Familes on the LandWe welcome you to an easy "challenge by choice" type of hike day with staff and docents at Bouverie Preserve. Explore the different trails and ecosytems of the preserve or enjoy a nice picnic, this day's adventure is all up to you!Register at weblink
Where: Glen EllenCost: 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
Join the San Francisco Bay Wildlife Society for a virtual conversation with Bill "The Fox Guy" Leikam! Bill will tell stories about gray foxes that he has studied and learned from here in the Bay Area. Come with your questions about these incredible animals!About Bill Leikam: Since October 2009, Bill Leikam ...
Where: Cost: Free
City Public Star PartyCome join the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers for free public stargazing of the Moon, planets, globular clusters and more!The event will take place in Tunnel Tops National Park, parking is located adjacent to Picnic Place (210 Lincoln Blvd for GPS) with the telescopes setup in the East Meadow.Dress warmly as conditions ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
Jazz Under the StarsJazz Under the Stars is a FREE monthly public stargazing event! Join us for a night of smooth jazz, bright stars, and a lot of fun! We play our jazz from CSM's own KCSM 91.1. Founded in 1964, KCSM has grown to become one of the top 35 most listened to non-commercial ...
Where: San MateoCost: Free
Sunday, 11/02/25
Morning Hike at WavecrestJoin Peninsula Open Space Trust for a very easy 2-mile walk at Wavecrest Open Space in Half Moon Bay! We’ll walk through groves of trees and fields where we’ll have a great chance to spot a variety of birds, especially raptors! We’ll also walk along the coastal bluffs where we ...
Where: Half Moon BayCost: Free
History of Drawbridge - LivestreamJoin Ceal Craig, Ph.D., a 20+ year volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for a unique opportunity to dive into the history of Drawbridge, a historic town that once housed a thriving community on an island along the South San Francisco Bay. How did this community survive in ...
Achieving climate change mitigation goals will likely require increasing the shares of variable renewable energy (VRE) from around 15% today to at least 70% by mid-century. Best-in-class macro-energy systems (MES) models explore important features of potential systems but make computational trade-offs in their resolution of grid features, weather, and land ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Toward Safe Water for All: From Geochemistry to Equity in AccessonSufficient freshwater to meet the needs of humanity is increasingly lacking. A changing climate coupled with increased demand challenges our ability to provide a sufficient, safe, economically viable, and equitable water supply for domestic use, food production, and industrial processes. California is no exception and, in fact, epitomizes the stresses ...
The Internet is at an inflection point. As AI and synthetic media explode, the world's digital knowledge faces unprecedented threats. At the same time, a new generation of web technologies known as "Web3" offer new opportunities to protect the security and integrity of data. This talk will outline a new ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
SETI Live: Welcome Moiya!Dr. Moiya McTier is an astrophysicist, folklorist, and science communicator in New York City who loves planets, galaxy evolution, her cat named Cosmo, and old stories about space. She is also the latest addition to our rotating cast of hosts for SETI Live! Join communications specialist Beth Johnson for an ...
While photophoresis, or “light-driven motion,” has long explained how aerosol layers remain aloft in the middle atmosphere, practical applications have only recently been gaining attention. Advances in nanofabrication now allow us to build lightweight structures that can propel themselves upward using photophoretic forces alone. These “photophoretic flyers” can sustain flight ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Biomolecular condensates: Interactions, emergent properties and potential functionsPhase separation compartmentalizes cells via the formation of membraneless organelles, also called biomolecular condensates. Phase separation influences many fundamental biological processes, from transcription to sorting of molecules and the stress response. Phase separation is mediated by a combination of associative and segregative phase transitions, or networking and a density transition, ...
Virtually all of the isotopes heavier than iron would not exist without neutron-induced reactions. Despite there importance in many different astrophysical scenarios, there are almost no direct measurements for isotopes with half-lives shorter than a few years. A radically new approach is necessary to overcome this constraint. Ion storage rings ...
Until about decade ago, the central focus of climate mitigation efforts was how to make progress - how we might drastically reduce fossil energy emissions. By 2018, though, it was increasingly clear that electricity from renewables would beat fossil fuels on cost, and the focus shifted from just making progress ...
From lunar samples returned by the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s to measurements taken from satellites orbiting the Moon in the present day, we've learned that the Moon used to have a global magnetic field just like the Earth does today. At some point, this global field disappeared. ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $15 General, $12 Members & Seniors
Tuesday, 11/04/25
Dubious News and the Aging American: Understanding Discernment and Engagement Among Older AdultsWhy do older adults engage more with misinformation online, even when they often identify falsehoods correctly in surveys? In this talk, I investigate that paradox using a host of survey experiments and behavioral trace data. Analyses across multiple nationally representative samples show that older Americans disproportionately consume and share low-credibility ...
A long-standing debate in the Earth Sciences bears on the question of whether top-down erosion processes govern mountain building processes, but how do we measure the topographic signature of the climate drivers independent of tectonics? I’ll discuss two natural experiments to disentangle topographic signatures previously attributed to climate. I’ll demonstrate ...
This talk will discuss Josephson junction networks from the double-junction SQUID to the frustrated dice-lattice array, examining aspects of 4e superconductivity leading to flat bands and opening a route to protected Josephson qubits. The experiments take advantage of superconductor-semiconductor hybrid materials.Speaker: Charles Marcus, University of Washington
In low-permeability fractured media, such as granites and shales, flow and the associated transport of dissolved solutes is controlled primarily by fractures embedded within the rock matrix. Interplay of individual fracture geometry with network structure determines the properties of the fluid flow field therein. However, relevant lengths scales within a ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Taiwan Rising - The Origins of a High-Tech IndustryHow did Taiwan ascend to such great heights in high-tech manufacturing? Honghong Tinn, author of Island Tinkerers, shares the fascinating history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan helped transform the country through innovative and creative computer use. Here's what you'll learn:Why the stereotype that “the West innovates, and the East ...
