Observation of Room Temperature Polar SkyrmionsComplex topological configurations are a fertile playground to explore novel emergent phenomena and exotic phases in condensed-matter physics. For example, the recent discovery of polarization vortices and the associated complex-phase coexistence and response under applied field in superlattices of (PbTiO3)n/(SrTiO3)n suggests the presence of a complex, multi-dimensional system ...
The first part of the presentation will introduce our methodology towards improving molecular catalysts for energy relevant conversions. We strategically introduce redox-active and slightly acidic imidazolium moieties into the secondary coordination sphere of molecular CO2 reduction electrocatalysts. Results from systematic comparative studies will be presented that strongly suggest that mechanistic ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
'Chasing the Thunder'"Chasing the Thunder" is a high-seas documentary about the Sea Shepherd’s epic 110-day, 10,000-mile chase of the “Thunder,†considered the world’s most notorious poaching vessel. Across two seas and three oceans, the marine activists hunted the fugitive fishing ship through massive ice floes, storms-tossed seas, a near collision and violent ...
Join us for a First Friday all about outdoor appreciation! Learn all about Bay Area ecology and how you can participate in science when you’re outside. Here at Chabot, we love to talk about how space exploration helps us learn about other planets, but what about how it helps us ...
Where: OaklandCost: $5
Charon, Pluto’s Companion: What We’re Learning from New HorizonsPluto’s large moon Charon turned out to be far more interesting than astronomers expected. Pluto was the star of the New Horizons show, but the features on Charon’s surface tell a fascinating tale of how icy worlds could form far from the gravitational influences of the giant planets. There is ...
What’s it like to explore the most polluted areas of our oceans? Long-distance swimmer Ben Lecomte was the first person to swim the Pacific Trash Vortex northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. With his team aboard the support ship I am Ocean, they documented how the largest ecosystem on Earth is being ...
Join us for a day of creativity, awe-inspiring demonstrations, and tons of free activities for you and your friends and family. At our upcoming Fall Open House, our faculty will be on hand demonstrating techniques in blacksmithing, woodworking, and glass flameworking - just to name a few. You can also get hands-on with ...
Where: OaklandCost: Free
Getting into Medicine for High School Students w/ Nae Tanaka Want to learn more about getting into college or being involved in the healthcare field? Teens In Health, a teen-led organization based here in California, presents Nae Tanaka, a renowned college admission counselor who will guide high school students on how to apply to college and give advice to what ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Trekking the ModelJoin a Ranger or docent on a guided tour of the Bay Model, a 1.5-acre hydraulic model of the San Francisco Bay and Delta. Discover the stories of the two major operations that took place at this location between 1942 - 2000.
Counter Culture Labs is proud to be hosting the American Society for Microbiology Agar Art Contest (http://www.asm.org/agarart) - last year we won in the Maker division!.Come and learn how to make colorful and unique living art. Design your own art piece using our colorful bacteria, and then submit your piece for a ...
Where: OaklandCost: $20
Not just ancestry: 23andMe and genomic researchWhile most people are familiar with 23andMe's commercial products such as sequencing of DNA to determine ancestry, many do not realize that the company has the largest re-contactable research database of genotypic and phenotypic information in the world. More than eight million 23andMe customers have consented to participate in research and have ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: free
MISSION: MARSWe are making progress globally - from the Arctic to Antarctica, from underground labs to the International Space Station - to achieve the first human voyage to Mars. Come explore the what, why, how, when, and who of our first journey to the Red Planet.Speaker: Pascal Lee, SETI and Mars ...
Where: Mill ValleyCost: Free
Sunday, 09/08/19
Golden Gate Raptor Observatory Hawk Talk & Raptor ReleaseThe Hawk Talk begins at noon, when a GGRO volunteer speaks about hawk migration and identification, and what we do here at the GGRO. Conditions permitting, a banding volunteer will bring up a newly banded hawk, talk about the banding program, and release the hawk in front of the crowd. ...
