The Wonderful World of Indoor Houseplants - LivestreamHouseplants can bring us joy and a sense of calmness in our homes, and provide other benefits too! As many of us continue to spend more time at home during this extended COVID period, our appreciation of our beautiful potted companions has increased. This informative, fun, and engaging workshop presented ...
Join our resident astronomers on Facebook Live every Saturday evening live from Chabot’s Observation deck!Each week, our astronomers will guide us through spectacular night sky viewing through Nellie, Chabot‘s most powerful telescope. Weather permitting we will be able to view objects live through the telescopes and our astronomers will be ...
Where: Cost: Free
Sunday, 05/02/21
Bringing Back the Natives Virtual Garden TourIn a series of live garden visits passionate garden owners and the talented designers of the Bay Area’s most beautiful and inspiring landscapes will show us what’s happening in the garden now, feature their favorite natives, describe their great native plant gardening resources, and more.Check the weblink for the agenda ...
Where: Cost: Free
San Bruno Mountain: Rare Plants & Rare GeologyOur speaker Dr. David Nelson is an orthopedic hand surgeon and a botanist on the weekends. He has just finished a book titled The Natural History of the San Bruno Mountains which will be released in Fall 2022.San Bruno Mountain is located between Highways 101 & 280 in northern San Mateo County, ...
Where: Cost: Free
Monday, 05/03/21
Imaging quantum spin liquid behavior in single-layer 1T-TaSe2 - LivestreamQuantum spin liquids (QSLs) are a novel state of matter predicted to arise in quantum antiferromagnets where magnetic frustration or quantum fluctuations are strong enough to prevent magnetically ordered states even down to the lowest temperatures. QSLs are believed to exist in strongly correlated Mott insulators, and are thus related ...
Why do falling cats always land on their feet? The question has long intrigued humans. In this talk, we explore how the solution stumped brilliant minds and how it helped solve other seemingly impossible puzzles. With numerous photos and videos, physicist and cat parent Greg Gbur explores how attempts to ...
Where: Cost: Free
Programmable light-matter interactions: DNA as a tool for nanophotonics - LivestreamLight can be created, scattered, and confined by nanoparticles whose dimensions are smaller than the wavelength of light. A nanoparticle's interaction with light is often strongly tuned by its size and shape, providing an exciting opportunity to control the fate of photons with extraordinary precision. However, harnessing this potential is ...
Recent years have seen unprecedented motivation for the emergence of new energy technologies. Global dependence on fossil fuels, however, will persist until alternate technologies can compete economically. We must develop means to produce energy (or energy carriers) from renewable sources and then convert them to work as efficiently and cleanly ...
Financial interests distort the truths of evidence-based medicine, says Dr. Leemon B. McHenry. By revealing previously confidential documents released in litigation, Dr. McHenry exposes the role that pharmaceutical marketing has in the construction of medical literature, conference presentations and continuing medical education. The marketing spin is designed to be indistinguishable ...
For nearly four decades, satellites showed Antarctic sea ice had been slowly expanding in horizontal extent. Over the same period Arctic sea ice extent decreased rapidly, by nearly half the extent seen in the first images from modern satellite sensors. The decline in Arctic sea ice extent is roughly proportional ...
“Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary. We are not the reason for the existence of the universe, but our ability for self-awareness and reflection makes us special within it.†― Sean CarrollSean Carroll is a Research Professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute ...
How do scientists go from OMG to PhD? How do they turn their passion for science into their profession? What advice do they have for future scientists?If you are a 5th-12th grade student, undergraduate, teacher or parent, join us to ask these questions and more in a Q&A session with ...
A New Force of Nature at the Large Hadron Colider - LivestreamAt the end of March 2021, scientists working on the LHCb experiment at CERN in Geneva reported an unusual discrepancy in their data that caused huge excitement in the physics community and beyond. They looked at a decade of information about how unstable particles called B mesons decayed into electrons ...
Where: Cost: Donations encouraged
A New Theory of Adversarial Examples in Machine Learning - LivestreamThe extreme fragility of deep neural networks when presented with tiny perturbations in their inputs was independently discovered by several research groups in 2013. Due to their mysterious properties and major security implications, these adversarial examples had been studied extensively over the last eight years, but in spite of enormous ...
Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Clathrate Hydrates - LivestreamClathrate hydrates are ice-like inclusion compounds in which space-filling water cages encapsulate different molecular substances. Dr. Saman Alavi studies clathrate hydrate materials using molecular dynamics simulations. In this talk, an introduction to these substances will be given with examples of how molecular dynamics simulations can give insights into details of ...
  The Frank Drake Award of the non-profit SETI Institute celebrates outstanding contributions to the scientific study of the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe, and for work on techniques for the discovery of the existence of such life. (Past winners have included Nobel Laureate Charles Townes, and ...
Where: OnlineCost:
Micromitigation: Fighting Air Pollution with Activated Carbon - LivestreamWe would like to invite new members to join Counter Culture Labs' Micromitigation Meetup alternate Thursdays. We will be discussing ways to deploy existing adsorption technology using commodity granulated activated carbon for the mitigation of air pollution. We welcome those interested in both the environmental justice and technical engineering aspects of ...
Where: Cost: Free
NightSchool: Extreme Life - LivestreamYou know the saying: “Life finds a way.†Meet the world’s most poisonous bird, tiny thermophiles, and other living organisms that have adapted - and thrive - through extreme measures and in extreme environments.
As an old adage (mistakenly attributed to Confucius) notes, it’s difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. Conspiracy theories have long been prevalent in the United States, but today they seem to be especially popular - from politics to popular culture ...
Planet 9 or Planet Nein? Discoveries in the Outer Solar System - LivestreamThere have been many headlines about the possibility of an undiscovered giant planet in the outer reaches of our Solar System. But is it real? Dr. Sam Lawler will lead you through the wilds of the distant Kuiper Belt with a surprisingly digestible (we promise!) discussion of orbital dynamics and ...
A sphere cluster (SPH-Mas) based gravity model allows a semi-analytic expression of the linearised equations around irregular-shaped celestial bodies Equilibrium Points (EPs) and an easy method for searching families of periodic orbits around them. The SPH-Mas model can retrieve the same dynamical objects of the shape model when the spheres ...
Where: Cost: Free
Virtual Talk: Through the Looking Glass at Aloes in WonderlandCome take a virtual tour of this well-known Santa Barbara garden’s namesake, the aloes! Though his life’s botanical passion has been the cycads, the name “Aloes in Wonderland†came to him in a dream some 15 years ago and changed the course of the gardens focus. Jeff will share some ...
The Mentoring Physical Oceanography Women to Increase Retention (MPOWIR) program was initiated in 2005 to address a systematic deficit in retention of women physical oceanographers at higher career levels compared to their representation at the PhD level. The program has focused on community and discipline-based mentoring. The principal elements of ...
