Nerd Nite #142: Time, Tentacles, and Most Delicious Poison

“Chasing Shadows â€" Tales of the Greatest(?) Eclipse Chasers”

From ancient civilizations to modern day American presidents, solar eclipses have fascinated us all. This talk is about those people who dared to go beyond the ordinary, running across the surface of the Earth in epic quests to chase our Moon’s shadow. Want to know about these fun/whimsical/ill-advised voyages and how they informed our modern sense of wonder and curiosity about space? Let’s dive right in! 

Speaker: Sahil Bansal, amateur solar eclipse chaser, product manager in cloud storage

Sahil replaces Stepy Kamei who is unable to attend.

"Octopathos or, How to Draw an Octopus”

Octopus bodies are about as far from human biology as it’s possible to be, and yet people still find them cute. How does this happen, and how can it be exploited to get people to care about ocean conservation? Cartoonist Sam Santos Julian will share his experience designing cartoon octopuses in his graphic novel Octopolis, how the principles of cartooning influence empathy in the reader, and - of course - how to draw an octopus.

Speaker: Sam Santos Julian is a cartoonist and the creator of Octopolis, a graphic novel that he self-published this year.

“Most Delicious Poison”

Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them?

Noah Whiteman is an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley