Mt. Tamalpais Turtle Observers TrainingSaturday, March 19:00 - 10:30 over zoom1:00 - 3:00 field visit Western pond turtles are the only species of freshwater turtle in California and they are important indicators of the health of our lakes. By becoming a Turtle Observer you can turn your interests into action by contributing to conservation efforts ...
Where: FairfaxCost: Free
First Saturday: Free Tour of the Santa Cruz ArboretumAround the World in 60-90 Minutes!On the first Saturday of each month, the Arboretum offers a docent or staff-led tour of the Arboretum.Sometimes you will see New Zealand, South Africa, California, and Australia. Sometimes you might see combinations of several gardens or the developing World Conifer Collection or Rare Fruit ...
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free with admission, and for members
Frontiers in AI: Language, Inference, and InnovationUC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Graduuate Student Assembly Presents an afternoon with Nathan Lambert, Alessio Fanelli, and Dylan Patel.Held in the Event CenterRegister at weblink
Where: Santa ClaraCost: Free
Sunday, 03/02/25
Morning Hike at Lower La Honda CreekJoin Peninsula Open Space Trust for a beautiful hike at Lower La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve where you’ll experience the area’s sweeping views and gorgeous rolling grasslands! The preserve is over 6,100 acres, of which POST has contributed 5,200 acres. You will be guided by POST ambassadors on the ...
The second Trump administration hit the ground running with a flurry of Executive Orders, the scope of which raises questions of legality and constitutionality. Can the presidency unilaterally eviscerate USAID activities if the programs had been created and funded by Congress? Doesn't that violate the principle of separation of powers? ...
Where: Mountain ViewCost: $10 donation suggested if in person for lunch
Solar ObservingIt’s there for us year round, lighting our days and providing energy for our lives, so maybe it’s time to give it a closer look. Join SJAA for amazing and detailed views of the Sun, and be assured that we’ll be using special telescopes that will keep your eyeballs perfectly ...
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to reshape the knowledge economy by automating cognitive, non-codifiable work. This paper introduces a framework to analyze this transformation, incorporating AI into an economy where humans form hierarchical firms to use their time and knowledge efficiently: Less knowledgeable individuals become "workers" ...
Galactic Accretion through the Dynamic Circumgalactic MediumThe region of space surrounding galaxies, the circumgalactic medium (CGM) is the site of all gas flows into and out of galaxies and is therefore responsible for regulating or promoting galaxy growth. Observations reveal an interesting diversity of gas properties in this tenuous medium, but it is only recently that ...
A tension appears in contemporary social-scientific studies of the causal effects of race. Race is understood by most scholars today to be a deeply social phenomenon??"a category that not only explains distinctive patterns of social inequality but is defined by these myriad social differences. But this fact about race, on ...
Since the early 21st century, over 80% of major U.S. blackouts have been weather-related. Intensifying extreme events such as hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires, have nearly doubled weather-related outages in the past decade compared to the first decade of the century. Meanwhile, our energy sector, especially the electric power system, is ...
The exponential growth of electronic devices and data processing has pushed charge-based electronics to their energy and performance limits, with power consumption and heat dissipation becoming critical bottlenecks. As Moore’s Law slows, there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift in our approach towards next-generation computing. Here, I investigate ...
Take a breath. Just breath.And then reserve your ticket for a special online-only talk with New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer, who will tell you all about what just went into your lungs. Zimmer will share the ideas that are in his new book Air-Borne, giving a fascinating, previously untold ...
Where: Cost: $10 General, discount for members
Generative Agent Simulations of Human BehaviorSimulations of human behavior can empower applications ranging from immersive environments to social policy simulation. However, traditional simulations have struggled to capture the complexity and contingency of human behavior. In this talk, I demonstrate an alternative approach: constructing an agent architecture that accurately simulates individual behavior in open domains. I ...
Disruptive technologies are groundbreaking innovations that fundamentally transform existing markets, create new economic opportunities, and render previous technologies or business models obsolete by offering more efficient, cost-effective, and user-friendly solutions.In my talk I illustrate, from cognitive, pedagogical, and curricular perspectives, why Generative AI (GenAI) can be viewed as a disruptive ...
The quest for learning the fundamental building blocks of matter and underlying laws of Nature has seen colliders playing a major role in the past century. Such projects have become complex international endeavours requiring multi-decade vision to be realized to their full potential.With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN ...
