Nerd Nite East Bay #64

The California Field Atlas

The #1 best-selling California Field Atlas from Obi Kaufmann blends science and art to guide readers outside normal conceptions of California. Learn about the grand scale of natural systems like tectonic plates and watersheds and the small scale details of wildflower gardens that combine to make up the myriad ecologies, topographies, and histories of the interconnected fifty-eight counties in our state. Think about our natural world in a different way through hand-painted maps, spirited wildlife illustrations and trail paintings from the book already celebrated as a quintessential love letter to California.

Speaker: Obi Kaufmann

How Woody Vines Evolved to Invade the Rainforest

Rainforests around the world are being invaded and replaced by a heartless and unstoppable (but not human!) enemy at an unimaginable scale. Climate change has shifted the balance of power to the ilianas, a group of woody vines that have evolved a novel growth mechanism to relentlessly climb towards the rainforest canopy in search of sunlight, doubling the chance of rainforest tree death and reducing fruit yields by over 75%. Learn how a subtle shift in cellular composition and CO2 moved ilianas to the top of the plant pecking order and endangered natural habitats around the world.

Speaker: Joyce Chery, UC Berkeley

How Materials Science Finds Answers in Failures

Much of modern society is based on the unique properties of complex new materials, and materials scientists break things on purpose in the lab to ensure resiliency and safety in the real world. Learn how famous broken objects like highways, planes and spacecraft tell interesting stories precisely because material science had already put them through tests to ensure that the unexpected would be avoided, and how failures in infrastructure start a critical race to discover what went wrong so future disasters can be avoided.

Speaker: Mingxi Zheng, UC Berkeley