Hello Science Fans,
I hope that you have thought about whether anti-science is worth considering or worrying about. From battles over the efficacy and safety of vaccinations, to dangerous or useless medical practices, to regulations not based on science, that can lead to injury or death there are a lot of challenges to getting through the day, week, month, or year. May I suggest... The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist's Warning. Here's a more specific take on it... The Death-Strewn Backstory of Big Supplement
I'm always amazed by the range of cool stuff that catches my attention. Keep in mind that many things we read focus on a relatively narrow range of interest or focus. Whoever is writing will invariably include their own bias. Trying to present something without bias is extremely hard but that is supposed to be what a good researcher does. (Needless to say, I wear my biases on my sleeve!) For instance, I'm really a cat guy and only tolerate domesticated dogs... I do appreciate it that some people care about why dogs wag their tales but I'm not going to pay much attention! I love reading about the passion some have for a small or large disciplines of science. It's important to consider the source when “learning” new things or hearing about stuff you think you know. Consider one of the really popular and successful informal science websites, Veritasium. I occasionally link to it and you may have watched it often. But... I suggest that even Veritasium can lead to misunderstanding. Consider what you know about the universe and what others you know or don't know to. The purpose of this video might be to inform us, but what does it say about how many have a good base knowledge. Do People Understand the Scale of the Universe? I hope it doesn't represent an accurate sample of those he asked!
“Be curious and resilient... curious to find the solution to a problem, and to cultivate the art of asking questions.” Debbie Berebichez, PhD
Health claims can be misleading! You really need to consider the source and probably the intent of almost anything you read these days. Consider this article... 9 Benefits of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) Check out the 9 benefits listed. Each one is qualified with “It may”, “It could”, or “It might”! Each of those benefits is also summarized with a may, could, might! Note that it was even “medically reviewed“! Here's a good website to check out for info.. What's the Harm following the science can be life changing! Looking for some science? My friends know that I jokingly consider garlic as a food group. Everyone “knows” that it is “good” for you. So here's what the same resource has to say about garlic... 11 Proven Health Benefits of Garlic Here they have added “appears”, “seems”, and other vagueness!
The opportunities for learning new cool and well established science are increasing as we head into spring. Here are a few that I think warrant some attention this coming week...
1- Wonderfest: The Psychology of Confidence Tue @ 7:00 Wouldn't it be great if Wonderfest webcast?
2- Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum - Livestream Thu @ 7:00
3- Is Anybody Out There? What’s New in the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations Sat @ 7:30
Do you know someone with a birthday on April 8 or maybe it's your birthday? What plans have you made? When you consider that about 71% of the earth's surface is water the chances for a large swath of land to be “solar eclipsed” is not that high. I suggest that you should take the opportunity to see the TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE ON APRIL 8, 2024 If you have never seen one, you've missed a lot! There will be many more in the future, but not as easily viewed. It will require a bit of poetic sacrifice and science poetry. If you would like to get involved with the eclipse try the Eclipse Soundscapes Project. The explOratorium is your local go to source for how to Immerse yourself in the eclipse experience.
So after all this science... It was pretty audacious: suck enough water from the underside of the glacier for the whole block of ice to lose its water cushion and crash back down onto bedrock. Glacial Elevation Operations
Just a few brief words about the SciSchmooze. We don’t advertise, often the organization presenting doesn’t even know that we are listing them, we provide this completely free, and we do it because we can (and it’s a cool thing to do). If you are so inclined please let us know how we are doing, and encourage others to subscribe, especially if they are teachers or students! Tell your friends and family too!
Have a great year learning cool new science and science that was figured out long ago.
herb masters
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Note: I forgot to give a source or attribution for the opening image on last week's SciSchmooze. I tried to track it down to share it with you but an image search yielded so many different sites with it I'm going to leave it to you to find the source you choose!
Upcoming Events:
Click to see the next two weeks of events in your browser.
Monday, 01/22/2024
Lessons from the deep: engineering biosensors, workflows, and communication tools for ocean science - 01/22/2024 12:00 PM
Mitchell Earth Sciences Building (04-560) Stanford
Effective ocean conservation and management relies on an in-depth understanding of the health of marine ecosystems. Dr. Kendall-Bar's interdisciplinary approach combines engineering, visualization, and computation to study ocean resilience in terms of the extreme physiology and behavior of marine animals, establishing eco-physiological baselines to track over time in the face of climate change. This seminar and chalk talk will review her work to create innovative tools to detect, visualize, and analyze the physiology and behavior of animals in extreme environments that showcase their biological resilience to oxygen and sleep deprivation.
Speaker: Jessica Kendall-Bar, UC San Diego
Room: Hartley Conference Center
COP28 Debrief: Attendees reflect on Dubai outcomes - Livestream - 01/22/2024 12:00 PM
Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
For the first time at a United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP), countries have agreed on the need to âtransition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.â
Chris Field, Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, will discuss this and other COP28 outcomes with Jonathan Pershing, former Special Envoy for Climate Change at the U.S. Department of State, and Stanford students and scholars who attended the two-week meeting in Dubai, UAE.
Speakers: Chris Field, Perry L. McCarty Director, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; Jonathan Pershing, Program Director of Environment, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Brian Rogers, Stanford doctoral student in Earth System Science + Additional students and scholars who attended COP28
Register at weblink to attend
If it were up to you¦ Implications for neuroscience, behavioral science, and a more humane society - Livestream - 01/22/2024 12:30 PM
Stanford University
Dr. Robert Sapolsky is John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor and professor of biology, neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery at Stanford University. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. He is also a research associate at the Institute of Primate Research operated by the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi.
Join livestream at the weblink
Maximizing the Value of Water Infrastructure Investments - 01/22/2024 12:30 PM
Shriram Center Stanford
Significant public spending is required to repair aging water infrastructure and prepare water systems for future changes in supply, demand, and storage driven by climate change. But recent landmark spending bills in the United States represent only a fraction of the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated $2.5 trillion infrastructure investment deficit. How do we bridge this value gap?
Speaker: meagan Mauter, Stanford University
(Retrieval & Vision) Augmented Language Models - 01/22/2024 12:30 PM
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg 460) Stanford
Large language models, on their own, have important limitations. I will discuss the trend of "augmenting" language models in various ways to overcome those limitations. Specifically, I will focus on two kinds of augmentation: retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and associated approaches; and vision-augmented language models enhanced to see (LENS).
Speaker: Douwe Kiela, Stanford University
See weblink for instructions to gain entry to the building.
This talk was originally scheduled for January 08, 2024
Environmental injustice among Hispanics in Santa Clara, California: A human - environment heat vulnerability assessment - 01/22/2024 02:30 PM
McCone Hall Berkeley
Population growth increases urbanization, impacting surface albedos and altering surface energy balances, including the reduction of urban evaporative cooling, thus forming surface urban heat islands (SUHIs). Neighborhoods with higher vegetative densities, therefore, tend to have lower temperatures than those with sparse vegetation. In the United States, racially and ethnically segregated neighborhoods have limited green infrastructure, exposing populations to higher ambient temperatures.
Editor's Note: Other lectures in this series start at 3:30. At time of our listing, this particular one was shown as starting at 2:30. That may be a typographical error.Check the weblink if you plan to attend as this may be corrected there.
Sustainable Concrete Construction - Present and Future - 01/22/2024 03:30 PM
Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) Colloquium Series Menlo Park
As the most common construction material and second only to water in terms of use by mankind, concrete cannot simply be replaced with another material at a large scale. In terms of global usage, 14B cubic meters of concrete were produced in 2020 using 4.2B tonnes of cement. Concrete provides a durable and resilient solution at a cost that other materials cannot match. However, cement production alone accounts for about 7 - 8% of global CO2 emissions and about 70M tonnes (or roughly 1%) of US CO2 emissions per year. Decarbonization by 2050, is a goal of this industry.
Speaker: Antonio Nanni, University of Miami
Attend in person or online (see weblink for Zoom information)
The neural mechanisms driving flexible behavior and rapid learning - 01/22/2024 04:00 PM
James H. Clark Center (Bldg 340) Stanford
Speaker: Kiah Hardcastle, Harvard University
Auditorium
Supermassive Black Holes from AU to Megaparsec: Fundamentally New Physics in Accretion Disks - 01/22/2024 04:15 PM
Physics North Berkeley
Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies present unsolved theoretical challenges for our understanding of high-energy astrophysics, gravity and gravitational waves, star and galaxy formation, and space plasma physics. For decades, our models have struggled to understand how such âmonsterâ black holes could form and exist at all. But recent novel multi-physics, multi-scale simulations have led to major breakthroughs. I’ll show how these have transformed our understanding of how such black holes could form, where they come from, and how they grow.
Speaker: Phil Hopkins, Caltech
Using Spatial Data to Inform Renewable Energy Transmission Planning - 01/22/2024 04:30 PM
Stanford University Energy Seminar Stanford
In order to achieve ambitious decarbonization targets, the electric sector is undergoing a massive expansion or renewable energy, storage, and transmission infrastructure. Modeling methods to identify the least-cost resource mix are well-established. However, spatial modeling and planning methods are still emerging. There is a need to identify high-resolution portfolios of future renewabl generation resources in order to enable the electrical grid modeling necessary to ensure reliability. This presentation will focus on methods developed by Leslie and her research teams, as published in PNAS. We will also explore a case study (California Statewide Integrated Resource Plan) where these methods have been applied.
