Challenges of Decarbonizing the Grid - LivestreamClimate change resulting from a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has taken on a new urgency over the past decade. Both U.S. and the EU aim to be carbon neutral by 2050 and China has pledged carbon neutrality by 2060. These commitments are driving new and more aggressive ...
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Associate Director McLean lectures on ethics relating to health care, health care justice and equity, and biotechnology. She will discuss the ethics surrounding Covid-19 and resource scarcity, including ventilators and vaccines. The presentation will cover ethical justice related to hospital care and the challenges of ...
So, you’re at a bar and you notice someone, or maybe they notice you. The “why†of who we find attractive is a hard question to answer. Are some of us wired to be monogamous? Promiscuous? What do the mating habits of the animal kingdom tell us about human love ...
Full-Spectrum Science Online: Countdown to MarsMars is an unforgiving target for spacecraft. Less than half of all missions to the Red Planet have been successful - though all of NASA's rover missions there, including Pathfinder/Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, have overwhelmingly succeeded. Next up, NASA deploys Perseverance, a rover specifically tasked with looking for past ...
Where: Cost: Free
SETI Talks: Strange and Intriguing Exoplanets - LivestreamAstronomers estimate 400 billion planets orbiting stars in our galaxy, so the Milky Way is full of exoplanets. In the past two decades, researchers have discovered thousands, most of them with NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and now its successor, the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).Some of them are rocky, ...
When viewed at the largest scales, the distribution of galaxies in the Universe resembles a complex, tangled web: an interconnected network of filaments of galaxies that surround vast, empty voids. Simulations and theory have established that filaments - the largest, most densely populated structures in the Universe - have formed ...
Where: Cost: Free
Thursday, 02/18/21
Should We Fear AI? - LivestreamNo current technology inspires such wild fears and hopes as artificial intelligence. Will AI steal my job? Drones hunt me down based on my social media profiles? Or, will my personal robot wake me with tea before carrying me to a steaming bath - then pick up the kids' socks ...
Where: Cost: Free
SETI Live: Mars 2020 - The Perseverance Rover Landing!Join us live to follow the landing and hear from engineers and scientists directly involved in the mission. Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, and Beth Johnson, a social media expert at the SETI Institute, will host this special SETI Live.Scheduled Guests: Adrian Brown, NASA HQ, Deputy ...
On February 18, 2021, the newest Mars rover, Perseverance, will attempt to land on the Red Planet. This is NASA's latest mission to Mars, and we'll bring you live coverage of Landing Day from the Exploratorium. Join us as we investigate the journey to Mars, the nail-biting excitement of landing, ...
Where: Cost: Free
NASA Mars Perseverance Rover Landing Watch Party - LivestreamJoin our community for a special Mars rover landing watch party and Q&A. The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover will make history when it lands on the red planet at 12:30 p.m. PST! We are coming together virtually to make observations, ask questions and celebrate this moment in history. Chabot astronomers ...
Where: Cost: Free
SLAC Special SeminarSpeaker: Tomasz Biesiadzinski, SLACSee weblink for Zoom information
Digital surgery and the metrics of surgical performance are now mainstream goals in healthcare. There are several industry groups making huge waves in this space and the future is both bright and exciting. Despite the great potential for positive impact, patient care, and surgical outcomes, there are still many questions ...
In this talk, acclaimed plant ecologist John Zentner will discuss how wetland health impacts the health of birds and wildlife. John will guide participants through understanding different types of local wetlands, from marshes, vernal pools, riparian wetlands, and more. He will then outline methods of wetland conservation and how these ...
How does our understanding of the origins of the universe continue to expand and evolve? What tools and theories continue to push our understanding into further realms? Hear from Black scientists and leaders whose work is at the forefront of cosmology and essential to forming and informing humans’ deepening grasp ...
Close your eyes and listen to music, nature, and the universe during an evening dedicated to surprising sounds - from the mind-bending theremin to the new songs birds are singing during the pandemic.Ages 21+See weblink to watch on YouTube or Facebook Live.
Where: Cost: Free
Friday, 02/19/21
The Solar Cycle - Livestream“The Solar Cycle†covers a brief history of the solar cycle; a look back at the high points of the cycle just ending (Cycle 24); an update on current solar activity and a look forward to what Cycle 25 might be like.Members will join via Zoom and visitors are welcome ...
Where: Cost: Free
'Rebuilding Paradise' - LivestreamWildfires have become a depressingly regular occurrence in California, Oregon and other western states. Due in part to climate change, as well as homebuilding that continues to encroach into the wildland - urban interface, the transition zone between human development and unoccupied lands, these disasters have progressed from annual rarity ...
Building an 18' f/4.5 Newtonian on a GEM - LivestreamDave made an 18" f/4.5 telescope using an "old school" design. It’s big, very big. It weighs about 520 pounds on an equatorial mount. It is capable of being a great visual scope as well as an amazing photographic instrument. Despite its size, it is portable and Dave can set ...
Where: Cost: Free
Saturday, 02/20/21
Biodiversity Virtual ProgramThe Earth is full of many different kinds of plants and animals. In this virtual, interactive program, we will teach your kids about what makes animals similar and different, where animals and plants live and why they live there, and even how to identify animals with only a couple of ...
