Harnessing natural variation to study the evolution of social behaviorNatural variation can provide powerful insights into the genetic and environmental factors shaping the origins and evolution of complex traits. Sweat bees harbor extraordinary variation in social behavior within and between species. Throughout their evolutionary history, these bees have repeatedly gained and lost sociality, resulting in many closely related yet ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
What RFK Jr.’s Confirmation Could Mean for the American Health Care System - LivestreamWhen Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was announced, public health advocates around the nation began sounding the alarm. The Center for Inquiry called him “wholly unqualified and manifestly unfit,” and that’s likely an understatement.In the weeks since, vaccine expert ...
Where: Cost: Free
FutureFest 2025: A conversation with the leaders of two Silicon Valley iconsAs 2025 begins, join us for a conversation about pushing the frontier of innovation with Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X (formerly Google X), and David Parekh, CEO of SRI. Together, with Pulitzer Prize-winning technology journalist John Markoff, they will explore the moments that transformed our world and discuss ...
Where: Palo AltoCost: Free
Pioneering the next energy frontier: From proven pathways to disruptive breakthroughsJoin the Stanford Energy Club for a discussion with Celina Mikolajczak, chief battery technology officer at Lyten - a supermaterial applications company.Celina is an engineering executive with experience working on lithium-ion batteries for the automotive, stationary, and consumer electronics sectors. She has led teams in cell engineering, manufacturing, reliability and testing, safety, and beyond - driving ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22.95, free for members
NightLife x SoulovelySlide through for NightLife's first-ever musical artists-in-residence with Oakland's groundbreaking cultural affair Soulovely featuring Aïma the Dreamer, Lady Ryan, Emancipation, and more.Plus, you can:Step inside the iconic Shake House and our four-story Osher Rainforest, where you can explore the Amazon’s treetops surrounded by free-flying birds and butterflies.Venture into our aquarium exhibit Venom ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Varies
Plot Twist: Could Artificial Intelligence Be the Transformative Force for Justice? Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, from predictive analytics to advanced data systems, has emerged as a catalyst for innovation. Yet, the criminal justice system lags decades behind, as more than 3,000 counties in the United States continue to rely on outdated and manual case management systems, making the path to justice ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22 General in person, $8 online
Microbes Mining Minerals: A New Route to Plant Cultivation Plants supply us with food, clothing, medicines, fuels, and other necessities of life. For their growth, plants need essential minerals from the soil. These nutrients can be provided by fertilizers, but over-fertilization can damage the environment. Is there another way? Many of the nutrients plants need to grow already exist ...
Speaker: Alex Filippenko, UC BerkeleyAttend in person or online (see weblink)
Where: NovatoCost: $20 Adults, $15 Students
Open Question: Artificial Intuition Can machines act naturally?What do machines and mother nature have in common? Finding novel solutions to existing problems, of course. Learn about AI and biomimicry at Open Question - only at the Exploratorium.Part of After Dark
Where: San FranciscoCost: $19.95 General, Free for members
Friday, 01/24/25
Designing Future Airspace Operations and Lunar HabitatThis seminar will discuss selected ideas related to the intersection of Civil and Environmental Engineering discipline, and Berkeley Space Center’s mission. The speaker will share his research related to air traffic controller workload and their decision support tools, and how those insights changed the paradigm to enable airspace operations of ...
The cyanate (NCO-), cyanide (CN-) and nitrosonium (NO+) ions are stable nitrogen-containing species that serve as functional groups in organic chemistry and ligands to transition metals. They are routinely used as illustrative examples of specific chemical properties. For example, the cyanate ion is an archetypal ambidentate nucleophile, the cyanide ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
After Dark: Look UpTurn your eyes to the skies - discover the wonders of space science at our spring experience Look Up. Learn more about robo-explorers that can navigate the terrains on Mars and the moon, and immerse yourself in the stunning natural phenomena in outer space.Ages 18+
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22.95 General, Members Free
In Town Star PartyCome join San Jose Astronomical Association (SJAA) for an evening of stargazing.Event details:Events are held at the parking lot of our headquarters, Houge Park San Jose. The event duration is 2 hours. SJAA volunteers will share night sky views from their telescopes.Please refrain from bringing your own telescopes (Binoculars are ...
Where: San JoseCost: Free
Saturday, 01/25/25
Science Saturday: Sandy's Birthday Party! (Marine Mammals)Happy Birthday, Sandy!Join us in celebrating Sandy's birthday at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History during our Marine Mammals themed Science Saturday. This exciting FREE event will provide a unique and enriching experience for families and people of all ages. Come engage in interactive activities designed to educate and ...
Where: Pacific GroveCost: Free
Stewardship Saturday: Eyeing Elephant SealsJoin Año Nuevo State Park and The Marine Mammal Center as we explore a natural breeding ground for one of the Center’s most common patients - elephant seals! Through this event you will learn more about these amazing creatures, how both organizations work to care for them in their natural ...