Speaker: Emily Leslie, Montara Mountain Energy
Attend in person or online (see weblink)
LLM + Graph Database for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) - 01/22/2024 07:00 PM
Intel Corporation Santa Clara
LLMs are often like the know-it-all at a bar - they can quickly and confidently produce realistic sounding answers to just about any question - even if the answers are complete fabrications. But an LLM can be grounded in reality by combining it with a Knowledge Graph in order to prevent hallucinations, and to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data.
This presentation will show you the benefits of Graph Databases over regular databases and how to use GenAI with RAG to eliminate hallucinations, enforce security, and improve accuracy. We will also discuss why a vector index plus Knowledge graph provides better, smarter, faster results than a pure vector database.
We will demonstrate an end-to-end retrieval pipeline. The code in the demo will be available in a Jupyter notebook on Github for you to reuse.
Speaker: Soham Dhodapkar, Neo4j
Attend in person or online. Register at weblink
Note location has changed.
Tuesday, 01/23/2024
The distribution of the Cosmic Neutrino Background on the surface of the Earth - 01/23/2024 03:30 PM
Hewlett Teaching Center Stanford
The Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) is a relic of the pre-CMB era which encodes a trove of information about the early Universe and the neutrino sector dating back to when the Universe was less than a second old. In this talk, I will argue that the Earth can significantly alter the local distribution of relic neutrinos and antineutrinos. While neutrinos are repelled from the Earth due to the weak interaction with matter, antineutrinos are attracted.
Speaker: Asimina Arvanitaki
Who Will Build the Ark? - 01/23/2024 05:30 PM
San Francisco Public Library San Francisco
Benjamin Kunkel is a co-editor of the New Left Review essay collection Who Will Build the Ark? Debates on Climate Strategy (2023, Verso). Ark lays out various takes on what is needed to restructure societies and economies in the face of climate change. Kunkel will discuss the contours of these debates and what the book contributes to the broader literature and activism around climate issues. Q&A to follow his remarks.
Benjamin Kunkel co-founded the journal n+1 and is a member of NLRâs editorial committee. His books include a novel, Indecision, and Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis.
Getting Ready for California’s New Electrical Grid: A Conversation with KALW - 01/23/2024 06:00 PM
KALW @ 220 Montgomery San Francisco
Californiaâs electrical grid is getting cleaner every day. Yet most people in the Bay Area still burn fossil fuels to heat their homes and get hot water for their showers - a major contributor to smog and other harmful pollution. But not for long - clean air officials say we should get ready to switch to clean equipment in our homes the next time our old gas-burning furnaces and water heaters break. How can you participate in the regionâs next big climate and clean air initiative? Join SPUR and KALW in person at KALW Radio's vacant to vibrant pop-up experience for an in-depth discussion with experts in the field.
Laura Feinstein / Sustainability and Resilience Policy DirectorBen Trefny / Executive Director, KALW Public Media
Register at weblink
The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation - 01/23/2024 06:00 PM
Commonwealth Club San Francisco
Dr. Jen Gunter, called "the world's most famous and outspoken gynecologistâ by The Guardian, returns to The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to apply her myth-busting, no-nonsense approach to discussing menstruation.
Why do people menstruate? The endometrium’s (the uterine lining’s) fascinating connection to the immune system. The impact of stress, vaccines, and health on the menstrual cycle. Menstrual migraines, PMS, and period diarrhea. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). Fibroids and other causes of heavy bleeding. Endometriosis and the latest treatments. Legitimate menstrual products, and the facts behind toxic shock syndrome.
Despite its significance, most education about menstruation focuses either on increasing the chances of pregnancy or preventing it. And while both are important for many people, Gunter believes that people deserve to know more about their bodies than just what happens regarding reproduction. At a time when charlatans, politicians and social media are succeeding in propagating damaging misinformation with real and devastating consequences, Gunter presents a practical, empowering guide to whatâs typical, whatâs concerning and when to seek care - shared with her trademark expertise and frank, fearless wit.
Speaker: Dr. Jen Gunter, MD, Author; Mina Kim, KQED Forum, Moderator
Attend in person or online
Embodied Economies: How our Economic Stories Shape the World - 01/23/2024 07:00 PM
The Interval at Long Now San Francisco
Economic policy can seem abstract and distant, but it manifests the physical world - affecting us all. Our economic stories shape our systems, and they in turn shape us. What myths continue to constrain us, and how might new stories emerge to scaffold the future? This talk will explore concepts we often take as gospel: profits, competition, economic value, efficiency, and others -- and asks how we might reshape them to better serve planetary flourishing - today, and well into the future.
