Santa Rosa council hears from legal, energy experts before power vote

Published: Saturday, June 29, 2013 at 3:12 p.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, June 29, 2013 at 3:12 p.m.

Santa Rosa has hired two consultants to help city council members understand the possible pitfalls of joining the Sonoma Clean Power Authority.

Their advice could prove pivotal for a council that is struggling to get its questions about the public power agency answered before a scheduled July 9 vote.

?I can't even begin to guess how the council as a whole will go on this,? Mayor Scott Bartley said. ?I go up and down, in and out, and any which way you can on this.?

The two consultants, one an attorney the other an energy engineer, have been answering questions from the council's three-member subcommittee over the past two weeks. Both will also be on hand to answer questions from the full council at the meeting, which starts at 1 p.m. Tuesday, July 2.

?They've helped us identify issues that we think are critical,? Bartley said.

The consultant with the most experience with issues surrounding public power authorities is Michael Dean, an attorney and founder of the Sacramento law firm Meyers Nave, which specializes in advising public agencies in California.

Dean, who has been practicing law since 1976, is general counsel to the Northern California Power Agency. The Roseville-based public power agency provides electricity to several agencies in Northern and Central California, including Healdsburg and Ukiah, the Port of Oakland and Bay Area Rapid Transit.

In 2008, Dean helped negotiate a 20-year, $500 million power purchase agreement between the agency and Western GeoPower for ?100 percent clean, green and renewable, electricity? from its geothermal power plants at The Geysers.

Dean is the chairman of the firm's Public Power and Telecommunications Practice Department. He will answer council members' questions about liability and any other legal concerns they may have, City Attorney Caroline Fowler said.

Any reports or opinions Dean puts in writing to the council will remain confidential, Fowler said.

The second consultant is John Rosenblum, a Sebastopol-based engineering consultant specializing in industrial water and energy efficiency projects.

He has 23 years of experience and has previously done work for the city, mostly recently to help install more efficient pumps at the wastewater treatment plant on Llano Road.

He also has experience analyzing how water demand will impact greenhouse gas emissions and targets, authoring a report on the subject for the Sonoma County Water Agency and Climate Protection Campaign in 2007.

He'll also be on tap to answer technical questions for the council during the July 2 session.

Windsor and Cotati have both voted to join Sonoma County in the launch of the agency, which seeks to displace Pacific Gas & Electric Co. as the area's main electricity supplier. Together, they account for about 40 percent of PG&E meters in Sonoma County.

Of the eight cities being solicited by the county, Cloverdale, Rohnert Park and Petaluma have chosen not to join for now. Sebastopol is set to vote July 2, followed by Santa Rosa on July 9, and Sonoma July 15.

Santa Rosa council members have said they need advice from experts unaffiliated with Sonoma Clean Power to help them get unbiased answers to their questions and insights to help them ask better ones.

?We need ? I, the subcommittee, and the whole council ? need and want to understand what we are getting into,? Bartley said. ?Then, you either accept the risk or you don't.?

The participation of Sonoma County's largest city, where nearly 170,000 residents and businesses consume 35 percent of the electricity sold by Pacific Gas & Electric, is considered vital to the fledgling agency's ability to spread costs over a larger base and negotiate the best possible rates from potential power suppliers.

There is intense pressure for council members to join the program, but they have so far resisted the power politics at play, winning an extension of a June 30 decision deadline and pushing for a variety of changes to language in the joint powers authority that would govern the new agency.

But at this late date, it's not clear to Bartley just how much say the city has over a JPA it has yet to join.

?We're not going to reinvent Sonoma Clean Power at this point, and that shouldn't be our goal,? Bartley said.

But other council members appear to be holding out for additional revisions to the JPA.

Councilwoman Julie Combs said she wants a pledge of no purchases of nuclear power in the JPA as well as clear language obligating the agency to build clean power projects that would produce local jobs.

?Don't claim it if it's not there in writing,? Combs said.

She also wants to see greater ratepayer protections and living wages paid on future energy projects, she said. Sonoma Clean Power officials have said the time to craft many such changes is after the cities sign on.

(You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@citybeater)

Source: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130629/articles/130629442

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07/02/2013 - College Heights Stadium Closure

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Source: http://www.collegeofsanmateo.edu/calendar/events/index.php?com=detail&eID=10553

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Young Imbeciles Destroy Largest Lego Helicopter Ever

Yesterday a group of idiots destroyed the largest Lego helicopter in the world, the 100,000-piece Erickson Air-Crane. Built by Ryan McNaught over the course of six weeks, the pieces alone are valued at $25,000.