Where: SausalitoCost: Free
Monday, 09/09/19
Population III Star Formation and the Cosmic 21-cm Background The first generation of stars to have formed in the universe were likely very different than the stars we observe today. These Population III stars formed from pristine gas with no metals, and their formation was crucial to the early evolution of galaxies. While we have yet to observe a ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Optoelectronic Properties of Hybrid Halide Perovskites from First PrinciplesPerovskites are a family of materials with unparalleled chemical and structural diversity that underpin a tremendous range of functionalities [1]. Their versatility often pushes the boundaries of chemical intuition, but also promises immense opportunity for materials design and discovery. In particular, organic-inorganic metal-halide perovskites have recently emerged as one of ...
Exploiting the Malleability of Disorder to Design Biologically-Inspired FunctionThe complexity of living systems poses a formidable challenge to physical scientists interested in biology. I will discuss one theoretical approach towards gaining possible insight into biological phenomena: to design systems to exhibit similar phenomena. To do so, we start with systems with complex energy/cost landscapes, which have far more ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Building Trust in the Black Box: An Introduction to AI ExplainabilityIn recent years, the themes of transparency and trust have become increasingly central to the way that humans develop, manage, regulate, and monitor ML technologies. It is clear that now more than ever stakeholders need tools to detect model bias and understand model behavior. At Fiddler Labs, we're building a ...
After 50 years of promises and potential, robots are beginning to leave the lab to live in the wild with us. But how should we coexist with these intelligent, autonomous machines? In this lecture, Dr. Madeline Gannon discusses how art and technology are merging to forge new futures for human-robot ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Searching for Needles in an Ancient Haystack: Environmental DNA from Pleistocene PermafrostYou shed DNA constantly everywhere you go… as do all other animals, plants, bacteria and fungi - we refer to this ‘shed’ DNA as environmental DNA (eDNA). Because all organisms shed DNA into their environments, ecosystem-level monitoring can take place with a single method, making eDNA an emerging frontier in ...
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free
Mapping the Universe: The Sloan Digital Sky SurveyThe Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an unprecedented all-sky spectroscopic survey of over six million objects. It is designed to decode the history of the Milky Way galaxy, trace the emergence of the chemical elements, reveal the inner workings of stars, and investigate the origin of planets. SDSS will also create ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $15 General, $12 Members and Seniors
Rainforest Action Network, www.ran.org, has been fighting for people and planet for 30 years. Communications Director Christopher Herrera will share how RAN takes on some of the biggest causes of climate change and forest destruction - including current campaigns targeting the palm oil industry, the fossil fuel industry, and even the Tokyo ...
Genetic engineering of plants is at the core of sustainability efforts, natural product synthesis, and agricultural crop engineering. The plant cell wall is a barrier that limits the ease and throughput with which exogenous biomolecules can be delivered to plants. Current delivery methods either suffer from host range limitations, low ...
Why Do Dark Matter Haloes Die Together? The Causes of Halo Assembly Bias at Galaxy Masses At a constant mass, old dark matter haloes and young dark matter haloes cluster differently from one another. This fact, known as "assembly bias," severely complicates the construction of mock catalogues and serves as a major challenge for structure formation models. In this talk, I test and synthesize the many ...
Everyone knows someone who’s survived cancer. But no one knows anyone who’s survived Alzheimer’s - until now. Alzheimer’s disease is a global pandemic and the third leading cause of death in the United States. Of the 326 million Americans currently living, approximately 45 million will develop Alzheimer's disease during their ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $20 General, $10 Members, $8 Students
Odd Salon: EphphanySpeakers:Muriel Gordon ~ Ferris’ Wheel and the World’s Fair: Transforming a Generation of AmericansLilia Gutnik - A Smokejumper’s Guide to Fighting Fire with FireAaron Laycook ~ Filippo Di Ser Brunellesco and the Invention of Linear PerspectiveMark Linsey ~ Katharine Briggs & Isabel Meyers: Creators of the World’s Most popular Personality ...
Scientists can spend theirentire career on a single idea, or elaborate experiment, and never find anything new. But if they make a significant breakthrough and discover what they have been looking for, they can win the ultimate prize: the Nobel Prize.Is the Nobel Prize, and any other high-profile recognition, a ...
