California magazine blog

Riding the Wave

Okay, so I'm getting to this almost a month late, but before the opportunity passes entirely, I wanted to point to the Berkeley Seismological Lab's Seismo Blog and, in particular, the October 16th entry remembering the Loma Prieta earthquake on the twenty-year anniversary. Here's how it begins:

It doesn't happen very often that a seismologist actually gets to observe a seismic wave in nature. Sure, we all sit in front of computer screens and look at the digital representation of the wiggles a seismometer produces. And indeed, the seismometer's mass swings with the rhythm of the wave. But these seismograms are far from the real thing. The blogger actually saw a seismic wave 20 years ago today, when the Loma Prieta Earthquake shook the Bay Area. I remember that it was a balmy afternoon. Everybody was excited because the A's and the Giants had lined up in Candlestick Park (as it was then known) for the third game of the 1989 World Series. I was in the car, picking my son up from after-school activities and dropping my daughter off for soccer practice. We were parked in her school's parking lot when the car suddenly began to rumble and then sway. I thought my son was jumping up and down in the back seat, eager to get home and watch the game on TV. But when I looked in the rear view mirror, I saw him sitting there quietly, staring awestruck out the window.

The Path to Greatness

Nobel Laureate Carol Greider tells the Times how she got where she got. And, yep, you guessed it: She came through Berkeley and co-recipient Elizabeth Blackburn's lab.

I never planned a career. I had these blinders on that got me through a lot of things that might have been obstacles. I just went forward. It’s a skill that I had early on that must have been adaptive. I enjoyed biology in high school and that brought me to a research lab at U.C. Santa Barbara. I loved doing experiments and I had fun with them. I realized this kind of problem-solving fit my intellectual style. So in order to continue having fun, I decided to go to graduate school at Berkeley. It was there that I went to Liz Blackburn’s lab, where telomeres were being studied.

Battle Beetles

We made mention of this in the May/June issue: Pentagon-sponsored Berkeley research has resulted in the development of a remotely controlled beetle that could one day be used for, well, ... who knows what it might one day be used for? The researchers at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center like to class their cyborg beetle as a MAV -- that is, a micro air vehicle. But that's only the beginning, apparently. Ultimately, according to this report from the BBC, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the funder of the research, is intent on creating a Nano Air Vehicle -- or NAV. For the moment, that remains science fiction, but of course so were airplanes once upon a time.

New Oldest Ancestor

Berkeley paleontologist Tim White is at the center of a discovery that could significantly revise our understanding of human origins. Ardi, a 4.4 million-year-old partial hominid skeleton from the Afar region of Ethiopia, predates Lucy -- formerly the oldest hominid skeleton ever found -- by more than a million years.

White and his fellow researchers put Ardi in a separate genus from Lucy. Neither chimpanzee nor human, Ardi has been designated as a species called Ardipithecus ramidus, a tree-dweller that nevertheless walked upright on land and lived in a moist, woodland ecosystem much different from the savannah-like environment that had supposedly given rise to bipedalism.

The findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Science. To learn more about Tim White and his work in Ethiopia, read our July/August feature, "Planet of the hominids," by Jeffrey Klein.

Science catches up with Burning Man!

And Woodstock. And Timothy Leary.

Actually, I wouldn't exactly call it "science" -- a study of 36 people sounds pretty lame to me -- but still, this report on a study of the spiritual aftermath of a hallucinogenic experience of the mushroom variety is worth thinking about:

Many of the 36 volunteers rated their reaction to a single dose of the drug, called psilocybin, as one of the most meaningful or spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Some compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.

Now, that in and of itself seems slightly obvious, but the possible applications of the study are quite fascinating:

The researchers suggest the drug someday may help drug addicts kick their habit or aid terminally ill patients struggling with anxiety and depression.

I like that.

By the way, anyone interested in hallucinogenic theory might want to read a fascinating book called Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution written by Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist and shaman and published in '92. (And no, I'm not tripping: Booklist, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and Mickey Hart gave it the thumbs up!)

--Meghan