miles long, 3000 feet wide, and 1000 feet deep in the Antarctic and towing it up to San Clemente Island off San Diego in a matter of 200 days.” That’s thinking outside the box.

Speaking of a box, one of the interesting details of the story is how much better Antarctic icebergs are for this kind of thing than those in the Arctic. Arctic icebergs are the pinnacled, mountainous type that we are most familiar with from photos, and the kind that likely sunk the Titanic. Antarctic icebergs are “tabular”, big and flat, not soaring blue spires like those from Greenland. This makes them far easier to transport and less likely to fall to pieces while being pulled across vast ocean distances.

By most accounts, Isaacs was an odd, but brilliant character. He was also a well-known polymath who became a world-renowned scientist, engineer, teacher, naturalist, fisherman, author, inventor, and Scripps professor. His colleagues called him a “giant of science” and an “idea man”, willing to take on most any problem that interested him with implacable energy and often unorthodox solutions. Over the course of his career, he was elected to the American Geophysical Union, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

After he died, the iceberg towing idea came up several additional times, including a wonderful 1973 Rand study titled “Antarctic Icebergs as a Global Fresh Water Source” that proposed creating an “iceberg train”, essentially a series of icebergs tied together like boxcars. In the paper, RAND gave a nod to Isaacs idea and tried to flesh out the details of how such a scheme would actually work.

As recent as 1978, California’s legislature endorsed the idea of towing two icebergs to southern California for drought relief.

Isaacs died in 1980. Needless to say, in the age of climate change, it would be nice to have a man like him around again. However, his legacy does live on: Through the California Sea Grant program Scripps awards six Undergraduate Research Assistantships each summer.

Using California reservoirs like a battery // NASA’s Mars Helicopter // A gazillion ladybugs fill the sky // The fish with Dragonglass teeth // Lighter than air metal

Week of June 7, 2019

Environment

California uses reservoirs and pumps to tackle climate change

California has some of the most aggressive renewable energy goals in the country. The state is required to obtain at least 33% of its electricity from renewable resources by 2020, and 100% from carbon-free sources by 2045. That’s going to take a lot of energy storage, and the fact is that Lithium-ion batteries, like Elon Musk’s Powerwall, produce a few hundred megawatts of electricity at most and will not be up to the task.

Up in the Sierras, 50 miles east of Fresno, there is a natural battery of sorts that harnesses the power of gravity and has been around for over 20 years. Bloomberg writes about PG&E Corp.’s Helms Pumped Storage plant, which delivers over 1,200 megawatts every day, enough to power 900,000 homes, and it does so cleanly. It is kind of an amazing project.

The facility uses so-called “pumped-hydro storage”, basically turning existing reservoirs at different altitudes into a kind of battery. The idea is simple. Take two reservoirs at different elevations, connected by pipes or tunnels. When electricity is abundant, pump water from the lower reservoir to the one uphill. When the grid needs power, let the water flow back down through turbines.

Helms relies on energy from Diablo Canyon to power the pumps during the reverse cycle at night, but the amount of power generated when the water flows down during the day more than compensates for the power used at night, making the plant both environmentally friendly and economical.

It’s century-old technology, but it works. There are seven in California alone. Unfortunately, they are very expensive (the projects can cost more than $1 billion to build), and there aren’t that many reservoirs around that meet the specifications to make pumped hydro work. That said, Nine projects are proposed in California. One proposed project by NextEra Energy Inc. would go near Joshua Tree National Park, but construction hasn’t started yet.

Bloomberg

Space

NASA’s Mars Helicopter getting ready for its close-up

The next big mission to Mars will carry more than the landers and rovers that we all know and love. In fact, the Mars 2020 mission will carry an actual helicopter. The advantages of a flying vehicle are obvious: you can go much farther and cross terrain that would be impossible for a ground-based system to traverse. But there’s a hitch:

“Nobody’s built a Mars Helicopter before, so we are continuously entering new territory,” said MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Helicopter at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

It’s not like building a copter for Earth. The tenuous Martian atmosphere has 1% the density of Earth, so all the flight systems have to be engineered differently. And what about controlling the vehicle from Earth over large interplanetary distances? The dynamics are significantly more complicated than when driving a rover over the surface.