Where: PescaderoCost: Free with admission
Salamander Search at SanbornSanborn is famous for its amphibians; you just need to do some extra searching to find them! Join us for a fun day of looking under rocks, logs, and other unique hiding spots that Sanborn’s Salamanders call home!Register at weblinkAges 4 - 12
Where: SaratogaCost: Free
Saturday Cinema: The Art + Science of Luminous FilmsCelebrate the Exploratorium’s winter exhibition Glow with a program of radiant animation and short documentaries, both meditative and kinetic.TV Light by Bob Kaputof (2 min.)Magnetic Movie by Semiconductor (2007, 5 min.)Nature by Numbers by Cristóbal Villa (2010, 4 min.)Daybreak Express by D.A. Pennebaker (1953, 5 min.) Rainbow Dance by Len Lye ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free with admission
Weekend Workshop: Radical ReactionsGet hands-on with several different chemistry experiments and demonstrations. Learn how common household materials can be used to measure ph, or cause explosive reactions. Get ready to see what you can cook up in this intro to chemistry.Ages 5 to 10 years old
What can we do, today, to improve muscle strength and, accordingly, to increase healthy longevity, i.e., healthspan? It starts by understanding the science of strength and of muscle function, and then appreciating how muscle changes with aging. Ultimately, we find that healthspan increases with simple and effective evidence-based strategies for improving ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Sunday, 01/26/25
Empowering Homes: Transitioning to Renewable EnergyDid you know that gas appliances cause more smog in the Bay Area than cars do? And that gas stoves are related to 1 in 8 cases of childhood asthma?GOOD NEWS: there are federal, state, and local incentives (both rebates and tax credits) available NOW to help you upgrade to ...
Where: AlbanyCost: Free
History of DrawbridgeJoin Ceal Craig, Ph.D., a 20+ year volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for a unique opportunity to dive into the history of Drawbridge, a historic town that once housed a thriving community on an island along the South San Francisco Bay. How did this community survive in ...
Where: AlvisoCost: Free
Monday, 01/27/25
Feeding Massive Galaxies in the Early Universe from the Cosmic WebGas accretion onto galaxies is perhaps the most fundamental process driving their evolution, supplyiing fuel for star formation, setting the angular momentum and size of disk galaxies, and driving turbulence and disk instabilities. Over the last two decades, a coherent picture has emerged whereby gas is accreted onto dark matter ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Leveraging Windows of Opportunity in Early Childhood and Adolescence for Systems-Level ChangeOur goals for this session aim at a translational bridge - from actionable insights into sensitive periods of learning, to strategies for improving practices, policies, and organizational systems that support children and adolescents. We describe a framework, some key principles, and promising approaches. We highlight the need for interdisciplinary teams, ...
In the past, models of human cognition attempted to capture principles of human cognition but they could not actually achieve human like levels of performance in a wide range of domains. For example, they could not recognize objects in images, learn to beat a good Chess player, or translate from ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
The Human Cost of Wildfires: Protecting Health in a Changing Climate - LivestreamAs recovery efforts continue in the wake of the Los Angeles-area wildfires, the need for clear, evidence-based guidance on protecting communities and people’s wellbeing has never been more urgent. Join leading experts in climate science, pediatrics, mental health, environmental health, and climate adaptation to explore wide-ranging short-term and long-term health ...
In this presentation, we explore how quasiparticles can be controlled and stabilized within 2-D solids by creating carefully designed atomic hetero structures. Quasiparticles give raise to phenomena such as excitons (bound states of electrons and holes), superconducting states, polaritons (hybrids of light and matter), as well as more exotic systems ...
My long-term research goal is to enable real robots to manipulate any kind of object so that they can perform many different tasks in a wide variety of application scenarios, such as in our homes, hospitals, warehouses, or factories. These tasks will require fine sensorimotor skills to, for example, use ...
Differential privacy is one of the most prominent definitions for privacy, being used not only in academic research but also in real-world applications such as Google’s next word prediction. The static data structures setting-where multiple queries must be answered in a differentially private manner over a static data set-is already ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Quantifying the physical genomeMy lab aims to understand how a 2 meter long object, the human genome, encodes for molecules which, through physical interaction with the genome itself, evince the immense cellular diversity we observe in the human body. I will discuss efforts to catalog regulatory elements and transcription factor grammars that are ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Resilience in ActionThe Berkeley Neuro-AI Resilience Center invites you to its inaugural event, hosted by center directors Professors Daniela Kaufer and Shafi Goldwasser. This evening will highlight the center’s mission to explore resilience as a unifying principle across neuroscience and computation. This event is co-hosted by the Simons Institute’s Research Pod on ...
