Morning Hike at Bear Creek RedwoodsJoin us for this beautiful hike! A POST volunteer will share a few words about POST’s decades of conservation success before the hiking group explores a strenuous but mostly shaded 5.4 mile hike with ~900 feet of elevation gain.In one of the county’s best preserved, second-growth coastal redwood forests, we’ll ...
Inspired by the blueprint of photosynthesis, creating synthetic systems for the direct conversion of sunlight into sustainable fuels has long been a defining ambition of chemistry. While decades of research have been spent on developing solar water splitting catalysts to produce green hydrogen, recently a new generation of photosynthesis-inspired architectures ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Saturday, 10/10/26
Birding at Cypress Grove PreserveCypress Grove Preserve encompasses approximately 100 acres and serves as a center for scientific research, long-term ecological monitoring, education, and stewardship. Surrounded by towering Monterey cypress trees and wind-swept hedges, the preserve is situated on the eastern shore of Tomales Bay with eelgrass beds, native grasslands, and coastal marshes that ...
Where: MarshallCost: Free
Benefits of Birding WalkOctober 10th, Urban Wildlife Conservation Day, is the kickoff to National Wildlife Refuge Week! Come explore the Refuge on an introductory birdwatching walk across multiple wetland habitats at the Environmental Education Center in Alviso. We'll discuss the various benefits of birding for individuals, our communities, and wildlife while observing year-round ...
Where: AlvisoCost: Free
Groovy Tie-Dye: Veggie Tie-DyeJoin us at Emma Prusch for a groovy and natural alternative to traditional tie-dye! This program is designed for 7 to 10 year olds to learn about different vegetables that we grow at Emma Prusch and about different ways to utilize vegetables. During the first session, participants will learn how ...
Where: San JoseCost: $38 SJ residents, $42 non-residents
Techfest: Cars - Computers on Wheelsexperience how computing has transformed the automobile - from early onboard electronics to today’s connected, electric, and increasingly autonomous vehicles. See how technologies such as hands-free driving, AI-powered assistants, sensors, software, and advanced displays are changing what cars can do and how we experience the road.Cars - Computers on Wheels ...
Family Nature Adventures: SpidersThis Months Theme: Spidey Spectacular - Adventures with Arachnids!Spin your way into the fascinating world of spiders and arachnids! This month’s adventure is packed with discovery and excitement:Interactive Workshop: Learn all about native spiders, their incredible adaptations, and even how they behave in space.Spider Safari: Grab a magnifying glass and ...
Where: OaklandCost: $25 Adult, $35 Age 3 - 8, Members $15 discount
Shared Sky Festival - Day 1Join us October 10th and 11th as artists fill the Center with photography, music, paintings, and cosmic creativity to celebrate the grand opening of the Shared Sky: Photos of the Universe exhibition and the 2026 Astrophotography Prize awardees! Get creative with hands-on activities for all ages and explore how space ...
Where: OaklandCost: $24 Adults, $19 Youth/Sr/Students, Free members
Images of star trails are an excellent entry to tons of great astronomical questions: Why do the trails arc around Polaris? Why are they different colors? Why can’t we see star color with our eyes? Can we tell time with the stars? With care, capturing star trails can also result ...
Where: OaklandCost: Free with admission
Hike at Calero County ParkJoin Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) at Calero County Park, one of the region’s most beautiful oak woodlands just south of San Jose on the westside of Santa Clara Valley. You will be led by POST ambassadors who will share about the natural history of the area and about POST’s ...
Where: San JoseCost: Free
Sunday, 10/11/26
Are You Climate Concerned and Looking for a Place to Land?Are You Climate Concerned and Looking for a Place to Land?If you’re carrying climate grief, uncertainty, or even an awareness of possible collapse, you don’t have to carry it alone. East Bay friends are warmly invited to join me for a guided exploration of Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson’s Climate Wayfinding: ...
Where: 2310 Telegraph Ave, Oakland,Cost: $20-$50 no one turned away due to lack of funds
Wax and Suds: Candle and Soap Making Class - Teen ClassJoin us at Emma Prusch for a fun and creative candle and soap making class! The class will begin with a 10-minute guided tour of our Native Plant Garden, where participants will learn about some of the aromatic native plants that they can add to their candle or soap. Then, ...