None of that is deterring the folks at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, who have been testing the Mars Helicopter for the Mars 2020 launch. It may be hovering above the red Martian landscape in 2021. However, the craft will carry no instruments. Its purpose is to prove that powered flight on Mars is possible.

JPL

Animals

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a gazillion ladybugs!

There were no clouds in the sky the other day over San Bernardino County when a weather satellite picked up a large blob hovering in the air. Instead, the 80-mile by 80-mile mass was a massive cloud of ladybugs flying at between 5,000 and 9,000 feet. That’s a crazy amount of ladybugs.

California is home to about 200 species of ladybugs, but scientists have not yet identified which species were seen in the radar image, but they say it’s likely they are Hippodamia convergens, known as the convergent lady beetle.

Los Angeles Times NPR

Animals

The fish with Dragonglass teeth

*Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography*

The Dragonfish is a crazy-looking animal. Part of its allure is a set of dagger pointed teeth that happen to be transparent and amazingly strong.

In fact, the teeth of the species Aristostomias scintillans are made of nanoscale-size crystal particles that make them much stronger than the teeth of other sea animals like sharks and other fish. The fish’s teeth caught the attention of scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, and led them to consider how new materials might be developed to take advantage of the crystal structures. Perhaps, like Dragonglass, they can be forged into objects with magical properties.

New York Times

Materials Science

Lighter than air metal

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a type of metal foam that is strong, but so light it can ride on a mosquito’s back.

It’s not really foam, though. It’s called “porous metal monolith” or ultra-low density metal, and is really a spaghetti-like web of randomly connected nanometer-sized wires made of gold, silver and copper. They take the shape of miniature marshmallows and contain the same or fewer number of atoms as air. Exactly what the material might be used for is still an open question. Perhaps Patagonia will someday use the material to make backpacks for mosquitos.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The ocean microplastics problem is even worse than we thought. Way worse, say scientists at MBARI.

Three South Koreans were nabbed poaching $600,000 worth of succulent plants. The Dudleya plants are hugely popular in Asia.

How might California use recent winter storm to replenish aquifers? It’s harder than it might seem.

Can empathy be cultivated? One Stanford scientist thinks so.

Cal Berkeley has its own experimental forest, and it may help us better understand wildfires.

Could California seaweed become the biofuel of the future?

150 lakes in the Tahoe Basin are still frozen, and it’s June.

Apple’s new “Spaceship” HQ is surprisingly earthquake ready.

There’s a town in California that was built to survive wildfires.

California says coffee may not be so bad for you after all.

A huge graveyard of strange fossilized worms was discovered off the coast of California.

Astronomers aren’t happy with SpaceX’s new array of Starlink satellites.

Drones will replace fireworks at the California state fair.

That’s it! Have a great week, and please send your friends an invitation to sign up for the California Science Weekly newsletter.

Design by Luis Ramirez

How California Companies are Leading the Effort to Save the World with Microbes

Synbio startups like NovoNutrients are developing novel products to help feed the world and stop climate change.

(Sign up for the California Science Weekly newsletter, delivered fresh to your inbox every Friday)

Overfishing is arguably one of the most significant threats to the human food supply on the planet. Approximately three billion people in the world rely on both wild and farmed seafood as their primary source of protein, and ten percent of the world’s population depends on fisheries to make a living.

One the of dirty little secrets of the global commercial fish industry is that it takes fish to make fish. While many people see farmed fish as an ideal solution to meeting our protein needs in the future, the reality is that feeding farmed fish right now requires massive inputs of so-called forage fish, namely small fish like anchovies, herring, menhaden, capelin, anchovy, pilchard, sardines, and mackerel that occur in large numbers in the ocean, particularly the cold Southern and Northern latitudes. A multi-billion dollar industry is dedicated to using large ships that ply the ocean with nets to bring up millions of tons of forage fish every year.

These forage fish go into making fishmeal, essentially powders and pellets made from ground up forage fish. As fish farming increases, which it has for decades, so does the need to harvest more feeder fish. Increasingly, this is done unsustainably, and illegally. Some scientists warn that as the feeder fish industry explodes, entire marine ecosystems, including those that support animals like whales and large pelagic fish stand in danger of collapse.

