Greetings Friends and Practitioners of Science,
Well we are heading in to the shortest day of the year. Christmas is just one of many celebrations linked to the Winter Solstice. I hope that you have a great celebration of one (or more) of the reasons for the season if you choose to.
I could comment on the latest I have seen about the current status of the “Covid Threat” but by the time you read this it will be out of date since the science is evolving so fast. There is an amazing amount of info out there. There are some excellent places to go for info and there are some crazy ideas out there, some of which you have probably heard. Please be careful, and may I suggest that you avoid any family or anyone for that matter that hasn’t been vaccinated and boosted against any of the covid-19 variants past and future. It is stunning that we have such an effective means of fighting it and so many people have chosen to deny science and follow such misinformation. Misinformation and disinformation aren’t real new, but digital and social media are not the problem allowing misleading, false, and harmful content to spread at a rate that is completely fine endangering society. And just to be blunt about it… Get Your Goddamn Booster Shot it’s not about you.
This week I’m taken by all of the space news. A few days ago the we started to get results from the fastest moving object ever built by humans. Traveling at 364,660 mph the Parker Solar Probe made its; closest approach so far to the sun. You might even say it touched the sun. This coming Friday NASA is launching the James Webb Telescope to deliver 48.2 grams of gold on a beautifully yet insanely engineered telescope to a place called L2. Hubble gave us amazing pictures of the universe. Just wait until we see what the James web can do! Just to top it all off did you see, and hear, what NASA shared about Jupiter last week?
There aren’t many science science presentations around the Christmas holidays. There is one that never let’s me down though. Wonderfest: Starship Reality-Check: The Science of Deep Space Travel will be on Mon 12.27 @ 7:00 PM. The other learning opportunity we have for now is Mushroom Dies - Livestream on Tue 12.21 @ 7:00 PM
Trying to get the crowds out of the house? Your local and/or favorite science museums are all open now (art museums too). They are definitely worth visiting as well as supporting. I’d like to suggest that whether you go to them or not, you send them some $$$. If you’re not a member, join. It has been a tough 2 years since covid started to spread and shut down a lot of public not for profit organizations. Check your savings. Do you have more money than you did a year ago. It’s time to think about sharing some of it. Don’t stop there though. If you support other great institutions that help and serve all of us, consider supporting them.
After all of that check out a few moths!
Here’s some interesting music for the holidays! Need some menu suggestions?
Don’t stop learning just because the days are short and there are great friends, food, and drink.
herb masters
“There is an anti-science by the far right. We have to be careful that the far left doesn't balance this with a naive approach of promising what we can't deliver. I mean, science is neutral; it's not politically conservative or liberal.” - Peter Agre
Upcoming Events:
Click to see the next two weeks of events in your browser.
Monday, 12/20/2021
Tuesday, 12/21/2021
Mushroom Dies - Livestream - 12/21/2021 07:00 PM
Mycological Society of San Francisco
Mayumi Fujio has always enjoyed working with her hands to blend imagination into her creations. She loves learning traditional craft techniques - Ikebana, silver jewelry, ceramic art, sewing, color dying with mushroom, and knitting. Fiber art is a natural progression and botanical printing is bringing together all of the handicraft skills she developed in the past. Her inspiration comes from art, nature, and simply looking at flowers and plants wherever she goes. Mayumi first learned the technique of botanical printing from Monique Risch. Since then, she has been creating with both existing and newly discovered natural dye techniques. As a modern craft, botanical printing is a constant cycle of learning and experimentation, yet it can never be fully controlled. Just like nature.
Her latest series is a combination of mushroom dye and botanical prints.
See weblink for Zoom information.
Monday, 12/27/2021
Wonderfest: Starship Reality-Check: The Science of Deep Space Travel - 12/27/2021 07:00 PM
Hopmonk Tavern Novato
The stars beckon. But humans evolved to survive on Earth, not to hurtle through space. For long-duration travel - interplanetary and, even, interstellar - what spacecraft accommodations are necessary? Is on-board human hibernation an option? Might we overcome the problems of space radiation and prolonged weightlessness? Finally, scientists may argue that the ideal craft for fast human interstellar travel is the "1-g starship" (perhaps similar to the Bussard Ramjet, artist's impression above), but what do the engineers say?
Speakers: Pascal Lee, SETI Institute; Tucker Hiatt, Wonderfest
Dandelion Energy - Livestream - 01/03/2022 04:00 PM
Stanford Energy
Dandelion is a home geothermal company that spun out of Alphabet's X in 2017. The company builds and installs home geothermal systems that are more affordable, convenient and energy efficient than anything else out there. Their initial market is the 6M homes in the Northeast currently stuck using propane and heating oil.
Speaker: Kathy Hannun, Dandelion Energy
See weblink for link to event.
Putting the ecological biogeography of vascular plants on the map - 01/03/2022 04:00 PM
James H. Clark Center (Bldg 340) Stanford
Barnabas Daru is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He received his PhD in Botany from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa in 2015. He then joined Harvard University in 2016 where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship on new uses of herbarium specimens for ecology and evolutionary biology. He joined the faculty as Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2018. He has pursued his interest in plant ecology and phylogenetic biology through a combination of research and teaching. His primary work focuses on elucidating the ecology and evolutionary determinants of floristic diversity, from local to global scales. He is Associate Editor at the journals eLife, American Journal of Botany, and he was also a subject Editor for the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B special theme issue: âMuseum Specimens as a Roadmap for Understanding Biodiversity in the Anthropocene.