Where: San JoseCost: $38 SJ residents, $42 non-residents
Shared Sky Festival - Day 2Join us October 10th and 11th as artists fill the Center with photography, music, paintings, and cosmic creativity to celebrate the grand opening of the Shared Sky: Photos of the Universe exhibition and the 2026 Astrophotography Prize awardees! Get creative with hands-on activities for all ages and explore how space ...
Where: OaklandCost: $24 Adults, $19 Youth/Sr/Students, Free members
My research lab focuses on answering applied ecological questions that promote improved marine management and conservation by focusing on species and ecosystems confronting anthropogenic stressors such as urbanization, climate change, and fishing pressure. To address questions of applied ecology, I use and apply a wide variety of tools ranging from ...
AI is advancing rapidly at the cognitive tasks that make up knowledge work, raising fears among firms, policymakers, and, not least, workers of a “China shock” for white-collar jobs. Neil Thompson will present new research on whether those fears are warranted. The research asks which tasks AI will take over ...
Batteries are increasingly central to transportation and the electric grid, yet many of the processes that determine their lifetime, safety, and performance remain hidden from conventional measurements. In this talk, I will discuss two complementary approaches for gaining access to this hidden information. First, cryogenic electron microscopy enables direct visualization ...
The Higgs boson is a fascinating particle that is connected to many of the outstanding mysteries of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider has now produced more than 50 million Higgs bosons, allowing us to study it in unprecedented detail and to use it as a tool to search for ...
The U.S. renewable energy industry is in the midst of a financial crisis. Over the past 18 months, more than 100 companies have filed for bankruptcy, even as solar accounted for roughly 80% of new U.S. electricity generation last year. In this seminar, Nick Franchot of GoodFinch will explain what ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Tuesday, 10/13/26
Global Skeptics in the PubInternational Zoom gathering to celebrate International Skeptics DaySee weblink for details
Low-valent reactive intermediates of carbon and nitrogen - namely, transition-metal complexes of carbenes and nitrenes - display diverse and powerful reactivity in the synthesis of complex organic molecules. Our group has focused on rhodium carbene complexes derived from substrates that lack electron-withdrawing groups. The diminished electrophilicity of these intermediates imparts ...
Chemical reaction dynamics in aqueous solution have traditionally been studied using optical methods such as absorption, emission, and scattering spectroscopy. In this talk, I will describe our efforts to follow chemical reactions in solution in real time by detecting photoelectrons emitted from the surface of an aqueous solution - that ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Skeptics in a Real PubEnjoy an evening of socializing and feasting with fellow Bay Area science-forward folk in an Irish Pub on the Peninsula with great food. < Menu >Also: This is International Skeptics Day! We will join others via the Zoom “Global Skeptics in the Pub” event.
Measles, an explosive cyclospora outbreak, a hantavirus scare aboard a cruise ship, an ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, rising sexually transmitted infections, and an HIV pandemic playing out amid U.S. funding cuts to global health. Meanwhile, COVID-19 is never fully out of the picture.In this talk, ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free, registration required
Best-selling author Michael Pollan has spent decades exploring what it means to be human, from the politics of food to the science of psychedelics. In his most recent book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, he examines the mystery of consciousness through scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and psychedelic perspectives. ...
The harvest of Atlantic sea scallops ranks among the most economically important fisheries in the United States. However, landings have declined by 70% over the last seven years, leaving fishermen, scientists, and policy makers searching for more effective management strategies. In this seminar, Andrew will highlight two avenues to improve ...
The dual quests - to understand intelligence as it arises in biology and to build it in machines of our own making - have been with us for nearly a century. While neuroscience and psychology seek to characterize intelligence in terms of underlying neural mechanisms and emergent behavior, we still ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Designing next-generation vaccines through control of antigen dynamicsFollowing infection, even “acute” viral and bacterial infections are often accompanied by prolonged antigen and/or inflammatory cue exposure, which can extend weeks after infectious pathogen is cleared. This is in contrast to the relatively short duration of antigen/inflammation that accompanies many subunit vaccines. Further, the structural integrity of vaccine antigens ...
The recent Nasdaq debut of a Korean semiconductor memory producer, SK hynix - raising $26.5 billion in the largest-ever listing by a foreign company - has garnered global recognition after temporarily overtaking Samsung Electronics as South Korea’s most valuable chipmaker. Together, the two companies account for more than half of ...
