Gathering 4 Gardner: Pixar in a BoxJoin us for a fascinating talk on the science behind Pixar films! Part of the Gathering 4 Gardner (G4G) conference, this talk features mathematician and former Pixar senior scientist Tony DeRose, who will share his insight into how STEM advancements have impacted filmmaking.We’re pleased to host this presentation as part ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free with admission
Marine Science Sunday: Marine Mammal BabiesJoin us to learn more about the elephant seals and gray whales being born right now along the coast! We will explore the incredible cuteness of marine mammal babies and the adaptations of marine mammal moms to care for their young. We will also share the best places to see ...
Where: SausalitoCost: Free with admission
Monday, 02/23/26
Beyond Black-Box: Human-Centric and Physics-Informed AI for Integrated and Autonomous ConstructionAs global demand for urban infrastructure collides with severe labor shortages and urgent decarbonization goals, industrialized construction has emerged as a critical paradigm shift for the AEC industry. However, the transition toward fully integrated and autonomous systems remains stalled by a fundamental technical hurdle: distributional shift. Unlike highly structured digital ...
Financial systems underpin climate resilience: they fund protective infrastructure, shape preparedness through risk transfer, and provide the insurance that enables communities to recover from disasters. Yet these systems are increasingly strained by climate-driven extremes, evident in the National Flood Insurance Program’s multi-billion-dollar debt and the withdrawal of insurers from high-risk ...
Machine learning is the key technology underlying today's amazing artificial intelligence systems.How did we get to today's technology which now supports a trillion dollar AI industry? What were the key scientific breakthroughs? What were the surprises and dead-ends along the way, as seen by the researchers who created them? Who ...
The Earth’s subsurface is fractured and highly heterogeneous, and fractures often act as preferential pathways that dominate fluid flow and solute transport. This fracture-controlled behavior strongly influences a variety of subsurface technologies including carbon and hydrogen storage, natural or stimulated hydrogen production, geothermal energy, enhanced hydrocarbon recovery, and long-term geologic ...
With all the trouble going on in the world, why would we make games? Shouldn't we be working on climate change or be out protesting? Games can be more than just escapism though. Come learn how they can be art, a protest or way to refresh ourselves when we're tired ...
Popular culture is one of the most powerful spaces where publics encounter science, form attitudes toward it and imagine what scientific futures might look like. Film, for example, reaches global audiences and offers a narrative imagination lab where emerging technologies can be explored long before they enter everyday life. These cinematic ...
Fault-tolerant quantum computation requires further advances in lowering physical qubit error rates in scalable architectures. In this talk, I will present our work on understanding and controlling the microscopic sources of decoherence in superconducting qubits arising from material defects and interfaces. I will present our identification of microscopic origins of ...
Speaker: James Gagnon, University of UtahRoom: Auditorium
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Accelerating Irregular ComputationThe last decade of hardware scaling has been defined by a contract of regularity in which modern parallel hardware reaches peak throughput when data is organized as dense tensors and computation is uniform. This contract breaks down for the irregular representations used to model the physical world, including dynamic meshes ...
The diversity of beetles is widely known - but beetles are complex creatures living in diverse locations so they don’t all compete. Far less well known is the diversity of bacteria within species, most surprisingly with huge number of variants living together and directly competing for very long times. Why ...
The global energy transition will only succeed with the active participation of the private sector. Corporates are central to this effort: they are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions, among the largest consumers of electricity, critical drivers of innovation and scale in climate technologies, and - crucially - key providers ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Advanced Geothermal Energy for California Science, Status and ChallengesAll indications are that advances in drilling technology, mostly developed for or by the oil and gas industry, have placed geothermal energy (the kind that generates electricity) on the cusp of major new opportunities. Historically limited to geographic locations where hot rock and water are relatively near the surface, the ...
Where: SebastapolCost: $7 Advance, $10 at door
From Prompt Grounding to Edge Delivery: Agentic AI at ScaleAs enterprises adopt Generative AI, the challenge shifts from building isolated models to engineering multi-tenant AI platforms that are secure, grounded, and operationally reliable. This session explores the architecture of prompt-grounded, agentic AI systems that combine prompt engineering, retrieval-based grounding, and tool orchestration with cloud and CDN-based delivery to enable ...
Where: Mountain ViewCost: Free
Tuesday, 02/24/26
Exploring the Hidden World of Backyard Birds - LivestreamExplore the stars of Backyard Birds Revealed with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and acclaimed wildlife photographers Tim and Russell Laman. This live online event celebrates the quiet wonder of winter birdwatching - the reminder that even in the coldest months, life and color thrive just beyond your doorstep.Our five-part video series ...
Slow, spatially complex motion and transport in the body play central roles in health and disease. Yet these dynamics remain difficult to measure non-invasively because they occur in small or geometrically complex regions, or are too slow and become buried under larger physiological fluctuations. To address this, we developed a ...