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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/fgnjXZF1OKA/young-imbeciles-destroy-largest-lego-helicopter-ever-614196901

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Scientists view 'protein origami' to help understand, prevent certain diseases

June 28, 2013 ? Scientists using sophisticated imaging techniques have observed a molecular protein folding process that may help medical researchers understand and treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's and cancer.

The study, reported this month in the journal Cell, verifies a process that scientists knew existed but with a mechanism they had never been able to observe, according to Dr. Hays Rye, Texas A&M AgriLife Research biochemist.

"This is a step in the direction of understanding how to modulate systems to prevent diseases like Alzheimer's. We needed to understand the cell's folding machines and how they interact with each other in a complicated network," said Rye, who also is associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Texas A&M.

Rye explained that individual amino acids get linked together like beads on a string as a protein is made in the cell.

"But that linear sequence of amino acids is not functional," he explained. "It's like an origami structure that has to fold up into a three-dimensional shape to do what it has to do."

Rye said researchers have been trying to understand this process for more than 50 years, but in a living cell the process is complicated by the presence of many proteins in a concentrated environment.

"The constraints on getting that protein to fold up into a good 'origami' structure are a lot more demanding," he said. "So, there are special protein machines, known as molecular chaperones, in the cell that help proteins fold."

But how the molecular chaperones help protein fold when it isn't folding well by itself has been the nagging question for researchers.

"Molecular chaperones are like little machines, because they have levers and gears and power sources. They go through turning over cycles and just sort of buzz along inside a cell, driving a protein folding reaction every few seconds," Rye said.

The many chemical reactions that are essential to life rely on the exact three-dimensional shape of folded proteins, he said. In the cell, enzymes, for example, are specialized proteins that help speed biological processes along by binding molecules and bringing them together in just the right way.

"They are bound together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle," Rye explained. "And the proteins -- those little beads on the string that are designed to fold up like origami -- are folded to position all these beads in three-dimensional space to perfectly wrap around those molecules and do those chemical reactions.

"If that doesn't happen -- if the protein doesn't get folded up right -- the chemical reaction can't be done. And if it's essential, the cell dies because it can't convert food into power needed to build the other structures in the cell that are needed. Chemical reactions are the structural underpinning of how cells are put together, and all of that depends on the proteins being folded in the right way."

When a protein doesn't fold or folds incorrectly it turns into an "aggregate," which Rye described as "white goo that looks kind of like a mayonnaise, like crud in the test tube.

"You're dead; the cell dies," he said.

Over the past 20 years, he said, researchers have linked that aggregation process "pretty convincingly" to the development of diseases -- Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Huntington's disease, to name a few. There's evidence that diabetes and cancer also are linked to protein folding disorders.

"One of the main roles for the molecular chaperones is preventing those protein misfolding events that lead to aggregation and not letting a cell get poisoned by badly folded or aggregated proteins," he said.

Rye's team focused on a key molecular chaperone -- the HSP60.

"They're called HSP for 'heat shock protein' because when the cell is stressed with heat, the proteins get unstable and start to fall apart and unfold," Rye said. "The cell is built to respond by making more of the chaperones to try and fix the problem.

"This particular chaperone takes unfolded protein and goes through a chemical reaction to bind the unfolded protein and literally puts it inside a little 'box,'" Rye said.

He added that the mystery had long been how the folding worked because, while researchers could see evidence of that happening, no one had ever seen precisely how it happened.

Rye and the team zeroed in on a chemically modified mutant that in other experiments had seemed to stall at an important step in the process that the "machine" goes through to start the folding action. This clued the researchers that this stalling might make it easier to watch.

They then used cryo-electron microscopy to capture hundreds of thousands of images of the process at very high resolutions which allowed them to reconstruct from two-dimensional flat images a three-dimensional model. A highly sophisticated computer algorithm aligns the images and classifies them in subcategories.

"If you have enough of them you can actually reconstruct and view a structure as a three-dimensional model," Rye said.

What the team saw was this: The HSP60 chaperone is designed to recognize proteins that are not folded from the ones that are. It binds them and then has a separate co-chaperone that puts a "lid" on top of the box to keep the folding intermediate in the box. They could see the box move, and parts of the molecule moved to peel the chaperone box away from the bound protein -- or "gift" in the box. But the bound protein was kept inside the package where it could then initiate a folding reaction. They saw tiny tentacles, "like a little octopus in the bottom of the box rising up and grabbing hold of the substrate protein and helping hold it inside the cavity."

