What happens to water from your toilet, sink, or laundry after it goes down the drain? Find out on a surprising and fascinating tour of EB MUD's Sewage Treatment Plant, near the foot of the Bay Bridge in Oakland. Learn about the history of cleaning our formerly polluted Bay, the ...
Where: OaklandCost: free preregistration is required
Wildflower and native plant hike on Albany HillSearch for late-spring wildflowers on this relatively challenging walk. Margot Cunningham, who organizes native-plant restoration on Albany Hill, leads as you climb about 340 feet up the north and east slope and head back down on the west. Wear long pants and closed-toed shoes with good traction. Bring water and ...
Where: AlbanyCost: Free
Understanding Redwood Giants: Using Science to Protect the Tallest ForestsJoin Emily Burns, Director of Science for the Save the Redwoods League, for a morning in our Redwood Grove. Home to endangered species and notable for their remarkable carbon storage capacity, coast redwood forests stand today in a rapidly changing world. Save the Redwoods League is applying climate change, genomic, ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: $20 General, $15 Members
Tackling Big Data with the ZooniverseCitizen science - the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people in the research process  - provides a radical solution to the challenge of dealing with the greatly increased size of modern data sets.  Zooniverse.org is the most successful collection of online citizen science projects which have enabled over 1.7 ...
Where: Menlo ParkCost: Free
Lab and Lunch: The Secret Behind California's Goldilocks WeatherCalifornia is known for weather that is rarely too hot or too cold, but have you ever wondered why? Come hear from visiting meteorologist Tom Di Libreto about the climate systems that make us the Goldilocks state for pleasant weather and how that might be changing.
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free - Registration required
Cosmological parameters from strong gravitational lensesRecent measurements of the Hubble Constant (H_0) through distance ladder techniques have revealed a noticeable tension with the Planck H_0 value that was obtained under the assumption of the cosmological “standard modelâ€, i.e., a flat Lambda cold dark matter cosmology. Is this tension an indication that modifications to the standard ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Hard Earth Talk: Wanting LessTechnology is the sexy path to a more-sustainable future. Behavioral change, though, may prove more effective. If people felt less urge to consume, they’d have less need for technologies to minimize their consumption’s environmental harm. But getting people to curb their appetites is hard. One potentially powerful tactic has been ...
This talk will cover the history of the human rotavirus vaccine- starting with the discovery of human rotavirus in Australia in 1973. I will then discuss how the early epidemiologic studies were facilitated by breakthroughs in modern viral diagnostics and the fact that the rotavirus is shed in very large ...
Where: Palo AltoCost: Free
'Of the Sea'Today, fishing is a rare and challenging way of life - Few California fishing families remain, due to complex regulations, high cost, and competition with cheap farmed and imported seafood. Struggling to revive a fading way of life, fishermen and entrepreneurs are creating new models for how to support sustainably ...
Everything Matters: Copper8:00 PMMalleable, conductive copper enabled the Bronze Age and is an essential element for life. In some invertebrates, copper binds to oxygen in the blue blood pigment hemocyanin. Explore its significance with host Ron Hipschman and environmental scientist Seira Ashley Adams, who’ll share its chemical role in spiders.=======Maker Faire - ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $17.95 advance, $19.95 at the door
Augmenting Cognition through Data VisualizationAs datasets get larger, it has become increasingly important to manage visual attention and augment cognition. My research has focused on developing novel techniques to draw a viewer's attention to regions of interest in large datasets. These techniques are specifically designed to increase the efficient completion of tasks and to ...
Where: Santa ClaraCost: $10 General $5 IEEE, Free IEEE
In July 2015, on a visit to California for some shorebird work, Jonathan Vargas met Steve Howell. Steve Howell is a well-known birding tour leader and author of bird books and publications. The two birded together and talked about the first Big Day Howell did in San Blas with Peter ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $5 General, Free for members
