Golden Gate Bridge

Officials here took another step Tuesday toward approving a suicide prevention barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge, the 71-year-old span that has long been at the center of a controversy pitting safety against aesthetics. Bridge officials released an environmental impact report that explores the cost and feasibility of five design options that include raising the existing pedestrian rail from 4 feet to 12 feet and installing nets that would catch jumpers.

Stainless-steel netting costing up to $50 million will be placed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge to catch would-be suicide jumpers, San Francisco officials decided Friday. The decision by the board of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District follows several years of controversy. The agency has yet to determine how to finance it, said spokeswoman Mary Currie. The netting was the "locally preferred alternative," Currie said.

For decades, Marin County Coroner Ken Holmes preached against publicizing the grim frequency of suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge. He claimed that media tallies of the deaths created a circus atmosphere and even encouraged some people to jump. His campaign came to fruition in 1995, when Bay Area newspapers and TV stations agreed to stop treating the untimely deaths as news.

The agency that oversees the Golden Gate Bridge voted to begin studies on a barrier to prevent people from committing suicide by leaping off the world-famous span. Board members of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District voted 14 to 2 on Friday to move forward with wind-tunnel testing of generic barrier designs, including netting and changes to the bridge's railings. The district will conduct further studies if any of those options proves structurally sound.

For an entire year the cameras rolled, capturing death amid the eerie fog and shifting tides. One by one, filmmaker Eric Steel documented the final moments of nearly two dozen despondent men and women, and the agonizing, four-second fall after they leaped off the Golden Gate Bridge, drawn by the span's tragic beauty. His intent, he says, was to illuminate "the darkest corner of the human mind."

IT took four years to construct the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. And it took a year to create the spectacular sequence in "X-Men: The Last Stand" in which the rebellious mutant Magneto and his band uproot the 69-year-old suspension bridge and send it sailing through the air. "It was the end of April 2005 when I started designing shots for that sequence," says visual effects supervisor John Bruno, "and that was the last sequence that we finished at the end of this April."

Donald Fisher, the billionaire Gap Inc. founder who wants to build a museum for his contemporary art collection in San Francisco's Presidio national park, has agreed to revamp his project and move it to a less prominent site. Fisher told the Presidio Trust, the park's governing board, that he would follow a "preferred alternative" plan for developing the 1,500-acre park next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Under the revised plan, the new construction would be split into two structures, with lower roof lines and about half of the space buried underground.

Officials say they have received $2.8 million to restore habitats of sea otters and birds whose homes have been periodically damaged by oil spilling from a freighter that sank more than a half-century ago. The source of the spills was the S.S. Jacob Luckenbach, a freighter that sank in 1953 about 17 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. In 2002, federal and state officials found the ship and identified it as the source of numerous mystery oil spills along Northern California beaches.

For years, humans have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore. We were wrong. Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February foraging among elephant seals, sea lions and other prey, according to a new study published this month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The team of 10 California-based researchers determined that these sharks probably pass close to populated beaches and have been spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge.