Impact of Environmental Disasters on Drinking Water InfrastructureThe frequency and intensity of environmental disasters, both natural (e.g. wildfires and hurricanes) and human caused (i.e. chemical spills), is increasing and public drinking water systems operating in impacted communities are at risk. Since 2017, widespread organic compound contamination has been found in at least 20 wildfire impacted water systems. ...
Tandem PV is a startup commercializing a new solar technology (perovskite-silicon tandem panels). In this seminar, CTO and co-founder Colin Bailie will discuss his journey to date from technology to startup and hopefully soon to product. Starting from a graduate student at Stanford working on the seminal demonstrations of the ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
The AI We Deserve: A Boston Review DiscussionGenerative AI tools, released by a handful of powerful tech companies, are remaking the economy, society, and human life as we know it. Must their vision be our common destiny?In Boston Review’s recent issue AI Futures, technology writer Evgeny Morozov explores a radically different way of thinking about artificial intelligence ...
Marine natural products chemistry is the field of studying compounds from marine organisms. The biosynthetic potential of our natural world to make unique chemistry scaffolds and exotic compounds exceeds what most chemists consider in medicinal chemistry or drug discovery. These unique compounds often exhibit biological properties that have the potential ...
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free
New Luddites vs. Biopiracy and AI“New Luddites” Camila Morena and Jim Thomas join us fresh from the latest conference on biotech at Asilomar. Up close and deep in the international negotiations on biodiversity, climate change, and synthetic biology, both of them have seen how the proponents of AI are working to inject their techno-fantasies into ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
Thursday, 02/27/25
Elevated and Dangerous: Health Implication of High Nitrate in Central Valley Well Water - LivestreamJoin us as we discuss the upward trend in nitrate levels in Central Valley groundwater, its link to dairy manure, and its subsequent health concerns. The California Water Resources Control Board recently released a draft of new dairy manure management regulations with the intent of better addressing rising nitrate levels. ...
Fossils, footprints, and the evolution of human locomotionBipedal locomotion is considered one of the defining features that “makes us human”. Hypotheses about the evolution of human bipedalism date back at least as far as Aristotle, and questions about locomotion remain fundamental to the study of human evolutionary biology. Over the past century, paleontological discoveries have shed light ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Fire Safe Sonoma Speaker Series - LivestreamErika Lutz, Prescribed Fire Information Coordinator for Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Fire Forward program and Devyn Friedfel, Pepperwood‘s Fire & Stewardship Manager will share more about their roles while providing valuable knowledge on prescribed burning basics and its role in keeping ecosystems healthy. Register HERE for their presentation.
Where: Cost: Free
SETI Live: Space is the Case - LivestreamDuring his time as an Artist in Residence (AIR) at the SETI Institute, visual artist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Martin Wilner invited prominent SETI Institute scientists to participate in his ongoing project, The Case Histories. Interested in exploring how scientists relate to the possibility of encountering an alien life form, Wilner ...
Where: Cost: Free
Rules, Regulations, and Randomness: From Biological to Social SystemsAcross both biological and social systems, rules and regulations play a crucial role in ensuring robustness and resistance to fluctuations across diverse environments. The expansion of rule systems over time is particularly relevant in contemporary political discourse, where some argue that society is over-regulated and that bureaucratic structures should be ...
Join us for an insightful discussion with Tom Steyer, former Presidential candidate and a leading advocate for climate action, as he breaks down the potential progress to be made in 2025 and the critical role the private sector must play in driving real change.Attend in person or online
Meet NASA's Mars rovers and orbiters, interact with the Mars Relay Network, and play with 700+ interactive exhibits that will upend your perception of the universe.
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22.95
DeepSeek AI: What You Need to Know & Why It Matters - LivestreamJoin us for an insightful conversation about the disruptive AI reasoning model R1 by DeepSeek. Developed by the Chinese AI company founded in 2023, DeepSeek has quickly risen to prominence with its open-source large language model (LLM) that rivals top-tier international models. We'll explore the origins of DeepSeek, its advanced ...
Where: Cost: Free
Firewise Landscaping PanelJoin us for an informative session featuring experts from the UC Master Gardeners, Monterey County Firewise, and the local fire department. These specialists will discuss effective fire-wise landscaping techniques tailored for our unique environment. Learn how to create defensible spaces around your area, select fire-resistant plants, and implement practices that ...
Where: Pacific GroveCost: $15 General, $10 Members
NightLifeCalling all creatures of the night: explore the nocturnal side of the Academy at NightLife and see what's revealed. With live DJs, outdoor bars, ambiance lighting, and nearly 60,000 live animals (including familiar faces like Claude, our alligator with albinism), the night is sure to be wild.Step inside the iconic ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Varies
Friday, 02/28/25
Signal (re)processing: How disease states shape signal transduction in CD8+ T cellsPersistent antigen signaling is known to drive CD8+ T cell exhaustion (TEX) in cancer and chronic infection, but which downstream kinase cascades control this process are unknown. We found that activation of protein kinase C (PKC) triggers degradation of PKC theta while sparing PKC eta, leading to terminal TEX cells. In chronic ...
In this talk, Brent Pease will discuss how darkness during the day affected wildlife and highlight the power of the public in large-scale research. Dr. Pease played a key role in the Eclipse Soundscapes project as a facilitator, organizing and engaging almost 100 volunteers to participate as Data Collectors during ...
Mt. Tamalpais Turtle Observers TrainingSaturday, March 19:00 - 10:30 over zoom1:00 - 3:00 field visit Western pond turtles are the only species of freshwater turtle in California and they are important indicators of the health of our lakes. By becoming a Turtle Observer you can turn your interests into action by contributing to conservation efforts ...
Where: FairfaxCost: Free
First Saturday: Free Tour of the Santa Cruz ArboretumAround the World in 60-90 Minutes!On the first Saturday of each month, the Arboretum offers a docent or staff-led tour of the Arboretum.Sometimes you will see New Zealand, South Africa, California, and Australia. Sometimes you might see combinations of several gardens or the developing World Conifer Collection or Rare Fruit ...
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free with admission, and for members
Frontiers in AI: Language, Inference, and InnovationUC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Graduuate Student Assembly Presents an afternoon with Nathan Lambert, Alessio Fanelli, and Dylan Patel.Held in the Event CenterRegister at weblink
Where: Santa ClaraCost: Free
Sunday, 03/02/25
Morning Hike at Lower La Honda CreekJoin Peninsula Open Space Trust for a beautiful hike at Lower La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve where you’ll experience the area’s sweeping views and gorgeous rolling grasslands! The preserve is over 6,100 acres, of which POST has contributed 5,200 acres. You will be guided by POST ambassadors on the ...
The second Trump administration hit the ground running with a flurry of Executive Orders, the scope of which raises questions of legality and constitutionality. Can the presidency unilaterally eviscerate USAID activities if the programs had been created and funded by Congress? Doesn't that violate the principle of separation of powers? ...
Where: Mountain ViewCost: $10 donation suggested if in person for lunch
Solar ObservingIt’s there for us year round, lighting our days and providing energy for our lives, so maybe it’s time to give it a closer look. Join SJAA for amazing and detailed views of the Sun, and be assured that we’ll be using special telescopes that will keep your eyeballs perfectly ...
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to reshape the knowledge economy by automating cognitive, non-codifiable work. This paper introduces a framework to analyze this transformation, incorporating AI into an economy where humans form hierarchical firms to use their time and knowledge efficiently: Less knowledgeable individuals become "workers" ...
Galactic Accretion through the Dynamic Circumgalactic MediumThe region of space surrounding galaxies, the circumgalactic medium (CGM) is the site of all gas flows into and out of galaxies and is therefore responsible for regulating or promoting galaxy growth. Observations reveal an interesting diversity of gas properties in this tenuous medium, but it is only recently that ...
A tension appears in contemporary social-scientific studies of the causal effects of race. Race is understood by most scholars today to be a deeply social phenomenon??"a category that not only explains distinctive patterns of social inequality but is defined by these myriad social differences. But this fact about race, on ...
Since the early 21st century, over 80% of major U.S. blackouts have been weather-related. Intensifying extreme events such as hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires, have nearly doubled weather-related outages in the past decade compared to the first decade of the century. Meanwhile, our energy sector, especially the electric power system, is ...
The exponential growth of electronic devices and data processing has pushed charge-based electronics to their energy and performance limits, with power consumption and heat dissipation becoming critical bottlenecks. As Moore’s Law slows, there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift in our approach towards next-generation computing. Here, I investigate ...
Take a breath. Just breath.And then reserve your ticket for a special online-only talk with New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer, who will tell you all about what just went into your lungs. Zimmer will share the ideas that are in his new book Air-Borne, giving a fascinating, previously untold ...
Where: Cost: $10 General, discount for members
Generative Agent Simulations of Human BehaviorSimulations of human behavior can empower applications ranging from immersive environments to social policy simulation. However, traditional simulations have struggled to capture the complexity and contingency of human behavior. In this talk, I demonstrate an alternative approach: constructing an agent architecture that accurately simulates individual behavior in open domains. I ...
Disruptive technologies are groundbreaking innovations that fundamentally transform existing markets, create new economic opportunities, and render previous technologies or business models obsolete by offering more efficient, cost-effective, and user-friendly solutions.In my talk I illustrate, from cognitive, pedagogical, and curricular perspectives, why Generative AI (GenAI) can be viewed as a disruptive ...
The quest for learning the fundamental building blocks of matter and underlying laws of Nature has seen colliders playing a major role in the past century. Such projects have become complex international endeavours requiring multi-decade vision to be realized to their full potential.With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN ...
This presentation by Dr. Descartes Li (UC San Francisco) looks at some of the complexities and controversies about psychiatric diagnoses. It examines the DSM-5's "Harmful Dysfunction" definition, contrasting it with the NIMH's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project. The lecture also discusses philosophical approaches to understanding mental illness, including reductionism, cultural ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22 General, discounts for members
Many people are convinced our lives, and all actions in the universe, are totally determined. One question remains: How did they make up their minds that that is true?One decent definition of the difference between mind and matter is that minds make decisions. Even if you decide to let someone ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22 in person, $5 online, discounts for members
Why are we here? Although we may think we know our place in the Galaxy, the Sun was likely born far from where it resides today. In recent years, ESA’s space-based Gaia satellite and NASA’s K2, Kepler, and TESS missions have helped to uncover not only our own Sun’s history ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $15 General, $12 Members/Seniors
Tuesday, 03/04/25
Intracellular lipid transport in immunoregulation and metabolismAnimal cells are essentially assemblies of membrane compartments marked by diversity and asymmetry of lipids. There remains a significant gap in understanding the biological processes and purposes of lipid localization and trafficking in specialized cell types. Immune cells, with their remarkable adaptability to evolving threats and ability to migrate to ...
Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean is a polyvocal chorus, weaving together essays, maps, art, and poetry to share the impacts of sea level rise on island nations around the world and the solutions to them. Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Material-Driven Construction Automation: Advancing Low-Carbon, Adaptive Building SystemsOur built environment faces a critical dilemma: By 2050, global urbanization will require us to double our current building stock, yet construction and building operations account for 37% of annual global CO2 emissions (Weber, Mueller, and Reinhart 2021). Ramping up industry-standard materials and methods to meet housing demand will increase ...
Neutron stars are physicists' dreams come true: they bring together aspects of classical and quantum electrodynamics, coupled with strongly magnetized plasma physics in the curved rotating spacetime of a massive compact object. They are observed to be powerful emitters of non-thermal electromagnetic radiation, spanning about 20 orders of magnitude in ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Musings on AI Policy from a Former U.S. Senate StafferIn this talk, Simons Institute Law and Society Fellow Serena Booth will first discuss the challenges of crafting specifications for AI systems; how easy it is for these systems to go rogue, whether through misspecification or other means; and her research studying both experts’ and nonexperts’ specifications. This technical research ...
Layered materials consist of crystalline sheets with strong in-plane covalent bonds and weak van der Waals out-of-plane interactions. These materials can be easily exfoliated to a single layer, obtaining 2D materials with radically novel physico-chemical characteristics compared to their bulk counterparts. 2D semiconductors exhibit very strong light-matter interaction and exceptionally ...
Recent advancements in deep neural networks (DNNs), especially transformer-based large language models (LLMs), have driven significant progress in artificial intelligence (AI). As demand grows, models expand to trillions of parameters, potentially requiring dedicated nuclear power plants for data centers. While GPUs are commonly used, they are outperformed in energy efficiency ...
Even when we overcome climate change denial, the question of how to motivate ecological moral priorities remains. Many hold that high consuming citizens’ ethical understanding of the extreme and present/future dangers of climate chaos for human wellbeing is sufficient to provoke effective climate action. However, without intense ethical caring about nature itself, the motivation ...
This year, we are excited to invite Dr. Ben Santer, Fowler Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, as our lecturer. In addition to having been one of Dr. Schneider’s close friends, Dr. Santer is a renowned climate scientist who has helped to reshape the way we understand climate ...