So is there a way to feed farmed fish that reduces the need to trawl the seas for forage fish? It turns out that one California company is working on a solution, and it involves one of the most abundant organisms on earth: bacteria.

NovoNutrients is a Mountain View, California, startup, whose offices lie close to both Facebook and Google. The company is harnessing new technology of synthetic biology or synbio to get bacteria to do our bidding, creating proteins using the same tiny organisms that curdle milk into yogurt and cause innumerable diseases.

NovoNutrients’ product is called Novomeal, and while it is not yet commercially available (the company says late 2019 or early 2020), it holds the promise to not only reduce overfishing, but to help diminish atmospheric carbon dioxide, one of the main culprits in climate change.

How it is able to do this is about as close to a “killing two birds with one stone” as one can get in science.

At the company’s headquarters, bacteria and other single-celled organisms are incubated in large steel vats called bioreactors and are fed industrial carbon dioxide which they convert into proteins that can be processed into a powder to feed fish grown in aquaculture. It sounds simple and too good to be true. But the company thinks it may hold the key to a sustainable future.

“We take untreated industrial emissions of CO2 and we turn them into protein — initially for animal feed and starting in fish farming,” says the company’s Web site.

Since bacteria can be grown in largely unlimited supply, which is not the case for forage fish, the company’s technology holds the promise of beginning to solve two of humanity’s most pressing current problems: global warming and overfishing.

The promises of synbio go way beyond creating fishmeal. Frances Arnold, the winner of this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, is a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. The award was bestowed upon Arnold (who, by the way, lives in La Canada Flintridge), for developing a technique called directed evolution.

Directed evolution is a form of synbio that generates novel enzymes and other biomolecules by tweaking the genetic machinery of bacteria like E-coli. A wonderful explanation of the process can be read here, but essentially the process mutates genes that encode proteins, getting them to make specific proteins that serve a particular need. Arnold has already created several companies like Provivi, that develop products using the method. Some proteins can be used to consume harmful chemicals after, say, an oil spill. Others perform more mundane, but hardly less useful tasks like removing laundry stains.

A key point here is that all of these companies and individuals call California home. That, of course, is no coincidence, as the state remains on the forefront of innovation in biotechnology. We’ve created this site to bring you exactly these kinds of stories, and hope that you will follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Lithium in Death Valley, Frogs making comeback, JPL’s Climate Elvis, Science of traffic jams, Mono Lake’s gulls, Amazing scallop eyes, Cow burps, Bee thieves

Week of May 10, 2019

Editor’s note: We’re heading to Indonesia next week on an assignment, so we’ll miss an issue of California Science Weekly. But keep an eye on our Twitter feed for posts.

A war is brewing over lithium mining near Death Valley

Lithium. It is one of the world’s most valuable elements, allowing batteries to be more powerful and longer-lasting than ever before. Right now, most lithium is mined in the high deserts of South America, but a new battle is being waged between battery companies and environmentalists over whether to mine lithium in Panamint Valley in California, right on the edge of Death Valley. There are strong arguments to be made that having a large domestic source of lithium is key to a carbon-free future, but some are saying that mining would potentially despoil one of California’s most treasured natural areas.

The LA Times has a story on how Australia-based firm Battery Mineral Resources Ltd. is seeking permission to drill four exploratory wells beneath the valley floor to see if enough lithium is there to make a mine economically viable.

Environment / Animals

The comeback of Mark Twain’s frogs

The California red-legged frog is said to be the species featured in Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

They began to disappear decades ago due to disease and habitat destruction, but a recent program to reintroduce them back in Yosemite Valley is seeing some progress. The program reintroduced about 4,000 California red-legged frog eggs and tadpoles and 500 adult frogs, into Yosemite and near the Merced River. For the first time, biologists have found eggs from the reintroduced frogs. That’s great news, given the rapidly declining state of frogs around the globe. The recent IPBES UN report says that more than 40 percent of amphibian species around the world are threatened with extinction.