Speaker: Denise Hearn, Senior Fellow, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Behind the Bark: What Noisy California Sea Lions and Other Marine Mammals Can Tell Us About the State of Our Ocean - Livestream - 01/23/2024 07:00 PM
American Cetacean Society
The ACS San Francisco Bay Chapter is excited to kick off our 2024 speaker series with Dr. Jeff Boehm, Chief External Relations Officer of The Marine Mammal Center. Thereâs no one better to share the experiences of this iconic organization that has been caring for ill and injured marine mammals for almost fifty years. Please join us to learn what The Marine Mammal Center has learned from the animals they treat and study and most importantly what the next fifty years call for to execute on the mission of ocean conservation.
Register at weblink
Wonderfest: The Psychology of Confidence - 01/23/2024 07:00 PM
Hopmonk Tavern Novato
How confident should we be? Overconfidence leads people to delude themselves with wishful thinking, take too many risks, pursue impossible goals, and waste their time on doomed ventures. Underconfidence dissuades people from taking risks that would pay off, and scares them away from trying things they would enjoy. Pschological studies offer evidence pointing to a middle way between these twin risks.
Our speaker is Dr. Don A. Moore, Professor and Chair in Leadership & Communication at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. His most recent book is Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely.
Editor's Note: This event was originally scheduled for 1/30/24.
Wednesday, 01/24/2024
Plasmonic Nanoparticle-Based Biodiagnostics - 01/24/2024 12:00 PM
Stanley Hall Berkeley
Plasmonics deals with understanding and manipulating the interaction between light and matter at a scale that is significantly smaller than the wavelength of light (e.g., metal nanoparticles), and chemical nanoplasmonics is mainly about the study and use of nanoscale chemistry for advancing plasmonics and the use of plasmonics to address key issues and challenges in chemistry and other related fields. Designing, synthesizing and controlling metal nanostructures with a superhigh precision for a large number of structures are the keys to the reliable and widespread use of plasmonic nanostructures in chemistry, materials science, optics, nanoscience, biotechnology and medicine.
Speaker: Jwa-Min Nam, Seoul National University
Removing Legal Barriers to Transmission + Unlocking Targeted Electrification - 01/24/2024 03:15 PM
Environment & Energy Building (Y2E2) Stanford
Removing Legal Barriers to Transmission in California and Beyond for a Clean Electricity Grid
Speakers: Michael Mastrandrea and Michael Wara
Removal of barriers to electric transmission deployment is essential to fully realizing the benefits of recent federal climate legislation and meeting Californiaâs clean electricity goals. Transmission also plays a critical role in ensuring grid reliability in a clean electricity grid in California and the West. Many of the most critical barriers are legal and regulatory in nature. This project aims to develop proposed solutions to transmission siting, interconnection, and cost-allocation challenges.
No-Calibration Building Models: Unlocking targeted electrification and demand management through hybrid data and physics models for multi-zone commercial buildings
Speaker: Jacques de Chalendar
The push to decarbonize and to electrify is a major driver for change in commercial buildings. However, current research and practice in building energy management overwhelmingly rely on synthetic simulations of reference buildings that poorly represent real-life operations. The actual impacts of retrofits or demand management strategies will likely vary significantly from building to building. Creating models and calibrating them to historical data is time-consuming, and models quickly become outdated as building behavior changes. This project aims to develop a framework and the associated computational tools to automatically create no-calibration hybrid physics-based and data-driven models for buildings using real-world measurements from distributed zone level sensors.
Room 362. Attend in person or online (see weblink)
Ministry for the Future and the Climate Crisis - 01/24/2024 04:00 PM
David Brower Center Berkeley
Kim Stanley Robinson(link is external) is the award-winning author of 22 novels and numerous short stories exploring themes of ecological sustainability, economic and social justice, global politics, and big science. In recent years, Robinson has written extensively on the climate crisis in 2312, New York City 2140, and 2020âs powerful Ministry for the Future. Barack Obama called Ministry one of his favorite books of the year while the New York Review of Books proclaimed: âOne hopes that this book is read widely - that Robinsonâs audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination.â Robinson is a long-time Californian, growing up in Southern California, studying at UC San Diego and living now in Davis. His latest book is The High Sierra: A Love Story (2022). At the Brower Center, Robinson will be in conversation with Berkeley’s Katherine Snyder(link is external) (English, Cli-Fi) and Daniel Aldana Cohen(link is external) (Sociology, Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative). The event will include audience Q&A followed by a networking reception.
Registration is required
Science Uncorked: Lending a Kelping Hand: Bull Kelp Restoration on the Northern California Coast - 01/24/2024 06:00 PM
Gourmet au Bay Bodega Bay
Pairing delicious wines with delicious ideas, this series features talks by scientists from UC Davis' Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute and Bodega Marine Laboratory
Speaker: Abbey Dias
Insanely Great: The Apple MAC at 40 - 01/24/2024 07:00 PM
Computer History Museum Mountain View
In January 1984, Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple Macintosh, an "insanely great" computer "for the rest of us" that changed the world - and Apple itself. Exemplifying a (counter) culture of changemakers, the Mac brought the graphical user interface to the masses and launched new connections for computing and creativity. It became the foundation upon which Apple built an empire and grew into the world's largest company.
Join CHM on the 40th anniversary of the Mac's launch to celebrate one of the most iconic and impactful products ever created, and don't forget to wear your favorite Apple swag!Â
What You]ll ExperienceÂ
With David Pogue as moderator, hear insider stories of the Mac and Apple]s early days from key members of the original hardware, software, design, and marketing/PR teams, such as Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Susan Kare, Steve Capps, Mike Murray, and Andy Cunningham. Learn about the impact of the Mac from experts like former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki Come early to see Hello: The Apple Mac at 40, a special pop-up exhibit featuring a unique array of artifacts from CHM and Apple alumni.
Panel:
Bill Atkinson, Apple Computer Andy Cunningham, Cunningham Collective Susan Kare, Niantic Labs Mike Murray, Unitus Steve Capps, Apple Computer Andy Hertzfeld, Apple Computer Guy Kawasaki, Canva David Pogue, Journalist, Moderator
Virtual Skeptics in the Pub - 01/24/2024 07:00 PM
Bay Area Skeptics
This is a casual night of socializing with fellow skeptics. If needed, we will have a number of breakout rooms for quieter conversations.
Please join us! This is a free event brought to you by Bay Area Skeptics. All are welcome.
Zoom. Join HERE. Passcode: 1023
Drought, Atmospheric Rivers and Floods, Oh My! - Livestream - 01/24/2024 07:00 PM
City of Sunnyvale
Join us for an exciting online event. We'll delve into the fascinating world of weather. From droughts to atmospheric rivers and floods, this event has it all!
Learn why California is experiencing more rainfall after years of extreme drought. Discover how we are adapting to our changing climate.
Speakers: Christine Shields, National Center for Atmospheric Research; Erik Porse, California Institute for Water Resources
Register at weblink to receive Zoom information
Thursday, 01/25/2024
Towards a National Police Accountability Database - 01/25/2024 12:00 PM
Sutardja Dai Hall Berkeley
Now, there is intense, if uneven, pressure for prosecutors to indict police officers in the wake of high-profile killings of Black, Latinx and Indigenous people. However, there is as yet no centralized public database that tracks how prosecutors respond to alleged racially-biased misconduct of their law enforcement colleagues at scale. In this talk, I use a case study from King County, WA to introduce a new data source: prosecutorial declination memos. Moving forward, I will build on this preliminary work to create the first national database that publicizes how police killings, use-of-force incidents and in-custody deaths are sanctioned, justified, or ignored by prosecutors in courts across the United States.
Speaker: Dr. Kayla Bourne, UC Berkeley
Attend in person or online (see weblink)
Uncovering the 'lost' planet that formed our Moon - 01/25/2024 12:00 PM
Mitchell Earth Sciences Building (04-560) Stanford
Earthâs Moon is widely accepted to have been created 4.5 billion years ago through a giant impact between Earth and a hypothetical planet known as Theia. Yet, direct evidence for Theia's existence has remained elusive--until now. Here, we demonstrate that the mantle remnants of Theia explain fundamentally important features of the largest seismically-imaged anomalies within Earth - the two large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) in Earth's deepest mantle. We combine state-of-art evidence from theoretical and computational astrophysics, geodynamics, mineral physics and seismology to demonstrate how Theia mantle remnants naturally provide an explanation for a compositionally distinct origin for LLSVPs, as well as their age, density and size. This study substantially expands the influence of giant-impact planetary processes in shaping Earth's evolution, with implications for comprehending the diversity of terrestrial planets and the quest for Earth-like exoplanets.
Speaker: Qian Yuan, Caltech
Attend in person or online
Room 350/372
Connecting Turbulence to Ecology at Multiple Scales - 01/25/2024 12:00 PM
Mitchell Earth Sciences Building (04-560) Stanford
The last 10-15 years of physical oceanographic research makes clear that a particular class of turbulent currents - thin, elongated fronts and filaments or swirling vortices 10 m - 1 km in horizontal scale - can dominate material fluxes on timescales of hours-to-days.  However, the aggregate impacts of these oceanic âweatherâ patterns on heat fluxes, nutrient availability, and ecosystem functioning remain to be comprehensively quantified and understood, especially on timescales of weeks-to-months. This knowledge gap precludes the confident prediction of ecosystem response to multiple stressors, particularly in coastal regions where a rich collection of fronts, filaments, and vortices co-exist and interact.
Speaker: Daniel Dauhajre, UC Los Angeles
Room: Hartley Conference Center
When Did Yosemite Valley Become a Deep Canyon? - 01/25/2024 03:30 PM
Earth and Marine Sciences Building Santa Cruz
Speaker: Kurt Cuffey
Interstellar Interlopers - 01/25/2024 03:30 PM
Physics North Berkeley
Speaker: David Jewitt, UC Los Angeles
Science on Tap: Cetaceans & Tales of Whales - 01/25/2024 05:30 PM
Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History Pacific Grove
Weâre going to have a whale of a time with our first Science on Tap of 2024! Just in time for whale migration season, join us for an in-depth look at whales and cetaceans with drinks from Peter B’s Brewpub and our panel of experts to discover the secret world of these incredible animals and their ecosystems. Join Dr. Matt Savoca of Hopkins Marine Labs for his discussion on whales and ocean ecology, Sarah Grimes of the Noyo Center for Marine Science for an in-depth look at what we learn about the sea on the shores, and UCSD PhD candidate Kelly Bowen for a discussion on her work about the natural history of orcas, with an update on our orca skull (find the first part of that story here. It’s going to be a great night, save your spot today!
General tickets are $23 at door, $20 advance.
NightLife - 01/25/2024 06:00 PM
California Academy of Sciences San Francisco
Calling 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 Shake House and our four-story Osher Rainforest, where you can explore the Amazonâs treetops surrounded by free-flying birds and butterflies. Reservations for these exhibits are no longer required. However, please note that the last entry into the rainforest is 7:30 pm - our animals need their sleep.
Venture into our latest aquarium exhibit Venom to encounter live venomous animals and learn the power of venom to both harm and heal.
Visit the BigPicture exhibit in the Piazza to marvel at the most recent winners of the BigPicture Natural World Photography competition.
Bask in the glow of one of the largest living indoor coral reef displays in the world: our 212,000-gallon Philippine Coral Reef habitat.
Take in the interstellar views from the Living Roof, then grab a bite from the Academy Cafe and head to the West Garden outdoor bar to drink and dine under the stars.
Finding Aliens on Earth - Livestream - 01/25/2024 06:00 PM
Night Sky Network
Finding life outside of Earth is one of the most interesting topics of Planetary Science. Is life possible on other planets? If so, on which ones? What would it be like, and what would they use as an energy source?
Speaker: Miguel à Fernández, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum - Livestream - 01/25/2024 06:00 PM
US Geological Survey Public Lecture Series
Ancient human footprints at White Sands National Park and their implications for the peopling of the Americas.
How old are the footprints? How do we know?What is the role of USGS scientist in this discovery? What's the link between these footprints & climate change?
Speakers: Kathleen Springer and Jeff Pigati, USGS Geoscience & Environmental Change Science Center
See weblink to attend
Searching for Trolls under the Electron Bridge - 01/25/2024 07:00 PM
Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) Public Lecture Series Menlo Park
Plants draw energy for all their chemical reactions from sunlight. Why can't we? In theory, this can be done by building a molecular bridge: Attach a molecule that absorbs light and gives the energy to electrons to a molecule that accepts the electrons and uses them to catalyze the desired chemical reaction. With this strategy, we can design complexes that, for example, use sunlight to convert water to hydrogen fuel. Electrons cross the molecular bridge at high speed under the subtle influence of quantum mechanics.
Speaker: Elizabeth Ryland, Stanford University
Register at weblink to attend in person, or watch on YouTube
Friday, 01/26/2024
Peering inside giant planets with giant laser dynamic compression experiments - 01/26/2024 12:00 PM
Earth and Marine Sciences Building Santa Cruz
Speaker: Marius Millot
Saturday, 01/27/2024
Coloring the Universe with Rubin Observatory - Online - 01/27/2024 09:00 AM
Vera C Rubin Observatory
Vera C. Rubin Observatory has developed a series of FREE online astronomy investigations using authentic data that provide rich and interactive experiences for students, from advanced middle school through college, covering topics commonly taught in introductory astronomy classes or units.
This webinar, hosted by the ASP, will unpack how to access and teach all of the components of the new Coloring the Universe investigation, which incorporates the topics of electromagnetic radiation, digital image processing, and using filters and color to discover and communicate some properties of stars and galaxies. The investigation is designed to support the three dimensional learning model of the Next Generation Science Standards.
The 4-hour webinar begins at 12:00 pm EST/ 9:00 am PST on Saturday, January 27 and concludes at 4:00 pm EST / 1:00 pm PST. Rubin Observatory will provide certificates of participation to all who attend the live webinar. The session will be recorded for those who may have time conflicts.
Register at weblink
Science Saturday: Sandyâs Birthday! - 01/27/2024 10:00 AM
Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History Pacific Grove
Have a whale of a time with the PG Museum as we celebrate the birthday of beloved community icon Sandy the gray whale! Get ready for some major merrymaking and learn about whales and other animals that migrate.
Salamander Search at Sanborn - 01/27/2024 10:30 AM
Sanborn Science and Nature Center Saratoga
Sanborn 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 Sanbornâs Salamanders call home!
Ages 4 - 12, with registered adult
Register at weblink
Stewardship Saturday: Icing Out Iceplants - 01/27/2024 11:00 AM
Doran Regional Park Bodega Bay
Help protect our beaches with The Marine Mammal Center and Sonoma County Parks! Through this event you will learn about the impact of the iceplant along our coastal ecosystems and support in removing this plant from a section of Bodega Bay. We hope that by the end of this event you will feel energized and empowered to continue supporting conservation efforts to help protect our terrestrial and aquatic spaces!
Note: Parking passes and lunch will be provided, and we are happy to sign off on community service hours if needed!
Register at weblink
Lunar Landing Sites, Past and Future - 01/27/2024 07:30 PM
East Bay Astronomical Society Oakland
As we look back on the discoveries of the Apollo program, now more than fifty years ago, and stand on the verge of a new generation of lunar exploration through the Artemis Program, it is appropriate to reflect upon the sites chosen for lunar exploration. In this talk, we will look back at the Apollo landing sites, examine why they were chosen, and discuss what we learned from them. We will then look ahead to sites that have been identified for upcoming lunar exploration, both human and robotic. These sites each offer fascinating and compelling reasons for exploration. They will help answer key questions about the Moon and its history. Many will also facilitate a sustained human presence on the Moon.
The presentation will feature data gathered from many different instruments aboard a variety of spacecraft and made available through NASAâs Moon Trek online data visualization and analysis portal. The presentation will include an overview of using the portal so that audience members can follow and even become direct participants in this exciting new era of lunar exploration.
Speaker: Brian Day, NASA
Attend in person or on Facebook
This event was originally scheduled for November 11, 2023
Is Anybody Out There? What’s New in the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations - 01/27/2024 07:30 PM
San Jose Astronomical Association San Jose
What is the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe? Can we detect radio, infrared, or optical signals from other civilizations? Current and future SETI projects may provide an answer. Dan Werthimer will describe the rationale for past and future searches and will show how new technologies are revolutionizing SETI. Dan will describe Breakthrough Listen, SETI@home, the new PANOSETI wide field all-sky-all-the-time project, as well as concepts for future SETI.
Speaker: Dan Werthimer, Berkeley SETI Research Center
Monday, 01/29/2024
Coastal Ecosystem Transition Dynamics: Insights from Ecological Change - 01/29/2024 12:00 PM
Sonoma State University - Biology Colloquium Rohnert Park
Dr. Smith is currently a Conservation Research Fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium: I am a community ecologist studying how species interactions shape the structure, functioning, and stability of nearshore marine ecosystems. I focus on temperate rocky reefs and am particularly interested in combining theory with observational and experimental approaches to understand how climatic perturbations (e.g., marine heatwaves) alter the behavioral responses of predators and herbivores, and how these interactions in-turn affect community and ecosystem dynamics. I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and conducted postdoctoral research at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. I am currently an Ocean Conservation Research Fellow at Monterey Bay Aquarium, where I am conducting research aimed at understanding mechanisms of kelp forest recovery.
Speaker: Joshua Smith, Monterey Bay Aquarium
Disparities in Police Crime Reports on Social Media - 01/29/2024 12:30 PM
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg 460) Stanford
A large and growing share of the American public turns to social media for news. On these platforms, reports about crime increasingly come directly from law enforcement agencies, raising questions about content curation. We gathered all posts from almost 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by US law enforcement agencies, focusing on reporting about crime and race. We found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25 percentage points relative to local arrest rates. This overexposure occurs across crime types and geographic regions and increases with the proportion of both Republican voters and non-Black residents. Widespread exposure to overreporting risks reinforcing racial stereotypes about crime and exacerbating punitive preferences among the polity more generally.
Speaker: Julian Nyarko, Stanford Law School
See weblink for instructions to gain entry to the building.