"The first thing we saw was a large amount of an unfolded protein inside of this cavity," he said. "Even though we knew from lots and lots of other studies that it had to go in there, nobody had ever seen it like this before. We can also see the non-native protein interacting with parts of the box that no one had ever seen before. It was exciting to see all of this for the first time. I think we got a glimpse of a protein in the process of folding, which we actually can compare to other structures."

"By understanding the mechanism of these machines, the hope is that one of the things we can learn to do is turn them up or turn them off when we need to, like for a patient who has one of the protein folding diseases," he said.

Rye collaborated on the research with Dong-Hua Chen and Wah Chiu at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Damian Madan and Zohn Lin at Princeton University, Jeremy Weaver at Texas A&M and Gunnar Schr?der at the Institute of Complex Systems in Germany.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/PfjFPU7j0xE/130628120759.htm

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US Lab to Reduce Biomedical Testing on Chimpanzees (Voice Of America)

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Good Reads: From algorithms, to Roman walls, to the new liberals and conservatives

This week's round-up of Good Reads include doubts about algorithms' 'all-power,' the recipe for Roman concrete, the need for a Turkish Mandela, young liberals who may be more conservative than they realize, and the usefulness of military 'land power.'

By Marshall Ingwerson,?Managing editor / June 28, 2013

Johnny Depp is one of only three actors who reliably bring a positive box office return.

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/File

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Algorithms all-powerful?

In spite of appearances ? from the US National Security Agency searching American phone records for patterns to Google counting keywords in e-mails to decide which ads to display ? the algorithm may not conquer all.

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This is the conclusion that science reporter Tom Whipple comes around to in his article ?Slaves to the Algorithm? in the magazine Intelligent Life, a sister publication of The Economist. An algorithm is how so-called big data is crunched into something meaningful. ?If p, then q? is an algorithm, but in the age of fast computers, the ?p? can include billions of data points.

Mr. Whipple explores the work of a company, Epagogix, that forecasts the earning power of proposed movies for Hollywood studios, based on thousands of factors punched into its software. It seems to work. And has uncovered some fun facts. One is that so-called bankable movie stars are almost nonexistent. Only three actors, Epagogix has found, actually bring a positive return on investment ? Will Smith, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp.

But human judgment has hardly left the picture. The head of Epagogix notes that his program assumes that everything about the movie is done well ? that the dialogue is credible and the actors good (stars or not). And even so, his algorithms can?t discern if the movie is good, only if, done well, a lot of people are likely to pay to see it.

Whipple discusses another facet of algorithms. They are good at finding patterns, sometimes surprising ones, in big numbers. They are not so good at predicting the behavior of individuals. Dating sites, for example, have yet to show any scientific evidence that they can predict who will hit it off with whom.

Lost recipe for Roman concrete, cracked

Some technology just isn?t what it used to be. The Portland cement that we use to make concrete these days doesn?t have a fraction of the lasting power of the aggregate the Romans used a couple millenniums ago. According to a report by Bernhard Warner in Bloomberg Businessweek, research engineers studying 12 ancient Roman-built harbors found that the breakwaters made of Roman concrete have stood the pounding waves for 2,000 years and are still intact. Modern concrete has a working life under water of a mere 50 years. The older, stronger stuff had an added advantage: Its manufacture was relatively clean. Creating Portland cement releases a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.?

Needed: a Turkish Mandela

One of the central dangers in Turkey today is of a slide into two sharply polarized camps ? the government and its conservative, religious, largely rural backers on one side and the more affluent, secular, and modernizing protesters on the other. They have come to be called ?black Turks? and ?white Turks.?

Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-born economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been writing about the current troubles in his country of origin on his Why Nations Fail blog. He notes that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently grouped Turks into ?black? and ?white,? putting himself among the ?black Turks.?

How do societies break out of cycles of polarization? Mr. Acemoglu consults history and finds several routes, but the most attractive is when a leader musters the vision and courage to make peace across the fault lines and show goodwill to the other side.

?So bottom line: we badly need a Turkish Mandela,? he says.

What they really mean by ?conservative??

