Hacking the ClimateCould the world get so hot that humanity is tempted to break the glass and spray heat-deflecting gases into the sky? The National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report cautiously endorsing research into such techniques known as geo-engineering. Join us for a discussion of hacking the climate to cool ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $20 General, $12 Member, $7 Student
Rat Poison Kills More Than RatsThe Green Friday presenter will be Lisa Owens Viani, the co-founder and director of Raptors Are The Solution (R.A.T.S), a project of Earth Island Institute. Lisa is a long time environmental activist and writer. R.A.T.S. educates people about the ecological role of raptors and the enormous danger to raptors and all ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: $3 donation requested
Near Earth Asteroids and Space MissionsThe near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are a population of objects on orbits around the Sun that cross or come near that of Earth. They represent remnants of material from the early solar system that never accreted into planets. In addition to scientific motivations, NEAs are important because of the Earth impact ...
Where: Los Altos HillsCost: Free ($3 Parking)
The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer AgeRobert Wachter in conversation with Abraham VergheseJoin us for a very special evening with Drs. Robert Wachter and Abraham Verghese as they discuss Wachter's new book, The Digital Doctor, a tempered view of where the field of medicine is headed, what medicine is going to look like in an increasingly ...
Where: Menlo ParkCost: Free
Saturday, 05/09/15
International Migratory Bird DayJoin us for the 15th Annual International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD). A free event filled with activities and fun for all ages. Throughout the Western Hemisphere, people flock to parks, community centers, refuges and town squares to learn about wild birds, take action to conserve birds and their habitats, and simply have fun. Visit with ...
Where: Mill ValleyCost: Free
Low Tide WalkMSI takes to the tidepools for a treasure hunt of nature's beautiful intertidal secrets. We'll spend our time taking advantage of the low tide to reach the outer edges of Pillar Point, and take in spectacular views as we slowly retreat to shore. Will we find crabs, sea stars, eels ...
Where: Redwood CityCost: $20 General, $10 Members
Hayward Fault Walking TourOver the last million years, the natural beauty of Fremont has been shaped by the Hayward Fault. Instructors will be leading these 'ground breaking' tours and exposing the science and beauty of the Hayward Fault. This fault is one of several active faults in the world actually creeping at 5 ...
Join us for this exciting mashup event where we'll combine our Ingenuity Lab's hydraulics challenge with Strawbees' unique straw contraptions. Collaborate to build a Rube Goldberg–type machine that uses water-powered inventions, in sequence, to succeed.
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free with admission
Tangled Web: Plankton, Plastics, and UsWhy is our Bay so deliciously green? Come discover all the microscopic life of the Bay and find out how they affect our dinner! Help a naturalist dissect the bolus of a black-footed albatross chick to see what these open wonderers are confusing for food, tow for plankton along the ...
Where: SausalitoCost: Free
Science Saturdays at Mountain LakeA lively series of talks by scientists studying topics relating to Mountain Lake and its ecological restoration. On the second Saturday of every month, gather at the lake to hear researchers from a variety of disciplines talk on topics ranging from Archaeology to Zooplankton. Here's a chance to ask the ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
Zoovie Night: Rio 2 Ages: 4 and upPut on your jammies and enjoy an evening of Zoovie magic with the whole family. Bring your pillows, blankets, and chairs and snuggle up in our auditorium for a specially selected animal-or nature-themed movie. Meet some of our movie themed education animals and Roosevelt, Oakland Zoo's costumed ...
Psychological Consequences of Walking in Typically Developing Infants: Perception and LanguageThe acquisition of new skills in human infants often changes the person-environment relationship, which provide opportunities for psychological development. Abundant evidence has come out from studies on prone locomotion, i.e. crawling onset and experience using converging research operations. However, as another major developmental transaction and motoric milestone, the effect of ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
New developments in the BICEP program and the next era of deep CMB polarimetry The BICEP/Keck Array program comprises a series of telescopes at the South Pole designed to measure cosmic microwave background polarization on degree angular scales, in search of imprints of inflation. This talk will describe the instrumentation, latest science results and recent improvements enabling further scale up of the program. Using ...
