Nerd Nite SF #126: Hey Girl! Bingo + DNA Sequencing + Nuclear Energy

Join us for Nerd Nite SF, the Pride month party edition!

We’re very excited to announce that we’ll be partnering with the bearded bingo babe herself, Shelix, for Hey Girl! Bingo before the talks begin. Come early to kick off the evening with a drink and a bingo card! Nerdy prizes and drink tickets are up for grabs!

The evening will continue with another kind of helix, the DNA kind! Other talk topics TBA, but word on the street is that they pertain to private investigation and San Francisco drag history. Stay tuned, but in the meantime, the early nerd gets the worm! Or, the free bingo square.

How to Sequence a Genome with Jess McLaughlin

Ever wonder exactly how you get DNA from, say, a fruit fly, a lizard, your dog, or even yourself, and actually turn it into something we can read? Would you have guessed it includes weird chemistry, magnets, fluorescent colors, and some very fancy dish soap? Jess McLaughlin, an evolutionary biologist, will explain how DNA sequencing is basically tech-wizardry, turning molecules in your cells into light and then into computer bytes.

Jess is a postdoc at UC Berkeley, where they study the evolution of anole lizards in the Caribbean. They also research how new species of birds develop, and they have a passion for telling folks about just how weird biology can be.

Powering the Nerdtropolis: Why we need to save Diablo Canyon, our last nuclear power plant
with Guido D. Núñez-Mujica

California is facing not a only a climate crisis, but an energy crisis. Despite all our talk about renewables, we continue building natural gas plants and asking for emission limits to be increased. Even worse, we plan to close our largest zero emissions power plant in 2 years. In this talk, Guido will tell us what we can do about it and why it needs to stay open.

Guido is data scientist working in environmental issues, with a background in computational biology. He’s a TED Fellow, a Cornell Alliance for Science Fellow and does volunteer work about immigration and human rights.

This event was orignially scheduled for June 15th.