Room 126
UC Berkeley Geography Colloquium - 01/29/2024 03:30 PM
McCone Hall Berkeley
Speaker: Kimberly Yazzie, Stanford University
Bacterial growth dynamics across scales - from protein synthesis to the human gut microbiota - 01/29/2024 04:00 PM
James H. Clark Center (Bldg 340) Stanford
Speaker: Jonas Cremer, Stanford University
Auditorium
UC Berkeley Physics Colloquium - 01/29/2024 04:15 PM
Physics North Berkeley
Speaker: Greg Boebinger, Florida State University
An uncertain future for the US critical mineral supply chain - 01/29/2024 04:30 PM
Stanford University Energy Seminar Stanford
The United States is strategically disadvantaged in building its critical mineral supply, in particular in the upstream and downstream portion. In this presentation, I will report findings on a year-long conversation with government officials, academics, and international industry experts on the status of the US critical mineral supply chain, in particular in the area of electrification (lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper & REE). Overall, the US and its government agencies lack a coherent view of how a robust, resilient & sustainable supply chain will be built starting from exploration to mining, processing to manufacturing. While important research is ongoing on finding replacement materials and recycling, these activities are likely not to have an impact relative to the state of the energy transition we are finding ourselves in today. Additionally, the US is betting too much on single horses, such as the Salton Sea, that remain unproven at operational scale, are unattractive to investors and constitute an unresolved environmental justice concern. Innovation in exploration in particular is completely neglected which means that proven and mineable reserves of critical minerals remain uncertain. In a simple analogy, the US is researching new technology for farming, but has no land to farm on. In the second portion of my presentation, I will focus on a plausible roadmap with very specific recommendations to get the US on a more certain footing. Important to such roadmap is the timing at which priority on innovation, development and manufacturing needs to take place, how are allies, Australia and Canada, will play a crucial role and how such roadmap requires having Environmental Justice and the Geosciences as pillars of its foundation.
Speaker: Jef Caers, Stanford University
Attend in person or online (see weblink)
Tuesday, 01/30/2024
What is up down there? Insights into ancient life through deep-sea exploration - 01/30/2024 03:30 PM
Earth and Marine Sciences Building Santa Cruz
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Reaction-Diffusion and Mechanical Models in Vertebrate Skin Patterning - CANCELED - 01/30/2024 03:30 PM
Hewlett Teaching Center Stanford
Extreme Electrodynamics of Neutron Stars and Black Holes - Rescheduled - 01/30/2024 03:30 PM
Hewlett Teaching Center Stanford
Innovative Patient-Centered Care for Cancer - 01/30/2024 05:30 PM
Commonwealth Club San Francisco
Wonderfest: The Psychology of Confidence - RESCHEDULED - 01/30/2024 07:00 PM
Hopmonk Tavern Novato
Wednesday, 01/31/2024
RoundTable: Taking Generative AI Enterprise Models to Production - 01/31/2024 09:00 AM
The Hibernia San Francisco
How to Make an Eye: Cephalopod Eye Development and the Evolution of Complexity - 01/31/2024 12:00 PM
Weill Hall Berkeley
Science on Tap: Integrating Aquaculture to Improve Olympia Oyster Restoration in Elkhorn Slough, CA - 01/31/2024 07:00 PM
Museum of Art and History Santa Cruz
Wonderfest: The Most Famous Equation - 01/31/2024 07:30 PM
Marin Science Seminar San Rafael
Thursday, 02/01/2024
Berkeley Institute for Data Science Seminar - 02/01/2024 12:00 PM
Sutardja Dai Hall Berkeley
UC Berkeley Astronomy Colloquium - 02/01/2024 03:30 PM
Physics North Berkeley
UC Berkeley Geography Colloquium - 02/01/2024 03:30 PM
McCone Hall Berkeley
The Coming 6th Generation (6G) of Mobile Wireless - 02/01/2024 04:00 PM
Sonoma State Dept. of Engineering Science Rohnert Park
NightLife: Black Thursday - 02/01/2024 06:00 PM
California Academy of Sciences San Francisco
After Dark: Phenomenal Fun - 02/01/2024 06:00 PM
ExplOratorium San Francisco
Is Anybody Out There? Innovative Approaches in the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations - 02/01/2024 06:30 PM
Ocean View Brew Works Albany
Friday, 02/02/2024
Energy Innovation: What It Is and How to Accelerate It - Livestream - 02/02/2024 10:30 AM
Osher Livelong Learning Institute
Isotopes in planets: From the earliest planetesimals to the Moon forming giant impact - 02/02/2024 12:00 PM
Earth and Marine Sciences Building Santa Cruz
Delivering the Future of CRISPR-Based Genome Editing - 02/02/2024 03:00 PM
Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union Berkeley
First Friday: Celestial Cinema - 02/02/2024 06:00 PM
Chabot Space and Science Center Oakland
N = 1: Alone in the Milky Way - 02/02/2024 08:00 PM
College of San Mateo Bldg 36 San Mateo
Saturday, 02/03/2024
Nike Missile Site Veteran Open House - 02/03/2024 12:00 PM
Nike Missle Site Mill Valley
Part 3 Neurobiology of Morality - 02/03/2024 03:00 PM
TBA
Starry Nights Star Party - 02/03/2024 06:30 PM
Rancho Cañada Del Oro Open Space Preserve Morgan hill
Sunday, 02/04/2024
Solar Observing - 02/04/2024 01:30 PM
San Jose Astronomical Association San Jose
Monday, 02/05/2024
Montane Grasshopper Fitness Constraints in Changing Environments - 02/05/2024 12:00 PM
Sonoma State University - Biology Colloquium Rohnert Park