Antibiotics can acutely and persistently compromise microbiome stability and resilience, enabling enhanced colonization of pathogenic microbes, and loss of host-beneficial functions from depleted commensals. We interrogate resistome, taxonomic, and functional dynamics of microbiota of humans, animals, soils, and built-environments via high-throughput functional metagenomic selections, whole metagenome and transcriptome sequencing, and ...
Decades after President Kennedy stood at Rice University to articulate the moonshot of that generation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as the defining “space age” of our decade, transforming all aspects of our lives. In this talk, we will discuss the “rocket engines” necessary to power this moonshot, including the ...
Ventana Wildlife Society biologist Mike Stake describes how technology is shaping non-lead outreach to help save condors in central California. But while struggling with roadblocks here at home, Mike takes us on a detour halfway around the world, where he draws hope from vulture recovery in a European country still ...
Since their reintroduction to the wild in 1992, endangered California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) populations have increased due to releases of captive-bred individuals and natural reproduction. Condors now nest across four subpopulations: Central and Southern California, Arizona/Utah, and Baja, Mexico. Most nests involve a male and female who share incubation and ...
Where: Pacific GroveCost: Free
The San Andreas Fault - LivestreamLearn about the San Andreas fault and its neighbors in the Pacific-North American Plate Boundary, across the Bay Area and Northern California.The San Francisco Bay Area sits within the boundary of two great plates, the North American and Pacific, and is one of the most highly faulted regions of the ...
Where: Cost: Free
The Science Scoop: Holly IngrahamThe SpeakerHolly A. Ingraham, PhD, is the Herzstein Professor of Molecular Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on hormone-responsive nodes in the brain and peripheral tissues that impact metabolic, skeletal, and gut physiology and women’s health. Through question-driven basic science, Ingraham has uncovered how hormonal ...
Dinosaurs were the dominant large animals on Earth for well over 100 million years, and they still manage to captivate generation after generation of humans. But beyond their entertainment value, what is the meaning of dinosaurs, and what important knowledge might we extract from their ancient remains?Scott D. Sampson, PhD, ...
We're all going to age, but the path our brains take along the way is not entirely out of our hands. In this talk, clinical scientist Dr. Breanna Bullard explores the science of successful aging: what actually happens inside the brain over the decades, why some people stay sharp well ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $27
AI and the Future of Academic LaborJournalist Kari Lydersen in conversation with Robert Ovetz and Lindsay Weinberg, authors of the forthcoming book AI and the Future of Academic Labor.Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly being integrated into higher education, putting the very mission and work of learning, research and teaching at risk of automation. Higher education ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free (donations welcome)
Thursday, 10/15/26
The neural basis of cuttlefish camouflage and social behaviorAll animals form internal neural representations of the external world that guide their behavior. Cuttlefish, coleoid cephalopods related to octopus and squid, perform visually driven adaptive camouflage by dynamically altering the color, pattern, and texture of their skin to create an approximation of their surroundings - a process directly controlled ...
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has opened a new window into the early universe, enabling sensitive, high-resolution images of the near-infrared sky and spectroscopy of faint, distant sources. The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) is a collaboration of the NIRCam and NIRSpec GTO teams pooling over 1000 hours of ...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming resource management and environmental sustainability by enabling smarter, data-driven decisions across energy, agriculture, water, transportation, and climate science. This presentation explores how AI technologies - including machine learning, predictive analytics, digital twins, and the Internet of Things (IoT) - are improving resource efficiency, supporting environmental ...
The land down under is quite a stunner when it comes to fungal diversity. A wide array of landscapes coupled by equally fascinating plants and animals has pressured fungi into some unique forms and niches. This presentation will focus on fungi found in Western Australia, the Daintree area of Queensland, ...
Where: SebastopolCost: Free
After Dark: Speak EasyDecode the hidden patterns in how we communicate, and challenge yourself to change your perspective.
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22.95 General, Free for members
NightLifeThursdays hit different at NightLife. The museum comes alive after hours??"wilder, more curious, and full of exciting creatures. Grab your friends, grab a handcrafted drink, and let yourself wander into whatever weird or wonderful corner calls you.Plus, you can:Step inside our four-story Osher Rainforest, where you can explore the Amazon’s ...
Why Are Exoplanetary Systems Unlike the Solar System?NASA's Kepler mission discovered over 4,400 transiting planets around other stars, including over 700 systems with multiple planets. This sample of exoplanet systems enables us to study planetary systems as a population, and test planet formation theory. The results are that our Solar System has a relatively rare configuration, and ...