KQED

Space / Climate Change

Climate Elvis at JPL

Josh Willis works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, California. He’s a scientist studying the change in ocean temperatures and how they impact Greenland’s melting glaciers. He’s also an Elvis impersonator and a comedian, who hopes to make people aware of the perils we face if we don’t change our behavior towards the changing climate, but getting a laugh along the way. Laughter is, after all, the best medicine. That said, we won’t be laughing much if climate change gets as bad as many scientists say. See the UN report referenced above.

Grist

Infrastructure

Science of traffic jams

Traffic jams. They are the bane of California drivers. But what causes them, and is there any way to lessen their severity? Mathematicians have developed all sorts of models to better understand how traffic forms, and some of them has been helpful to improve flow. For example, extra-long freeway entry lanes (take a drive on Highway 110, the old Route 66, which has very short entry lanes, to see what I’m talking about.) An interesting story in Nautilus examines how fluid models are being used to better predict and reduce traffic jams. It’s complicated, but you will learn about the jamiton. And we’re not holding our breath that things will improve in places like LA anytime soon.

Nautilus

Animals

Gulls of Mono Lake

Kristie Nelson studies seagulls at Mono Lake, home to massive colonies of gulls. Her Mono Lake Gull Project examines how gulls serve as an indicator of ecosystem health. The gulls spend most of their time at the coast, but during breeding season they make fly to saline places like Mono Lake where the population can reach up to 65,000 birds.

A video at Science Friday looks at her work and has some great scenes of the voracious birds going after the lake’s insanely numerous Alkali Flies, moving across the bazillions of them, beaks open, like a lawnmower.

Science Friday

Marine science / Animals

Scallop eyes surprise scientists

Many people know that scallops have eyes, blue ones, in fact. But their eyes function a bit differently than our own. As light enters into the scallop eye, it goes through the pupil and then a lens. Interestingly, the scallop has two retinas, and when the light hits them it strikes a crystal mirror made of guanine at the back of the eye.

A study in Current Biology looks at two species: the bay scallop Argopecten irradians and the sea scallop Placopecten magellanicus, and reveals that scallops have a novel way of focusing light. They have no irises like ours and so they use their pupils to dilate and contract, and this, along with changes to the curvature of the cornea, improves resolution and forms crisper images. Vision is such an amazingly complex ability, yet it has likely evolved 50 times among animals, a process called convergent evolution. There are several scallop species in California, and the next time you are diving and see one, remember that it probably sees you right back.

Current Biology Smithsonian

Climate Change

Reducing cow burps with seaweed

You’ve seen Harris Ranch on I5? Did you know that California is a major producer of beef and dairy. Cows produce prodigious amounts of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. In fact, methane is 30 times worse than CO₂. Meanwhile, more than half of all methane emissions in California come from the burps, farts, and exhalations of livestock. And belches are the worst, accounting for roughly 95% of the methane released into the environment. Worldwide, livestock accounts for 16% of our greenhouse gas emissions. A fascinating new approach at Scripps Institution of Oceanography proposes using seaweed as cow feed. Scripps notes that “just a small amount of Asparagopsis seaweed to cattle feed can dramatically reduce methane emissions from dairy cows by more than 50 percent”.

Agriculture

Bee thieves in California

It’s no longer cattle rustling and horse stealing. Bee thieves are threatening almond growers in California. A lucrative bee rental industry has surged.

Scientists have identified 67 marine species in California moving north from their commonly known habitat due to severe marine heatwaves from 2014-2016.

The Keeling Curve has been called one of the most important scientific works of the 20th century. Developed by Charles Keeling at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, California, it is a measurement of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa since 1958. Here’s why it’s so important.

Thanks to the rains the areas where the Woolsey burned outdoor areas, scorched an Old West film set and Jewish summer camps in the Santa Monica Mountains, there is lush green and wildflowers.

Once a Gold Rush boomtown, Bodie, California, is now an isolated ghost town. Meet one of the five people who still live there in the winter.

Lovely pictures of a sunrise. On Mars.

HUGE Basking sharks are swimming around and feeding right off the coast of California.

Design by Luis Ramirez

Week of July 19, 2019

Space