Chemical engineers have been at the forefront of the invention of powerful algorithms that enable the molecular-based analysis of complex technical problems, such as developing strategies for the long-term preservation of therapeutic drugs and estimating the solubility of trace pollutants in water. Building upon a solid foundation in thermodynamics and ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
What Could a Global Shale Gas Revolution Bring?, Natural Gas mini-series three of threeThus far the United States has been the major beneficiary of shale gas. The rest of the world also has substantial shale gas resources, but there is significant uncertainty whether and how rapidly these resources will be developed. Lower natural gas prices in the United States (US) have significantly reduced US coal ...
Can 21st-century molecular biology answer age-old questions about the human experience? Can studying proteins and DNA help us understand how we make our choices in sex and love? How we communicate? Where our emotions come from? Or why we age and die? Using stories of people and animals, Peter Schattner ...
7:00-7:25: Marjorie Schwarzer(USF/ Museum Studies) on "The Museum Boom in the United Arab Emirates"Teaching contemporary museum practices in the United Arab Emirates...Read more7:25-7:50: Laura Maguire(Stanford & Philosophy Talk) on "A New Theory of Bullshit"Abstract forthcoming...Read more7:50-8:10: BREAK. Before or after the break, anyone in the audience currently working ...
Beth Shapiro is far from a giddy enthusiast about de-extinction. She knows more than nearly anyone about the subject because she is a highly regarded biologist in the middle of the two leading efforts in the new field-to resurrect extinct woolly mammoths and passenger pigeons. She knows exactly how challenging ...
Dr. Daphne Miller approaches medicine with the idea that opportunities for health and healing can be found in the medical system as well as on farms, nature trails, and in our kitchens. In addition to maintaining her integrative primary care practice in San Francisco, Miller has written two books and ...
Where: Mountain ViewCost: $22
Tuesday, 05/12/15
Lakes, Fans, Deltas and Streams: Geomorphic Constraints on the Hydrologic History of Gale Crater, MarsIt has been proposed that in Gale Crater, where the Curiosity rover landed in August 2012, lakes developed to various depths after the large central mound (informally referred to as Mt. Sharp) had evolved to a form close to its current topography. Using a combination of CTX and HiRISE imagery and CTX, ...
Where: Mountain ViewCost: Free
Searching for the First StarsDr. Harvey Moseley (Laboratory for Observational Cosmology, Goddard Space Flight Center) will give the Applied Physics/Physics colloquium.
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth's Climate: Emulating Volcanoes and Brightening Marine CloudsSolar Geoengineering and Climate Change: Nearly everyone understands that the most effective way to reduce environmental risk associated with climate change is to deeply cut greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, yet emissions and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to increase. If current emissions trends continue, by the ...
Where: Menlo ParkCost: Free
Climate CognitionSigns of dangerous climate disruption are everywhere, and yet many people are going about business as usual. What's up with that? Are humans wired to deal with climate reality?Building a clean economy can be a positive and empowering story. The key lies at the intersection of economics, psychology and emotional ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $20 General, $12 Members, $7 Student
Forest Fires and Fungi: Losers, Winners and StrategiesFire is a natural part of most western forest ecosystems, and while plant strategies for surviving or recolonizing after fire are well known, much less is known about how fungi deal with this common disturbance. This talk will review some of the details that are known about how saprobic and ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Wednesday, 05/13/15
Secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism In 1900, sponge divers off the coast of the tiny Greek island of Antikythera made an astonishing discovery: the wreck of an ancient Roman ship lay 200 feet beneath the water, its dazzling cargo spread out over the ocean floor. Among the life-size statues and amphorae was an encrusted piece ...
The Arctic is rapidly warming with continued changes in sea ice, ocean chemistry, and marine ecosystems. Increased heat import via the atmosphere, flows from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and increased river runoff into the Beaufort Sea have dramatically reduced sea ice extent and thickness. We hypothesize that temperature, sea ...
