When others come to your paradise to find solitude, where do you find yours? This longing has taken me from my hometown on Oahu into the jungles of Central America and to islands in Southeast Asia. A few years ago, I finally found what I was looking for—a mere island hop from where I started. The place was Kauai’s Na Pali Coast. I wrote this travel feature about a kayak trip down the Na Pali Coast for the January/February 2007 issue of California magazine.

Airport security screening relies heavily on metal detection devices; screening for explosives in liquids has proved to be elusive—most liquids are simply confiscated. While researching degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and cancer, UC Berkeley chemist Christopher Chang developed a chemical sensor that identifies hydrogen peroxide—which living cells excrete when stressed. Hydrogen peroxide is also the main ingredient in a popular homemade explosive. Chang quickly devised a plan to convert his “peroxysensor” for use in anti-terrorism security screening.

A dragonfly’s eye has thousands of tiny lenses, each the size of a pinprick. They can see in all directions at the same time. Bioengineering Professor Luke Lee and his team developed an artificial compound eye similar to a dragonfly’s—with 360-degree vision—that could aid in military surveillance or medical imaging. Lee’s specialty is what he calls “biologically inspired systems.” This article appeared in the May/June issue of California magazine.

What you can’t smell can hurt you. That’s the idea behind electronic noses—sensors that detect harmful gases, such as ammonia or carbon monoxide, at much lower levels than the human nose can. Commercial e-noses are used in the food industry, in hospitals, and on NASA space shuttles, but they have generally been too expensive for consumer use. But Vivek Subramanian, an associate professor of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, is building cheap e-noses that can be printed quickly and cheaply with plastic “ink.”

A solar burst is the sudden ejection of particles from the sun’s corona—responsible for the ghostly illuminations known as aurora borealis, or “Northern Lights.” In a strange collaboration with the Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley, composer Roberto Morales is transforming satellite recordings of solar bursts into music. This article ran in the July/August 2006 issue of California magazine.