This presentation by Dr. Descartes Li (UC San Francisco) looks at some of the complexities and controversies about psychiatric diagnoses. It examines the DSM-5's "Harmful Dysfunction" definition, contrasting it with the NIMH's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project. The lecture also discusses philosophical approaches to understanding mental illness, including reductionism, cultural ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22 General, discounts for members
Many people are convinced our lives, and all actions in the universe, are totally determined. One question remains: How did they make up their minds that that is true?One decent definition of the difference between mind and matter is that minds make decisions. Even if you decide to let someone ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22 in person, $5 online, discounts for members
Why are we here? Although we may think we know our place in the Galaxy, the Sun was likely born far from where it resides today. In recent years, ESA’s space-based Gaia satellite and NASA’s K2, Kepler, and TESS missions have helped to uncover not only our own Sun’s history ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $15 General, $12 Members/Seniors
Tuesday, 03/04/25
Intracellular lipid transport in immunoregulation and metabolismAnimal cells are essentially assemblies of membrane compartments marked by diversity and asymmetry of lipids. There remains a significant gap in understanding the biological processes and purposes of lipid localization and trafficking in specialized cell types. Immune cells, with their remarkable adaptability to evolving threats and ability to migrate to ...
Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean is a polyvocal chorus, weaving together essays, maps, art, and poetry to share the impacts of sea level rise on island nations around the world and the solutions to them. Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Material-Driven Construction Automation: Advancing Low-Carbon, Adaptive Building SystemsOur built environment faces a critical dilemma: By 2050, global urbanization will require us to double our current building stock, yet construction and building operations account for 37% of annual global CO2 emissions (Weber, Mueller, and Reinhart 2021). Ramping up industry-standard materials and methods to meet housing demand will increase ...
Neutron stars are physicists' dreams come true: they bring together aspects of classical and quantum electrodynamics, coupled with strongly magnetized plasma physics in the curved rotating spacetime of a massive compact object. They are observed to be powerful emitters of non-thermal electromagnetic radiation, spanning about 20 orders of magnitude in ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Musings on AI Policy from a Former U.S. Senate StafferIn this talk, Simons Institute Law and Society Fellow Serena Booth will first discuss the challenges of crafting specifications for AI systems; how easy it is for these systems to go rogue, whether through misspecification or other means; and her research studying both experts’ and nonexperts’ specifications. This technical research ...
Layered materials consist of crystalline sheets with strong in-plane covalent bonds and weak van der Waals out-of-plane interactions. These materials can be easily exfoliated to a single layer, obtaining 2D materials with radically novel physico-chemical characteristics compared to their bulk counterparts. 2D semiconductors exhibit very strong light-matter interaction and exceptionally ...
Recent advancements in deep neural networks (DNNs), especially transformer-based large language models (LLMs), have driven significant progress in artificial intelligence (AI). As demand grows, models expand to trillions of parameters, potentially requiring dedicated nuclear power plants for data centers. While GPUs are commonly used, they are outperformed in energy efficiency ...
Even when we overcome climate change denial, the question of how to motivate ecological moral priorities remains. Many hold that high consuming citizens’ ethical understanding of the extreme and present/future dangers of climate chaos for human wellbeing is sufficient to provoke effective climate action. However, without intense ethical caring about nature itself, the motivation ...
This year, we are excited to invite Dr. Ben Santer, Fowler Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, as our lecturer. In addition to having been one of Dr. Schneider’s close friends, Dr. Santer is a renowned climate scientist who has helped to reshape the way we understand climate ...
Emerging contaminants, such as pesticides, plasticizers, and perfluorinated compounds, are well-documented for their harmful eGects on ecosystems and human health. However, the chemicals we have identified so far represent only the tip of the iceberg, with countless potentially harmful contaminants remaining unknown in our environment. In this seminar, Dr. Zhao ...
The global pandemic highlighted a medical oxygen crisis in African health systems. Poor electricity quality has emerged as a major bottleneck. This talk explores the intersections between power and health, focusing on a study of 25 health facilities monitored between 2022-2024 in East and SouthEast DRC using IoT sensors and ...
The transition from an economy mainly driven by fossil fuels to one that is more sustainable, secure, and resilient is often discussed in terms of climate and energy policy. But in reality, shifting from an extractive to a more distributed energy model will have profound impacts on workers, tax structures, ...
Noah Whiteman is Professor of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution and Development in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology and the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. His new book is Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins - From Spices to Vices, published in 2023. Professor Whiteman will ...
The story of the anesthesia service at Stanford is one of many firsts. In 1909, Caroline Palmer, MD founded a modern, all-physician anesthesia department at the Cooper Medical College, the predecessor of Stanford's Medical School, creating a model for other hospitals in the country. William Neff, her successor, later ...
Building Smarter, Safer Systems: Unlocking AI’s Potential for Autonomous Systems with Proven PerformanceToday’s most exciting technologies - self-driving cars, air taxis, space transportation, and healthcare breakthroughs - rely on advanced systems that combine physics, computing, and data. However, the inherent uncertainty in ensuring their safety, reliability, and performance is challenging. Traditional methods often fall short, and while AI techniques like machine learning ...
Copernicus’ work in 1543 was the kick-off date in the cosmic decentralization of Planet Earth. First, we were relegated to be just another planet in the solar system, then our sun to being just another star in the Milky Way. Now our galaxy seems to be just a suburban member ...