Woods Affiliate Lily Hsueh is an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Arizona State University and the author of Corporations at Climate Crossroads (MIT Press, 2025). Previously a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Lily Hsueh’s work has been featured in major news outlets, ...
The Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctic contains the coldest and most thermally stable waters on Earth, and supports a diverse and highly endemic fauna that has evolved under these conditions for millions of years. Many unusual phenomena like gigantism, anti-freeze capacity, extraordinarily long development, and stenothermality have been described in Antarctic ...
Where: Cost: Free
From Cells to Circuits: The New Era of Bioelectronic Precision MedicineThe seamless integration of biology with modern electronics is redefining how we study, diagnose, and treat disease. In this new era of bioelectronic precision medicine, advances in two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene are enabling direct electronic interfaces with biological molecules, cells, and tissues, transforming the way we decode and ...
Beginning in 2013, sea star wasting disease (SSWD) swept the Pacific Coast of North America, devastating sunflower sea star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) populations from Mexico to Alaska by more than 90%. The rapid disappearance of P. helianthoides further contributed to a trophic cascade involving unchecked population growth of their sea urchin ...
In The Pacific Circuit, the award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and a vivid rendering of the defining themes of the twenty-first century.Oakland’s stories encompass everything ...
we are excited to hear from UT San Antonio’s Dr. Lindsay Fuller: “Canary Islanders: A random walk from Spanish Colonial Texas to Modern Astronomy in San Antonio” and UT San Antonio/Southwest Research Institute’s, Dr. Caleb Gimar: “Strange Stars, Strange Particles, Strange Planets: My Journey to a Physics Ph.D.“Click here to ...
Where: Cost: Free
Stars to Soil: A Journey from the Big Bang to Planet EarthProfessor Alexie Leauthaud will present the latest results on the nature of our universe, including groundbreaking and prize-winning new results on the nature of dark energy. Leauthaud will discuss our current understanding of the basic ingredients of our Universe and will explain why recent results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic ...
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, 11/06/25
SETI Live: TRAPPIST-1e Revealed - LivestreamJoin SETI Live host Moiya McTier with Néstor Espinoza (STScI) and Ana Glidden (MIT) for a deep dive into the latest JWST observations of TRAPPIST-1 e, one of the most tantalizing Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of a nearby star.In this episode, we explore:How JWST is peering into TRAPPIST-1 e’s atmosphere (or lack thereof).Why the planet ...
Breaking waves in shallow waters drive mean currents and low-frequency eddies within the surf zone. These rotational flows alter the transport and mixing of contaminants, bacteria, larvae, and other materials within coastal environments. Surf-zone vortices are driven by several mechanisms, including instabilities in mean flows and spatial gradients in wave ...
Energy storage resources - particularly batteries - are rapidly becoming essential sources of flexibility in modern power systems and active participants in electricity markets. By arbitraging price differences, they generate profit while reducing peak demand and mitigating renewable variability. Yet, their effective market participation requires accounting for future price opportunities ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
'The Spectrum of Life': Remote Sensing at the Southern Tip of AfricaJoin us for a special screening of The Spectrum of Life, a new documentary on BioSCape - NASA’s first biodiversity-focused field and airborne campaign. Co-led by Erin Hestir, director of CITRIS at UC Merced, Adam Wilson of the University at Buffalo, and Jasper Slingsby at the University of Cape Town, ...
Discussed are Ionic Polymer Conductor Nano-Composite Materials (IPMCs and IPCNCs) as Distributed Nanosensors, Nanoactuators, Nanotransducers, Energy-Harvesters, and Artificial Muscles. The fundamental theories are discussed, and several video demonstrations of ionic polymer-metal nano-composites and artificial soft, biomimetic robotic muscles are presented. Some biomedical applications are also discussed.Speaker: Mohsen Shahinpoor, University of ...
Where: Rohnert ParkCost: Free
The Innovative Genomics Institute: A Decade of CRISPR Tech - Livestream2025 marks ten years since Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna founded the Innovative Genomics Institute, where scientists are developing the next generation of genome engineering tools to treat currently incurable human diseases, and create sustainable solutions for agriculture and food security in the face of a rapidly changing climate. Come hear ...
Where: Cost: Free
After Dark: Nuclear OptionsJoin us for an evening where curiosity, society, and atoms collide - and leave with new insights into nuclear power. Dive into the technology behind reactors, learn about the challenges of managing radioactive waste, and engage with scientists and energy experts. Don’t miss this opportunity to practice difficult conversations by ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22.95, free for members
NightLifeWhen the lights dim, the museum comes alive at NightLife. With live DJs, hand-crafted drinks, glowing lights, and 60,000 live animals (including familiar faces like Claude, our alligator with albinism), the night is sure to be wild.Plus, you can:Step inside the iconic Shake House earthquake simulator and our four-story Osher ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Varies
The Science Scoop: Joe DeRisiPlease join us for the inaugural session of a quarterly public lecture series hosted by UCSF Basic Sciences. Discovery for ALL!We invite you to learn about how curiosity-driven research is leading to critical medical advances. Through engaging lectures geared towards a lay audience, premier researchers at the University of California, ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: 0
Thirty Years of Exoplanet DiscoveryThe first exoplanet orbiting a normal sun-like star was announced in October 1995. Discoveries have been trickling in at an accelerating pace ever since, with the roster of new worlds surpassing 6000 just this year. Due to a confluence of lucky events, I’ve been afforded a front row seat to ...
