Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Is Radiation Actually Good For Some of Us?

February 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Meet Reference Man, a kind of hypothetical Ken Doll: a 20-something white male, fit and hearty, out in the park doing a hundred one-armed pushups every morning at 5:30. He’s the guy most radiation exposure standards are designed to protect. But as a stand-in, he’s passé. Reference Man was born when most of the evidence about the health effects of radiation came from high-dose exposures such as nuclear bombs. But the landscape has changed. Exposure now comes from low and often chronic levels of radiation such as medical technologies, which are the fastest-growing source of radiation ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, March-April 2012, Science
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California’s Medical Marijuana Morass

January 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In California, annual retail sales of medical marijuana may be as high as $1.3 billion. But to use it, people have to grow it, and deliver it, and the laws governing the substance are anything but clear. What’s more, the feds’ official position is: no marijuana is legal. And they’re cracking down. Writer David Freed takes us on a road trip through the medical marijuana morass as part of the “Medicine on the Front Lines” report in the January-February 2012 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. We’re riding south out of Northern California’s Humboldt County, pushing 75 miles an ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, January-February 2012, Legal Affairs
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LAPD Cracks Cold Cases With Science, Grit

October 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

His list of victims could read like a yearbook: Debra Jackson, 1985; Henrietta Wright, 1986; Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, and Mary Lowe, 1987; Alicia Alexander and Lachrica Jefferson, 1988. Then, after a break of more than a dozen years — the "sleeper" period that inspired his nickname — Valerie McCorvey, 2003. Four years after that — Jenica Peters, 2007. All of the victims were black women. They were as young as 18 and as old as 36 when he ended their lives. Most were sexually assaulted and then shot, their bodies left in alleys or trash bins along a stretch of Western Avenue in ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Legal Affairs, November-December 2011
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Teacher Collaboration Gives Schools Better Results

August 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Five years ago, Sparks Middle School hit bottom. Its test scores were some of the worst in the district. A chain-link fence was locked after hours to prevent gangs from tagging the open-air hallways. Between classes, members of rival tagging crews would fight. Word came down to the La Puente, Calif., school from the Los Angeles County Office of Education: We may shut you down if you don't come up with a plan. Sparks embarked on a makeover. Sherri Franson, the school's new principal, took down the chain-link fence because she thought it made the school look like a jail. She lengthened the ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Education, September-October 2011
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CSI: Wildlife — Solving Mysterious Animal Deaths

June 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Carol Meteyer unfurled the Sandhill crane's gray wings across the steel examination table, and for a moment, the 4-foot-tall bird regained its former majesty. In that instant, the laboratory's windowless cinderblock walls, cement floor and fluorescent lights disappeared. It was easy to imagine the crane's wings cupping the prairie air as it landed in an Oklahoma field, its long gray neck stretched, its red crown the only bright spot in a dun landscape. FedEx had delivered the crane, along with three others, that morning. The day before, it had stood in a farm field in Oklahoma, its head ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Environment, July-August 2011, Profile, Science
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Solar Showdown: Are New Solar Power Projects Anti-Environmental?

April 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
May-June 2011

Last December, I flew to Phoenix, rented a car and drove two hours west on Interstate 10 to Blythe, Calif., a sun-baked town of 13,000 on the lower Colorado River surrounded by orange groves and irrigated farmland. In the winter, this area attracts tens of thousands of snowbirds, many of whom park their recreational trailers along dirt roads in the desert and tool around in all-terrain vehicles. I hadn't come to see them, though. I wanted to learn about another new arrival, an international consortium called Solar Millennium LLC, which is building a 7,000-acre solar power generating station ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Environment, May-June 2011
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How to Stop Suicide by Cop

February 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Standing before a classroom of police officers, Lt. Mark Poisson of the Wethersfield, Connecticut Police Department cues up video of a young man talking about the night he tried to get Poisson to kill him. "Seth*," who was 19 at the time and attending college in New Jersey, had already attempted suicide twice. He'd never been in trouble with the law but had spent years crippled by depression, and he was searching for the best way to die. Eventually, he decided the surest method was a gun. But he didn't own one; neither did his parents. That's when it came to him: Police have guns. The ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Culture, Health, March-April 2011
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The Bad Daddy Factor

December 10, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
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The fathers weren't supposed to matter. But in the mid-1960s, pharmacologist Gladys Friedler was making all sorts of strange findings. She discovered that when she gave morphine to female rats, it altered the development of their future offspring — rat pups that hadn't even been conceived yet. What's more, even these rats' grandchildren seemed to have problems. In an effort to understand the unexpected result, she made a fateful decision: She would see what happened when she put male rodents on the opiate. So she shot up the rat daddies with morphine, waited a few days, and then mated them ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Health, January-February 2011
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Ocean Carbon Sequestration: The World’s Best Bad Idea

October 11, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Ocean Carbon Sequestration

Nestled on the narrow neck of a rocky peninsula that juts into the Pacific Ocean, the Seto Marine Laboratory is one of Japan's oldest facilities for studying the abundant fish, marine invertebrates and seaweeds that have sustained people here for centuries. These days, the resort hotels that line the coastline of Shirahama — the name means "white beach" — are a far more important lifeline for the region's economy than fishing. But in the laboratory, amid a welter of bubbling tanks and clattering pumps, a marine biologist named Yoshihisa Shirayama and his staff and student researchers are ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Environment, Magazine Feature Story, November-December 2010
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The Best Fiscal Stimulus: Trust

August 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The neuroeconomist Paul Zak is driving west along Interstate 10 on a gorgeous Southern California morning. As we pass emerald hillsides, glowing from recent rains, and the snow-blanketed ridges of the San Gabriel Mountains, Zak talks about how standard economics neglects the biological mechanisms of trust that underlie myriad human interactions. "Why people cooperate — why people are altruistic — is a huge question," he says. "When you think about how much of the world works on a handshake or on holding a door open for somebody in an airport, all that kind of falls through the cracks in ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Cover Story, Magazine Feature Story, September-October 2010
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