Starting in undergraduate statistical physics, we study small systems that thermalize by exchanging quantities with large environments. The exchanged quantities - heat, particles, electric charge, etc. - are conserved globally, and the thermalization helps define time’s arrow. If quantum, the quantities are represented by Hermitian operators. We often assume implicitly ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Bitcoin+: Blockchain Architectures, Stablecoins, & Its Transformative PotentialBlockchain technology, widely recognized as the backbone of Bitcoin, has emerged as a revolutionary force poised to redefine industries far beyond cryptocurrencies. This talk delves into the foundational architectural features that distinguish blockchain from traditional technologies, including distributed ledger systems, cryptographic hashing, and consensus algorithms. These components enable blockchain’s unparalleled ...
Racial and ethnic diversity in the geosciences continues to be exceptionally low relative to other STEM fields. These demographics have not shifted over the past 40 years even as gender representation has improved and despite sustained attempts to achieve diversity. These results reflect a need to significantly alter institutional and cultural systems and ...
The concept of attractors, well-known in classical mechanics, proved very productive in the theory of black holes and inflationary cosmology. I will start with attractors in supersymmetric black holes and discuss how the discovery of Kaluza-Klein black hole attractors helped recently to explain the mysterious cancellation of ultraviolet divergences in ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Towards predictive protein separations: Imaging protein dynamics at nanoscale interfacesRecent efforts by our group and others have shown the promise of applying single-molecule methods to link mechanistic detail about protein adsorption to macroscale observables. When we study one molecule at a time, we eliminate ensemble averaging, thereby accessing underlying heterogeneity. However, we must develop new methods to increase information ...
Water has always been the heart of California, providing essential habitat for both waterbirds and people. After the Gold Rush, California experienced rapid and widespread destruction and modification of natural hydrological ecosystems and wetlands. This included the rapid conversion of Delta wetlands to peat farmland, development of many North Bay ...
Where: Cost: Free
Euclid: Mapping the Geometry of the Dark Universe - LivestreamEuclid is a new European Space Agency space telescope with NASA contributions designed to provide new insights into the nature of dark matter and why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The term “dark energy” has been given to refer to the unknown cause of this accelerated expansion. ...
Where: Cost: Free
Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary - Discoveries and Surprises - LivestreamChad King, Research Ecologist at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, will treat us to his many years exploring the Sanctuary. We will celebrate ocean protection with Chad as he leads us into the deep sea and shares his observations and discoveries, covering flora and fauna, including human impact on ...
Where: Cost: $10 donation suggested
Thinking in Planetary TimeDisrupting traditional western understandings of time that separate human history from natural history, Planetary Temporality recognizes that these two modes of history are now inseparable, and that meeting planetary challenges will require that we go beyond our lived experience of time, to think instead in terms of our deep-time embeddedness ...
Insufficient sleep dramatically changes how we feel and think, about ourselves and about others. Even a single night of sleep loss elevates levels of anxiety, depression, and asocial behavior in healthy adults. If sleep loss is chronic, this association can develop into a clinical mental disorder. Since 40% of adults ...
Oceanography remains vastly underrepresented in science communication. Take the example of a college freshman who might register for an oceanography class expecting to learn about sharks and whales, only to encounter topics like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). While such subjects may seem less captivating, the key to effective ...
Where: Cost: Free
Engineering Real-Time Sensors and Sustainable Materials for a Healthier PlanetWe currently face rising global temperatures, dwindling natural resources, and increasing threats to human and ecological health. To help meet these challenges, my research group engineers biomolecules and microorganisms for real-time bioelectronic sensing and sustainable materials synthesis. We draw inspiration from how proteins and microorganisms transfer electrons to their environments ...
Decarbonizing the industrial sector to mitigate climate change is challenging: not only must multiple processes within existing coupled production systems be transformed, but changing technology and production geography will have consequences for workers, the local environment, and community health. Focusing on the iron and steel industry in the United States ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
A Philosophy of Planetary Computation: From Antikythera to Synthetic IntelligenceThe Antikythera mechanism, sometimes called the “first computer,” was more than a calculator; it was also an astronomical device. Thus the birth of computation is in the orienting of intelligence to its planetary condition. From Climate Science to Synthetic Biology, this remains the case.As computation becomes planetary infrastructure, its myriad ...
NASA’s VIPER lunar-rover is being planned as humanity’s first resource mapping mission on another celestial body. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will go to the South Pole of the Moon to get a close-up view of the locations that can sustain water ice - ice that could eventually ...
Where: Los Altos HillsCost: Free
Restoring Wetlands for Climate Resilience - LivestreamJoin us for an informative webinar with Ecological Engineer, Christina Toms, and Senior Water Resources Specialist, Judy Nam to discuss how wetland restoration helps communities adapt to climate change. Discover how these efforts enhance community well-being and foster climate resilience. Explore actionable ways to contribute and make a meaningful impact.Register ...
What are those amazing auroras we’ve been seeing around here in recent years? Laura Peticolas earned her B.A. in mathematics and physics at the University of Oregon Honors College and her Ph.D. in physics studying the aurora at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She then spent 3 years as a ...
