This talk examines why South Sudan’s 2011 referendum on self-determination, a process intended to resolve Sudan’s racial conflict, ultimately intensified racialization for South Sudanese who remained in Sudan’s capital. The talk argues that independence functioned less as a resolution of racial injustice than as a reorganization of it, inscribing racial ...
In Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power (Oxford University Press, 2025), climate media scholar Hanna E. Morris (University of Toronto) reveals how national anxieties following the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 have shaped American journalistic and political interpretations of climate change in ways that severely limit how ...
Editor's Note: Bruce Macintosh, the original speaker scheduled to talk on "Pictures of Distant Worlds", has been called out of town. This talk will be given instead.Our Universe has provided many surprises to astronomers. One hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble showed it is expanding. In the 1990s, we found that the ...
Where: Los Altos HillsCost: Free
Fusion Energy: The Hope, the Hype, and What Comes Next - SOLD OUTHumanity has tamed fire, wind, steam and even the atom to fuel civilization. Now we’re reaching for the next leap: fusion.Fusion means creating the heat and pressure needed to force atoms to merge and release energy - essentially, building a tiny star on Earth. Long considered out of reach, that changed in December ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $25
Virtual Skeptics in the PubThis is a casual night of socializing with fellow science-forward skeptics and with others inhabiting our oblate spheroidal planet.Please join us! This is a free event brought to you by Bay Area Skeptics. All are welcome.Click here to join
OneTaste hoped orgasm would change the world. Emerging in the midst of the late-aughts for-profit wellness boom, the company was unwavering in its faith in orgasmic meditation, or OM, a fifteen-minute practice featuring a woman being clitorally stimulated by a clothed, usually male partner. Nicole Daedone, the group’s magnetic and ...
Engineering Skin Bacteria for Needle-Free Topical VaccinationThe ubiquitous skin colonist Staphylococcus epidermidis elicits a CD8+ T cell response pre-emptively, in the absence of infection, but the scope and purpose of this program remain unclear. Here, we show that this colonist also induces a potent, durable, and specific antibody response. Colonizing mice with S. epidermidis engineered to ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
One Mother For Two Species: The Complex Lifecycle of Harvester Ants - LivestreamLearn how the complex lifestyle of social insects leads to complex reproductive models in the Brad Ashby Memorial Lecture.Eusociality is a complex reproductive strategy where the sterile worker castes help their sexual relatives reproduce. In this presentation, we will explore how extreme caste differentiation can trigger genetic conflicts within a ...
Where: Cost: Free
SETI Live: Life After Ice - 46,000 Year Old Worm Wakes Up - LivestreamIn this SETI Live episode, host Simon Steel (Deputy Director of the Carl Sagan Center) chats with evolutionary biologist Philipp Schiffer (Worm Lab) about one of the most astonishing discoveries in modern biology: scientists have revived a microscopic worm that had been frozen in Siberian permafrost for roughly 46,000 years. These nematodes entered a state of ...
Firn, the compacted snow layer covering glaciers and ice sheets, controls how surface meltwater is stored or runs off to the ocean and therefore influences sea-level rise. While firn can buffer meltwater and delay runoff, the widespread expansion of ice layers, observed by in situ and remote sensing measurements, may ...
Most people on earth live in cities and they are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. Cities are also where exposure to poor air quality is most frequent and most variable. Understanding and managing the path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, improved public health and lower public health ...
Brainstem trauma or neurodegenerative diseases can often result in the inability to move or speak, despite intact cognition. The inability to communicate often results in severely decreased quality of life for individuals living with these conditions. Our recent work has shown that brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), can employ neural signals to ...
Join us for a book talk with author and climate scholar Hanna Morris on Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power.Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing at the event. See you there!About the Author: Dr. Hanna Morris is an Assistant Professor at the School of the ...
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 hand-crafted drink, and let yourself wander into whatever weird or wonderful corner calls you. You never know what you’ll stumble into next, and that’s the ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Varies
Pesticide Impacts in and around Monterey BayThe short- and long-term health impacts of pesticide use for local communities on land as well as in the ocean are addressed in a conversation with Yanely Martinez, Katherine Gabriel-Cox, Adam Scow and Logan Pallin.
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free
Astro 101: Moons of the Solar System (online)This event is one of several different introductions to astronomy offered by SJAA. In our solar system, the planets often get all the attention, but the moons have a lot going for them! This presentation visits our planets from Mercury to Pluto, but we'll focus on their moons to learn ...
Because all systems are either absorptive, open, or both, their resonance modes correspond to the eigenstates of a non-Hermitian operator and therefore have complex frequencies. These modes, known as quasinormal modes (QNMs), extend well beyond the electromagnetic context I will discuss in the seminar. They have gained significant interest in ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Saturday, 01/31/26
Bird Walk with Amanda PreeceJoin us for a special bird walk with the amazing Amanda Preece! This walk will be ADA accessible and open to all ages. We’ll be keeping a focus on shorebirds and their allies this time, as there are likely to be lots of winter migrants in by this point in ...
Where: Pacific GroveCost: $20 General, $10 Members
Science Saturday: Marvelous MigrationsJoin us for Science Saturday celebrating the amazing journeys of migrating animals! Microscopic plankton, magnificent birds, and massive whales: it’ll be a journey to remember. We are also celebrating the birthday of Sandy the grey whale, so come by to sign a birthday card and receive a birthday treat. Includes ...