Where: Los Altos HillsCost: Free
Earthquakes and their impact on San FranciscoSan Francisco sits on shaky ground. How prepared are we for the next big earthquake?Join us at Manny’s for a fascinating conversation with Dr. Annemarie Baltay, a leading geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, as we dig into the science behind earthquakes and what they mean for our city.How likely ...
In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered that our Universe is expanding. Eighty years later, the Space Telescope that bears his name is being used to study an even more surprising phenomenon: that the expansion is speeding up. The origin of this effect is not known, but is broadly attributed to a ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Thursday, 03/06/25
The impacts of hybridization: from molecular mechanism to evolution in natureHybridization, or the exchange of genes between different species, is much more common than previously recognized. In the past decade, the genome sequencing revolution has allowed us to peer into the evolutionary histories of myriad species. This has led to the realization that many if not most plant and animal ...
Our cities are changing profoundly, experiencing increasing urbanization and more frequent extreme weather events. To understand how these drivers impact our cities, we need precise tools to measure and track urban change over time. However, existing census and survey data have constraints in spatial and temporal granularity, failing to capture real-time physical ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
SETI Live: Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) - LivestreamNASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH mission, is a constellation of four small satellites in low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s corona to better understand how the mass and energy there become the solar wind that fills the solar system. ...
Where: Cost: Free
AI Governance at a Turning Point: New Realities Post AI Action SummitAI governance is at a turning point. The Paris AI Action Summit (Feb 10??"11) marked a shift from AI safety to societal harms like environmental impact??"while also moving toward a pro-innovation, deregulatory agenda. Rising geopolitical tensions, fueled by China’s DeepSeek model and the AI arms race, led to the US ...
The increasing capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) makes them appealing for adoption in labor-intensive human tasks. For example, significant efforts have recently focused on developing agents -- systems that map observations and instructions to executable actions -- and their benchmarks in real-world tasks like web navigation. In this talk, ...
Where: Rohnert ParkCost: Free
Clear Thinking About Climate | Bill Nye - LivestreamSkeptical Inquirer was honored to have Bill Nye as the guest editor of its January/February issue, in which he called climate change and critical thinking “the two most serious problems facing us.” Nye has spent his award-winning, decades-long career working to address both of them - and has plenty of ...
Where: Cost: Free
NightLife: Hot Dino NightsStep into a colossal party millions of years in the making that will awaken your dino-loving inner child. We’re celebrating the launch of our latest exhibit Dino Days with a nod to the most popular dinosaur movie of all time.
Where: San FranciscoCost: Varies
After Dark: Play of LightImmerse yourself in the world of moving images, cinema arts, and optical illusions.
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22.95, free for Members
Take a visual journey into the diverse and lush natural world of Greece. Ancient forests, traditional land-based living still exists, providing a rich culture weaved within nature itself. Connections to fungi are ever-present and they’re only gaining attention. Take a look into the relationships the locals have with certain species ...
Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in extreme wildfires, driven by climate change factors likeincreasing temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and prolonged droughts. The escalating wildfire crisis poses a complex and growing environmental engineering challenge, threatening ecosystems, communities, and critical infrastructure. Climate change intensifies these wildfire events, with areas like ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
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 ...
Science is for everyone - and benefits everyone. When the federal government supports scientific research through taxpayer funding, it fuels innovation, creates jobs, and sustains the world we live in. From purified water to the polio vaccine to the cell phone you might be reading this on, science has significantly ...
Join us for a conversation with Eric Schmidt as he delves into AI’s societal and ethical implications. Drawing from his new book, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, Schmidt will share insights and stories about the critical role of AI in U.S. national security, the ethical and trust ...
UCSC Silicon Valley Graduate Student Assembly Presents an afternoon with Nathan Lambert, Alessio Fanelli, and Dylan Patel.Room: Event CenterAttend in person or watch on Youtube
Where: Santa ClaraCost: Free
First Friday: Space for HerIn September of 2025, NASA’s Artemis 2 is set to launch their first crewed mission of the Orion Spacecraft, which will land the first woman on the moon. Meanwhile, women have been making monumental advancements in space science for decades. This First Friday, come hear from some phenomenal women and ...
Where: OaklandCost: $10 General, $5 kids/seniors, free for members
Free First Friday: Wild Monterey Bay Book Talk and 'From the Unreal to the Real' exhibit openingJoin us for a special night with the editors and storytellers of Wild Monterey Bay, a beautiful book that explores the interactions between humans and the wildlife that lives here. Authors of the book will be there to tell their amazing tales, and copies of the book will be available ...
The Moon and Mars are humanity’s destinations in space this century. Why and how will we explore these worlds? When will we go? Where will we land, what will we see, and what will we do? And who will go? Dr. Pascal Lee is a leading planetary scientist working on planning ...
