Tom Fudge

2 weeks ago | kpbs.org | Thomas A. Fudge |Tom Fudge

Ephedra. Artemisia. Yerba santa. Opium poppy. A lot of well-known drugs start with roots in the ground. The San Diego Botanic Garden in Encinitas is leading an effort to make curative plants even better by exploring their genomes. The Medicinal Plants Initiative began three years ago by the botanic garden. During that time, their collection of medicinal plants has quadrupled, according to Benjamin Naman, director of medicinal plants research.

3 weeks ago | kpbs.org | Thomas A. Fudge |Tom Fudge

A campground at the Tijuana River Valley Regional Park is set to reopen as planned on Tuesday after being closed for more than a year, despite a push by a local union to keep it closed. The SEIU Local 221, which represents park rangers, argued the area was so polluted it posed a danger to the health of people using the park or working there. The campground is home to a cluster of yurts that offer a temporary home to visiting campers.

4 weeks ago | kpbs.org | Thomas A. Fudge |Tom Fudge

Our most familiar image of the dung beetle shows one of them rolling a finely shaped ball of dung to a hiding place where it digs a hole and lays its eggs. Along with the dung ball rollers, there are the “dwellers” that move into a dung pile and set up housekeeping. “And there’s a third group that are called tunnelers. And they tunnel underneath cow pats, and create little brood chambers in these tunnels.

1 month ago | kpbs.org | Thomas A. Fudge |Tom Fudge

Employers ranging from SeaWorld to the military arrived Tuesday morning at the Balboa Park Club to make a pitch for their chosen careers. Young people, ages 16 to 24, were also invited from San Diego’s Promise Zone to hear their pitches. The Promise Zone ranges from Barrio Logan to Encanto, and it’s a federally defined area of historic underinvestment. “There are 22 Promise Zones throughout the country. They are urban, rural and tribal.

1 month ago | kpbs.org | Tom Fudge

The lecture hall at UC San Diego’s Price Center was full Wednesday with an audience eager to hear about devices that can bend light and sound waves to change what we can see and hear — and perhaps even make things invisible. It sounds like magic, but it's physics. The presenter was physicist John Pendry from Imperial College in London, and the devices are called metamaterials.