KQED Science Video Podcast

The Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco are a vital home to many birds and marine mammals. While the forbidding and inhospitable nature of the Farallones may be ideal for wildlife, it also makes this a difficult place for scientists to live and work. QUEST ventures out to these jagged rocks to get a glimpse of daily life on the islands and what it’s like there for the researchers from PRBO Conservation Science.

California Highway One, between Pacifica and Montara, was carved out of the steep coastal cliffs. Plagued by closures due to rockslides and land slippage, this route has earned the nickname "The Devil's Slide." Now two tunnels beneath San Pedro Mountain, each 30-feet wide and 4,200-feet long are being dug to bypass it. QUEST meets the engineers and geologists deep underground to learn how Caltrans is digging this new tunnel.

Artist Kate Nichols longed to paint with the iridescent colors of butterfly wings, but no such pigments existed. So she became the first artist-in-residence at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to synthesize nanoparticles and incorporate them into her artwork.

Meet Shelley, a car that drives itself. Researchers at Stanford University have developed an autonomous race car and plan on taking it on one of the toughest courses in the country. First, the car is taking them for a test ride at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.

Pale ghosts that hide amidst their gigantic siblings, only a few dozen Albino redwood trees are known to exist. They are genetic mutants that lack the chlorophyll needed for photosynthesis-- how and why they survive is a scientific mystery. QUEST ventures into the deep canopy of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Felton, California to track down these elusive phantoms of the forest.

As the "father of biodiversity," two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and guru of myrmecology (the study of ants), E. O. Wilson has been an inspiration to young scientists around the globe. Wilson discusses his life, his career, and his hope for the future of our living world.

Scientists say it's no secret San Francisco Bay is rising, along with all of the earth’s oceans. The reason -- global warming. This rise in sea level will affect everyone who lives, works, or plays near the bay. QUEST asks how high will the Bay rise and when? And what steps can communities take to plan for it?

QUEST journeys back to find out how physicists on the UC Berkeley campus in the 1930s, and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the 1970s, created "atom smashers" that led to key discoveries about the tiny constituents of the atom and paved the way for the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Flowing 330 miles from the Sierras to the delta, the San Joaquin River is California’s second longest river. It once boasted one of the state's great salmon runs. But since the construction of Friant Dam near Fresno in the 1940s, most of the San Joaquin's water has been siphoned off to farmland in the Central Valley. Now, after years of lawsuits, a new effort to restore the river is offering hope that fish and farmers can co-exist.

San Francisco 's fickle summer weather has earned it the nickname "Fog City." Science on the SPOT asks UC Berkeley's Todd Dawson to clear up the mysterious origins of this weather phenomenon, and share his research on how fog is integral to our state's ecology.