Join our resident astronomers on Facebook Live every Saturday evening live from Chabot’s Observation deck!Each week, our astronomers will guide us through spectacular night sky viewing through Nellie, Chabot‘s most powerful telescope. Weather permitting we will be able to view objects live through the telescopes and our astronomers will be ...
Wonderfest Science Envoys are early-career researchers with special communication skills and aspirations. Following short talks on provocative modern science topics, these two Science Envoys will answer questions with insight and enthusiasm:UC Berkeley computer scientist Adam Gleave on "Collaborative Artifical Intelligence" - Many people interact with AI systems on a daily ...
Marine heatwaves, prolonged oceanic warm water events, are increasing in frequency and magnitude as global temperatures rise. One of the most dramatic marine heatwaves in recorded history was the Northeast Pacific Blob, a large marine heatwave that adversely affected ecosystems across the Northeast Pacific, from producers to top predators. What ...
Where: Cost: $10 General, Free for Members
Monday, 02/22/21
SLAC Special Seminar: Sensitivity in Numbers : Scaling Up Superconducting Sensing at the Cosmic Frontier - LivestreamMany Cosmic Frontier efforts must instrument large numbers of superconducting sensors to meet their science goals. Though superconducting sensors offer unparalleled sensitivity in many applications, historically it has been very difficult to instrument them in the large numbers (hundreds or more) required to exploit their full potential. Superconducting sensor readout ...
Where: Cost: Free
Loops, Ladders and Links: The Recursivity of Social and Machine Learning - LivestreamMachine learning algorithms reshape how people communicate, exchange and associate; how institutions sort them and slot them into social positions; and how they experience life, down to the most ordinary and intimate aspects. Drawing on this published paper and examples from the field of social media, we will review the ...
Where: Cost: Free
Space Nuclear Propulsion for Human Mars Exploration - LivestreamSafely transporting humans to and from Mars will require advances in spacecraft propulsion. Advanced nuclear propulsion systems, including Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) and Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP), have the potential to substantially reduce trip time and space radiation exposure for astronauts compared to fully non-nuclear approaches. However, more research is ...
Where: Cost: Free
Building the next ubiquitous computing platform drawing on condensed matter physics - LivestreamComputing is at a momentous point today. AI, big data and decentralized work are driving a surging demand for computing power. At the same time, an ending of Moore’s Law and Dennard’s scaling are making it increasingly difficult (and expensive) to improve processor performance. The energy consumed by computing is ...
This talk will provide an overview of Stanford's Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab), which partners with government agencies to carry out high impact demonstration projects for better government. The RegLab is an interdisciplinary team of legal experts, data scientists, social scientists, and engineers, with an extensive track record of ...
Hundreds of millions of years ago, massive ice caps blanketed Earth’s continents from coast to coast. More recently, lush mega-forests of swamp cypress and dawn redwood have occupied what is now the Arctic circle. These dramatic shifts in Earth’s climate have long fascinated geoscientists. What caused these dramatic transitions between ...
Speaker: Greg Mulholland is the CEO and cofounder of Citrine Informatics, which builds software to help materials scientists, chemists, and product designers discover, manufacture, and design with advanced materials in 90% less time than with traditional approaches.
Nematic Fluctuations in Iron-based Mott Insulators - LivestreamMy research focuses on how electrons organize according to their charge, spin, orbital and lattice degrees of freedom in order to exhibit novel phases of matter. A particular area of interest is iron-based superconducting materials and low-dimensional systems that exhibit emergent, quantum phenomena. This talk will discuss a combined experimental-theoretical ...
Where: Cost: Free
Deep Networks Are Kernel Machines - LivestreamDeep learning's successes are often attributed to its ability to automatically discover new representations of the data, rather than relying on handcrafted features like other learning methods. In this talk, however, Pedro Domingos will show that deep networks learned by the standard gradient descent algorithm are in fact mathematically approximately ...
Where: Cost: Free
Tuesday, 02/23/21
Listening to Elephant SealsExplore the fascinating world and interesting adaptations of northern elephant seals during the Seymour Center’s virtual Elephant Seal Celebration Week. Special at-home activities, lectures, and interviews with scientists will reveal natural history, migration strategies, and allow participants to immerse themselves in elephant seal science at UC Santa Cruz. Virtual Elephant Seal ...
Where: Cost: $10 General per household, Free for members
In this talk, we will harness the pipeline concept towards manageable high throughput experimentation in ML/DL research. We will make a distinction between top-down pipelines used in production and a bottom-up design that we propose for researchers. We make the claim that using such a design principle mitigates some of ...
While working as a file clerk at a Los Angeles law firm in 1992, Erin Brockovich uncovered documents that ultimately led to more than 600 residents of Hinkley, California, filing a lawsuit against utility giant PG&E. Since then, Erin has worked on a host of a environmental issues across the ...
Get to know SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, which recently helped scientists find water on the Moon. SOFIA is a specially-modified Boeing 747SP aircraft that carries a very powerful 106-inch reflecting telescope.Soaring above 40,000 feet allows astronomers to study the Universe in ways that are not possible from ...
Where: Cost: Free
Vanishing Vaquitas: Lessons From a Humble Porpoise - LivestreamJoin us for a thought-provoking presentation by Dr. Barbara Taylor about what we can learn from the plight of the vaquita porpoise. Only a handful of Mexico's desert porpoise remains, and their habitat is a war zone controlled by illegal wildlife poachers. While there is still some hope, most lessons ...