Right after it cooled off in the Hadean, Earth is thought to have been mostly an ocean planet. The first substantial record of emerging land dates to the early Archean, with the recognition of sedimentary rocks laid down in subaerial environments. Deciphering that record is paramount to our understanding of ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Quantum Computing in Practice - LivestreamQuantum computing is a rapidly emerging field that uses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that are far beyond the reach of even the most powerful traditional supercomputers. While there is tremendous promise, quantum information is remarkably delicate, and building systems that can manipulate it poses an enormous ...
The discovery of quantum materials, from unconventional superconductors to topological and correlated systems, has traditionally relied on a slow and fragmented loop between theory, computation, and experiment. Serendipity and brute force trial-and-error have played an important role in many important discoveries. In this talk, I will describe how Periodic Labs ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Responsibly Improving AI with Privacy-Sensitive Data: Principles, Theory, and PracticeLarge language models have revolutionized the field of machine learning, but a core tenet remains: AI systems need to be built and tuned using high-quality data from the right domain. As these systems increasingly touch our daily lives, the relevant data is frequently distributed and privacy sensitive. In this Richard ...
I will present battery-free autonomous microrobots that can fly in the wind or drive independently on the ground using microwatts of harvested energy from light or radio waves. These mobile sensing platforms could have a transformative impact in applications from agricultural monitoring, hazardous infrastructure inspection, exploring extraterrestrial environments, and reconfiguring ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Old-Growth Chronicles: Saving the Salmon Forests - LivestreamLynda Mapes will give a short presentation on highlights from her latest book, The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests, including an exploration of how abundant salmon runs once nourished old-growth forests on both coasts. She will detail other takeaways from her wide-ranging project on these remarkable ecosystems, ...
There are scientific truths, religious truths, historical truths, mythical truths, and more. In our current swamp of misinformation, disinformation, truthiness, rewritten history, conspiracy theories, “fake news,” and bald-faced lies, how do we discern actual facts and truth? What is “truth,” anyway? The Declaration of Independence claims that “We hold these ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22 General, member discounts
Come learn more about the Western Snowy Plover, a diminutive shorebird that calls the beaches of Monterey Bay home. Point Blue Conservation Science ecologist Kriss Neuman has spent decades studying this tiny, threatened shorebird and will share information on the plover’s life history and breeding ecology, discuss why California’s sandy ...
Where: Pacific GroveCost:
Unraveling individual and environmental drivers of variation among elephant seals - LivestreamEnvironmental variation across temporal and spatial scales shapes individual differences in traits and causes resource acquisition and allocation to fluctuate dramatically. Spotlighting northern elephant seals as a model system, Roxanne and research technician Conner Hale will discuss how the Beltran Lab combines mark-recapture methods and animal-borne sensors to investigate how individual ...
The most energetic phenomena in the universe tend to reveal themselves through intense, short-lived signals. These violent transient events include novae, supernovae, and mergers of both neutron stars and black holes. Their signals - their natural messages - can span the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and may include gravitational waves as ...
Where: NovatoCost: Free
Wednesday, 02/25/26
AI-Driven Load: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities - LivestreamThe growth of AI is driving increasing energy demand in the form of new data centers, while also changing how data centers are designed and operated. In this webinar, experts from EPRI’s DCFlex initiative and Stanford’s Bits & Watts Initiative will discuss trends, challenges, and opportunities arising from this AI-driven ...
Where: Cost: Free
Drive-Thru USA - the Spatial Analysis of Car-Centric Sprawl - LivestreamDrive-thru businesses, in which customers place and retrieve orders without ever leaving their cars, discourage social interaction and physical exercise, and degrade a street’s walkability and air quality. Despite these negative attributes, their proliferation across the United States has never been quantified or spatially analyzed. This study pursues this topic ...
Extreme urban heat, driven by climate change and rapid urbanization, poses a growing threat to public health, energy systems, and economic productivity. Yet effective urban heat mitigation is hindered by two key gaps: limited mechanistic understanding of urban heat environment across global cities, and a lack of robust tools to ...
The crustal magnetic anomalies near the lunar crater Gerasimovich are among the highest-magnitude anomalies on the Moon. Previous work has suggested they formed from the deposition and magnetization of ejecta from the Crisium basin, which is antipodal to the region. In this talk, I will describe the correlation between topographic ...
Feminist interventions have instrumentally shaped critical perspectives in mapping. Yet, feminist mapping has often been erased or considered niche within both GIScience and critical GIS conversations. Drawing on recent work in data feminism, design justice, and feminist digital geographies (among others), I engage with a feminist mapping framework to reveal ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Productively Programming Accelerated Computing SystemsModern accelerated computing systems are increasing in scale, becoming more specialized and diverse, and evolving more quickly. While these changes bring significant performance improvements, they also come with the challenges of productively developing software that targets complex and rapidly changing hardware. For software to keep up with modern hardware, programming ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Leading Scientific Innovation: A conversation with Dr. Kimberly BudilJoin us for a fireside chat with Dr. Kimberly Budil, Director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as part of the Russell Women in Science Leadership Lecture Series at Northeastern Oakland. Dr. Budil will discuss LLNL's mission and core scientific capabilities, her leadership approach as the Lab's first woman director, and ...