Meanwhile, Americans may not be quite as polarized as they think they are. A series of three new studies find that young adults who call themselves liberal Democrats are overall not quite as liberal on the issues as they think they are. But young people from the rest of the political spectrum tend to bill themselves as more conservative than they are on the issues. The biggest disparity is among those who regard themselves as most conservative. Not so much, it turns out. When asked their stands on a dozen major issues from welfare to gay rights, they didn?t toe as conservative a line as they thought they did, according to the studies, which were reported first in an academic journal, and brought to us by Tom Jacobs in Pacific Standard magazine. Clearly, conservatism is the more popular brand, even when it?s not an obvious fit.

The benefits of military ?land power??

With US forces finally checking out of Afghanistan and American attention pivoting to East Asia, it?s time for some soul-searching: What?s the Army for?

Maj. Robert M. Chamberlain, writing in the Armed Forces Journal, sees future peace and prosperity in currently unfashionable land power. Terrorists who hole up in the world?s backwaters can best be pursued by special forces teams and armed drones. The Navy can protect the world?s sea lanes and global commerce. Air power can strike awesomely anywhere. But land power ? the job of the Army and Marines ? is inherently less threatening, he argues. ?Land power is the only avenue by which America can enhance regional security and stability, deter Chinese militarism and encourage Chinese commitment to the global status quo.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/c6nz-yHibak/Good-Reads-From-algorithms-to-Roman-walls-to-the-new-liberals-and-conservatives

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NASA launches sun-watching satellite from Calif.

File-This undated image provided by NASA shows technicians preparing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. for the launch of NASA?s latest satellite, Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), that will study the sun. The Iris satellite is set to ride into Earth orbit on a rocket, which will be dropped from an airplane flying over the Pacific some 100 miles off California?s central coast Thursday June 27, 2013. (AP Photo/NASA,VAFB, Randy Beaudoin,File)

File-This undated image provided by NASA shows technicians preparing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. for the launch of NASA?s latest satellite, Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), that will study the sun. The Iris satellite is set to ride into Earth orbit on a rocket, which will be dropped from an airplane flying over the Pacific some 100 miles off California?s central coast Thursday June 27, 2013. (AP Photo/NASA,VAFB, Randy Beaudoin,File)

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) ? NASA launched a satellite late Thursday on a mission to explore a little-studied region of the sun and to better forecast space weather that can disrupt communications systems on Earth.

Unlike a traditional liftoff, the Iris satellite rode into Earth orbit on a Pegasus rocket dropped from an airplane that took off around sunset from the Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's central coast. About 100 miles off the coast and at an altitude of 39,000 feet, the airplane released the rocket, which ignited its engine for the 13-minute climb to space.

Mission controllers clapped after receiving word that Iris separated from the rocket as planned, ready to begin its two-year mission.

"We're thrilled," NASA launch director Tim Dunn said in a NASA TV interview.

The launch went smoothly, but there were some tense moments when communications signals were temporarily lost. Ground controllers were able to track Iris by relying on other satellites orbiting Earth. It also took longer-than-expected for Iris to unfurl its solar panels.

In a statement, NASA said it received confirmation that the satellite deployed its solar panels and was generating power.

Previous sun-observing spacecraft have yielded a wealth of information about our nearest star and beamed back brilliant pictures of solar flares.

The 7-foot-long Iris, weighing 400 pounds, carries an ultraviolet telescope that can take high-resolution images every few seconds.

Unlike NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which observes the entire sun, Iris will focus on a little-explored region that lies between the surface and the corona, the glowing white ring that's visible during eclipses.

The goal is to learn more about how this mysterious region drives solar wind ? a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun ? and to better predict space weather that can disrupt communications signals on Earth.

"This is a very difficult region to understand and observe. We haven't had the technical capabilities before now to really zoom in" and peer at it up close, NASA program scientist Jeffrey Newmark said before the launch.

The mission is cheap by NASA standards, costing $182 million, and is managed by the space agency's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Engineers will spend a month making sure Iris is in perfect health before powering on the telescope to begin observations.

The launch was delayed by a day so that technicians at the Air Force base could restore power to launch range equipment after a weekend outage cut electricity to a swath of the central coast.

The Pegasus, from Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., is a winged rocket designed for launching small satellites. First flown in 1990, Pegasus rockets have also been used to accelerate vehicles in hypersonic flight programs.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/b2f0ca3a594644ee9e50a8ec4ce2d6de/Article_2013-06-28-US-SCI-Sun-Satellite/id-8cb5098c2e9f413c8a8faa895fbbf808

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