Where: Pacific GroveCost: Free
Stewardship Saturday: Cook with ImpactJoin 18 Reasons and The Marine Mammal Center for a hands-on, food-focused event exploring how our everyday eating choices can support a healthier planet. Together, we’ll learn what it means to choose sustainably, eat sustainably, and make a delicious vegetarian meal. During this interactive session, you’ll collaborate to prep, cook, ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
Tilden Fungus FairCelebrate the fruits of winter! View hundreds of local mushroom specimens, enjoy phenomenal vendors sharing their talents through fungi, mingle with the mycological community and enjoy presentations by guest speakers.Saturday Speakers11:00 AM Glowing Fungi: Bioluminescence and UV Flourescence in California - Damon Tighe12:30 PM Australia 2023: FUNGA, Flora and Fauna ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
The planetary scene 60+ years ago, and how it suddenly changed with Mariner 4On July 15, 1965, human understanding of another planet in the solar system took a remarkable turn. That was the day Mariner 4, the first successful mission to Mars, encountered and took close up photos of that planet. By today’s smart phone standards those images are laughingly crude; then they ...
Where: OaklandCost: Free
Sunday, 02/01/26
Tilden Fungus FairCelebrate the fruits of winter! View hundreds of local mushroom specimens, enjoy phenomenal vendors sharing their talents through fungi, mingle with the mycological community and enjoy presentations by guest speakers.Sunday Speakers:11:00 AM Fungi of the East Bay's Oak Woodlands - Ben Anderson12:30 PM Koji Fermentation - Eleana Hsu1:30 PM Storytime ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
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 ...
Ashley worked for 12 years as a public aquarium professional, where her passion in aquaculture supporting sustainable exhibits and conservation initiatives began, notably with SECORE coral conservation & the White Abalone Recovery Project. She holds an MS in Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences from the University of Florida, researching sunflower sea ...
The subsurface is indispensable to deep energy decarbonization, with capacity to store energy on scales necessary to balance renewable grid loads and to sequester carbon on scales relevant to emission reduction targets. Sustainably engineering subsurface reservoirs for energy production, energy storage, and dedicated carbon storage requires an integrated understanding of ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
SETI Live: Back to the Moon - LivestreamHumanity is heading back to the Moon - and Artemis II is the mission that makes it real.In this SETI Live, host Simon Steel is joined by Dr. Caitlin Ahrens, assistant research scientist at NASA Goddard, to explore how Artemis II will prepare the way for future astronaut missions.Artemis II isn’t landing ...
Semiconductor moiré lattices provide a flexible platform to study flat, topological bands with a variety of closely competing ground states. In this talk, I will describe single-electron transistor microscopy of twisted WSe2 which reveals a rich interplay between magnetism, correlations, and topology. At zero magnetic field, we observe quantum anomalous ...
By introducing the concept of fugitive networks, this talk re-thinks Black women’s geographies of mobilization around former plantations on Venezuela’s Caribbean central coast. I show how these mobilizations both engage with and resist the state, as they are shaped by long-standing historical legacies of racialized exclusion and denial of claims ...
In 1964, L.V. Keldysh predicted that excitons - quasiparticles formed by bound electron-hole pairs - could undergo Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) below a critical temperature. However, realizing this macroscopic quantum state in conventional semiconductors proved difficult due to the ultrashort lifetime of optically excited excitons. While spatially indirect excitons in GaAs ...
Bioorthogonal chemistry enables the performance of chemical reactions in biological, including living, systems. The concept was borne out of an unmet need for molecular imaging technologies focused on cell surface glycans, but quickly expanded to applications across basic and translational life sciences research. Today, bioorthogonal chemistries are enabling the development ...
Climate change isn't just threatening our energy systems, it's already breaking them. Extreme weather and other climate hazards are straining generation, transmission, and supply infrastructure, triggering cascading failures across the grid. This talk reveals the scale of our growing vulnerabilities and explores how they collide with surging energy demand. And ...
Finding new chemistry from natural sources is often described as “finding a needle in a haystack,” where scientists must sift through vast numbers of organisms, extracts, and/or genetic variants before uncovering a molecule that fits their needs. Advances in analytical technology now allow us to search more chemical space than ...
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free
Tuesday, 02/03/26
Beyond the Classical Paradigm: Redefining Immune Responses in Tissue Repair and DevelopmentBeyond classical microbial defense, barrier tissue immune cells integrate dynamic environmental and intrinsic signals while communicating with parenchymal cells to maintain homeostasis and shape disease outcomes across the lifespan. My research uncovers unconventional immune responses within the skin barrier across distinct biological settings. I identify a previously unrecognized immune - ...
Today, climate change is affecting virtually all terrestrial and nearshore settings. How well do we understand the physical landscape effects, and how have planning and economic sectors responded so far? This presentation will discuss the challenges of identifying and measuring climate-driven physical landscape responses to modern warming and its associated ...
Modern cosmology has revived interest in some early 20th century puzzles that had seemed to be more philosophical than scientific, the problems of Boltzmann’s brain and Wigner's friend. The inability of a complete understanding of a physical system’s state and dynamics to reveal whether it is conscious plagues both ethics (“Which systems have rights?”) and ...
In interstellar and circumstellar environments, most volatile molecules exist as an amorphous molecular solid referred to as astrophysical ice. This icy material is one of the major building blocks in the formation of new solar systems, and its properties shape the composition and potential habitability of nascent planets. The James ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Live Longer, Live Better: Technology Advances and AgingJoin Prof. Ronjon Nag (of Stanford University and R42 Group) for an accessible, fast-moving tour of the most important technology approaches in longevity today. We’ll also explore the companies investing heavily to turn these ideas into real-world therapies and tools. Prof. Nag works at the intersection of AI and biology ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22 General, member discount