Where: OaklandCost: Free
The Age of Tech x Biopharma - Livestream(In-person tickets are sold out)AI and emerging technologies are reshaping biopharma and redefining how science is built, scaled and valued. As the landscape shifts, the industry must confront critical questions about leadership, capital strategy and what innovation really looks like in the years ahead.Join us to hear inside perspectives from ...
Where: Cost: Free
Virtual Skeptics on 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.
Who gets included in neuroscience - and who gets left out?Many common tools in psychophysiology and neuroscience - like EEG, EDA, and fNIRS - struggle to work accurately across different skin tones and hair types. While not intentionally exclusionary, these technologies often fail to accommodate darker skin and curlier or ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $25
Thursday, 02/26/26
Fostering Resilient Communities with Prescribed Fire - LivestreamLearn how fire readiness extends to both prescribed fire and wildfire, and why collaboration with communities is essential for all types of resiliencies.All Hands Ecology Director of Prescribed Fire Julia Berkey will introduce her work with All Hands’s Fire Forward program to build prescribed fire capacity in the North Bay, ...
Where: Cost: Free
eyond the Benchmarking Paradigm: Audits & Evaluation in the Age of Artificial IntelligenceDespite great potential, there is a growing gap between what AI systems promise and what they deliver, with real human costs.AI auditing is the practice of independently evaluating deployed AI systems to determine how they behave, what risks they pose, and whether they meet their intended objectives. This interdisciplinary endeavor ...
NightLife: SF Center StageWe're bringing you classic art forms in an unexpected setting. It's an elevated crossover of the symphony, opera, and ballet, brought to you by the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center.
Where: San FranciscoCost: Varies
After Dark: Unplug and PlayPlay with eye-opening exhibits, test your knowledge at science trivia, and enjoy a dance performance in our Bay-adjacent gallery.
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22.95 General, Free for members
What can fashion teach us about sustainability, culture, and justice?Join Grace Toléqué - Stanford lecturer, researcher, and fashion designer - for a compelling look at fashion, environmental justice, and sustainability in West Africa.Drawing on West African sartorial traditions, this lecture explores how custom-made clothing, reuse, and women-led cultural practices have ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $25
Friday, 02/27/26
International Polar Bear Day: Melting Ice, Mighty Bears - LivestreamStep onto the frozen Arctic seas (without leaving your classroom) to meet the largest bear on Earth, the polar bear. This session takes students through icy hunting grounds, explains how shrinking sea ice changes their way of life, and invites them to think like Arctic scientists. With real polar bear ...
Citizen Science in Astronomy - LivestreamJoin Dr. Franck Marchis, Director of Citizen Science at the SETI Institute and co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of SkyMapper, and Dr. Lauren Sgro, Outreach Manager at the SETI Institute, for a conversation on citizen science with the Unistellar network in partnership with the SETI Institute. We will discuss making ...
More than five decades ago, President Kennedy exhorted the nation to rise up and meet the biggest challenges of that period, amongst them being the Race to the Moon that led to the “Moonshot” and the establishment of the Apollo program. It is quite likely that we, as a nation ...
Metalloenzymes catalyze the challenging chemical reactions that lie at the core of vital life processes, from carbon and nitrogen fixation to photosynthesis and respiration. Native metalloenzymes use only earth-abundant transition metals and operate under mild conditions, accessing reactivity that remains largely out of reach for synthetic systems. Given the importance ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Muir Woods Night TourEver wondered what Muir Woods is like after the park closes?Join us on our free evening tour to explore what keeps the redwood forest awake when we go to sleep. Step outside your comfort zone and into the ancient, nocturnal setting of Muir Woods for this two-hour, two-mile walk.After all, we're ...
Where: Mill ValleyCost: Free
IMPACTS OF PLASTIC POLLUTIONFour exceptional speakers will present their research and experience of key impacts on human health, animal health and biodiversity.Dr Desiree Labeaud , MD, Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine ??" impacts on human healthDr Padraig Duignan, DVM, and Dr Cara Field, DVM, Directors at The Marine Mammal Center - ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $15 General, $10 UFE & FACC Members
Saturday, 02/28/26
Stewardship Saturday: Exploring Human and Marine Mammal AdaptationsThis free program for high school students features rotating events along our 600-mile range exploring various realms of conservation.Join Seymour Marine Discovery Center and The Marine Mammal Center for a hands-on event exploring marine mammal adaptations. Together, we will conduct experiments comparing and contrasting our human capabilities with various marine ...
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free
Science Saturday: Reptile RevelryJoin us for a FREE Science Saturday celebrating the remarkable lives of reptiles and amphibians! With family-friendly games, crafts, and special guests, this event includes free admission to the Museum.
Where: Pacific GroveCost: Free
Science Saturdays: Hands-on Exploration for KidsFrom how snow forms, to how erosion impacts the earth, to how we can read the clues that animals leave behind, we’ll explore topics that will both engage, fascinate and help us all be a little more conservation-minded. Each month will cover a different topic, such as Weather & Climate, ...
