Tim Didion

Some Bay Area customers are getting a new jolt of green energy. That's thanks to a nonprofit power company, and the largest geothermal power generator in the country.

Researchers in a lab at Stanford University are focused on a tiny predator that has an enormous, and sometimes deadly impact around the world, mosquitoes.

If you're going to make a splashy entrance, timing is everything -- and the recent arrival of sunflower sea stars at the California Academy of Sciences couldn't have hit it much better. Here's how they can help restore the Bay Area coastline.

Test results are in on a technology that could help keep a popular Bay Area seafood on the table. They're specially designed traps to fish for Dungeness crab, without endangering other marine creatures.

If it's in your home and runs on electricity, you'll probably find it in the Stanford Bits and Watts lab. And that includes solar panels to help power and test consumer appliances.

"People come here, they spend their money at restaurants, coffee shops... And one of the biggest draws to people visiting here and staying here, even though with sales and rent going up a lot, is surfing in the ocean," says Shaun Burns with the Save the Waves Coalition.

North America's 1st large-scale manga exhibit opens at San Francisco's De Young Museum

InPipe Energy has installed the Bay Area's smallest hydroelectric power plant in a pipeline connecting part of the East Bay water distribution system, taking the place of the normal water pressure regulator to harness the flow and produce electricity.

From the air, you could mistake it for the world's largest beach umbrella. But this solar canopy near Turlock is not only shading the water flowing underneath it - it's also producing enough clean electricity to power several thousand homes.

The team uses seawater and delicate mesh filters to painstakingly separate the buoyant plastic by hand. The goal is to understand where the samples are originating, and how they're being carried from their source to the sea.