Where: Menlo ParkCost: Free
Free Bay Currents Talk: The Curious World of SeaweedJoin artist/naturalist Josie Iselin as she introduces her newest book, focused on ecological relationships of these colorful marine algae. This seventh book illustrated by Josie’s unique art brings to life the roles of seaweeds as marine engineers and providers of habitat vital to life on the Pacific's edge. Refreshments 7 PM, ...
7:00-7:25: Stephen Auger (Media Artist) and Benjamin Smarr(UC Berkeley/ Neuroscience) on "Interstellar Hallucination"Visualization of patterns that inform nearly all shamanic and archaic traditions...Read more7:25-7:50: Anja Ulfeldt(Media Artist) on "Subjective Infrastructure: Experiential art employing civic, domestic, and personal infrastructure as it relates to physical and auditory experience."Art that ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common ProblemsRandall Patrick Munroe is an American cartoonist, author, scientific theorist, and creator of the webcomic xkcd - primarily a stick figure comic with themes in computer science, technology, mathematics, science, philosophy, language, pop culture, romance, and physics. The popularity of xkcd among science fiction fans resulted in Munroe being nominated ...
 Monterey Bay is subject to seasonal dinoflagellate blooms, many of which are harmful. These blooms were so dominant during 2004 - 2007 that this period was called the “age of dinoflagellates.†From mid-2017 through 2019, a diversity of dinoflagellates returned to dominate the phytoplankton biomass.To quantify bloom development at high ...
Where: Moss LandingCost: Free
CITRIS Research Exchange: Why are there Brakes on a Car?Drawing from examples from a career in regulated industries like operational healthcare, finance and government, this talk will focus on how controls, discipline, and boundaries in tech aren't just good for privacy and security - they can actually help us move fast.Speaker: Jutta Williams, Facebook
Daniel Ducat is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. His lab is interested in using engineering and synthetic approaches to examine the biology and biotechnological application of these intriguing bacteria. He earned his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins University.
'The Pollinators'Thousands of semi-trailers crisscross the country in the dead of night delivering goods through the darkness to stores, warehouses and factories nationwide. But some of them carry an unsuspected and highly unusual cargo. Honey bees. Tens of billions of them are transported back and forth from one end of the ...
Climate change requires urgent action. Regular tracking of the actions by the various actors is necessary to evaluate how far the world is progressing to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change to hold global average temperature increase well below 2°C and to make efforts to hold ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Why Cannabis? Why CBD? Why Now?Join two leading experts in the field for presentations on the changing cultural landscape around cannabis and CBD. Presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion and Q&A led by Eric Siegel.Speakers: Dr. Josh Meisel, Humboldt State University; Martin Lee, Project CBD
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Thursday, 09/12/19
Climate Smart San JoseAdopted in 2018, Climate Smart San Jose has been a national example of how local cities can address climate change and resiliency by promoting ways to reduce air pollution, save water and create a stronger and healthier community. In the year after its adoption, the city has enacted numerous new ...
Where: San JoseCost: $10 General, Free for members
Software Beyond the ScreenSoftware has had an amazing decade, as it has transitioned from desktop computers into the cloud and onto smartphones. The next decade will focus on software making an even more important jump: moving beyond the screen and into the real world around us.In his talk, Sunil Nagaraj will explore how software ...
What’s funny? The things that tickle our funny bones can range from puns and jokes, to pranks, irony, and whimsical illustration. Experience all of this at After Dark: Humor Mesift through the research on the science of laughter and humor and seek out the humor woven into many of our ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: 17.95 advance, 19.95 door, AD members free
How can scientists tap into a spirit of exploration and inspire bold dreams for young people especially young women to engage with science and engineering? From the top of Mt. Everest to the Moon and Mars, this SciComm Studio event is all about turning everyone into an explorer.Meet women whose ...
Potatoes are often invisible one one’s plate. Not considered an exotic, it has been a food you can rely on to soothe your soul and stomach. Many have claimed its origin, due to its capacity to keep people alive in so many diverse environments. But its origin history begins 10,000 ...
Successful Skepticism: Creating Lasting CommunityWe often look at youth as a source of hope for the future: we want them to be less prejudiced, more equitable, able to tell right from wrong and better equipped to build a better world. As Skeptics, we often tell ourselves that critical thinking and ...