Chiral asymmetry choices exhibited by molecules present in living organisms constitute a scientifically challenging set of observations. Such geometric preferences favoring one enantiomer over its mirror image are obvious in the structures of amino acids, sugars, and the biopolymers that they form. These facts generate fundamental questions about how those ...
Randomness is essential to cryptography: cryptographic security depends on private keys that are unpredictable to an attacker. But how good are the random number generators that are actually used in practice? In this talk, I will discuss several large-scale surveys of cryptographic deployments, including TLS, SSH, Bitcoin, and secure smart ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
The State of California's Water: Now and In The Future - SOLD OUTCalifornia is in the midst of a historic drought, with agriculture, communities, and fish and wildlife struggling with water shortages. At the same time, the state is looking at a future where these conflicts will be exacerbated by climate change, increased population, and other factors. Learn what California is doing ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $20 General, $8 Members, $7 Students
As Mitt Romney's "Green Quarterback," Gina McCarthy played a key role in helping the Massachusetts Governor craft a plan to protect the climate and grow the economy. Now she's the point person for President Obama's effort to do the same thing on a national scale.The Obama administration's clean power plan ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $20 General, $12 Member, $7 Student
Author and physicist Leonard Mlodinow (PhD, UC Berkeley) will explore how humans have won such a grand grasp of nature's workings - and what deeper understandings may lie ahead. He is the author of five bestsellers including two co-written with Stephen Hawking: A Briefer History of Time and The Grand Design. Dr. Mlodinow's The ...
Governor Jerry Brown is determined to build the Delta Tunnels through the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta. The once-and-future Peripheral Canal is the latest plumbing scheme to follow the damming and diking of rivers and swamps which began with intensive Chinese manual labor in the 19th century. California has already radically ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
Thursday, 05/14/15
Who Owns the Data? An International Conference on Digital Assets, Data Philanthropy, and Public BenefitAs countless social, commercial and civic transactions are rapidly moving to online platforms, and sensors in our houses, cars, and mobile devices send endless streams of data to servers around the world, discussions of "Big Data" have become commonplace. But what happens to the information once it leaves our fingertips ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: $20 General, Free for students
Star formation on GMC and galactic scales The rate of star formation in star-forming disks is slow compared to the dynamical time, at least on kiloparsec scales, a result known as the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation. Candidates for opposing the force of self-gravity and thereby reducing the rate of star formation include magnetic fields, large scale turbulence, and feedback ...
Speaker: Saeed Amidi, Plug and Play Tech CenterThis event was originally scheduled for April 9 and has now been canceled.
Where: San JoseCost:
Magic: Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology is Indistinguishable From MagicArthur Clarke's Three Laws are "laws" of future predictions:1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture ...
Where: Palo AltoCost: Free
Nightlife LIVENightLife's summer music series returns! Inspired by science and powered by sound, the Academy will transform into an oasis of music and art on one special night per month.On the outdoor West Garden stage, catch a live performance by "electronic Renaissance man" Machinedrum, known for his rich exploration of multimedia ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $12 General, $10 Members
The Fog of ConcussionA concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury that is caused by a blow to the head or body, a fall, or another injury that jars or shakes the brain inside the skull. This talk will discuss the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and biology of concussion.Speaker: Jamshid Ghajar, MD, PhD, ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Unwrapping the Visual Discovery of Spiral Nebula Steve Gottlieb, a contributing editor for Sky & Telescope, will be our featured speaker on "Unwrapping the Visual Discovery of Spiral Nebula". This is the story of William Parsons' (Third Earl of Rosse) first visual observations of M51 with his massive 72-inch speculum reflector in the spring of 1845 ...
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free
CANCELLED! Trisect an angle? It seemed so easy!CANCELLED! Watch for it to be rescheduled in the fall. Angle Trisection: A problem many tried to solve.Throughout history many people have tried to find some seemingly simple solutions to problems that were not understood because of the limits of knowledge about how things really work. Alchemy, tried to do more ...
