KQED QUEST Receives 5 Northern California Area Emmy® Award Nominations!

The 41st Annual Northern California Area EMMY® Award Nominations were announced today for outstanding achievement in television by The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS). The following five QUEST stories received nominations — congratulations to you all and best of luck!

Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct: Big Fixes for Big Quakes

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is hard at work on a $4.6 billion, decade-long construction project to overhaul the Hetch Hetchy water system, which delivers water from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite National Park and five local reservoirs to 2.5 million residents in the Bay Area.

Exoskeletons Walk Forward

An exoskeleton suit may seem like science fiction, turning ordinary humans into super heroes, but wearable robots are moving forward into reality.

Redwoods and Climate Change

QUEST follows a group of UC Berkeley scientists to the top of a 320-foot redwood in Mendocino County. Only 5 percent of these ancient redwoods survived our voracious desire for their hardy and plentiful wood. Now scientists are trying to predict how the remaining ones and their descendants might fare in the face of climate change in the decades to come.

Sidelined: Sports Concussions

Studying the effects of a concussion at its source, inside the brain, is no easy feat. Says Dr. Geoffrey Manley, Chief of Neurosurgery at San Francisco General Hospital, “What we’re dealing with is one of the most complicated injuries in the most complicated organ in the body.”

Science on the SPOT: Open Source Creativity – Hackerspaces

Inspired in part by the open source movement, public spaces are emerging where people congregate to share ideas, make cool projects, teach, and brainstorm on everything from coding to cooking. With no leaders, they have one rule: “Be excellent to each other.” Take a tour of the hackerspace Noisebridge, located in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, with co-founder Mitch Altman.