SciSchmoozing to Infinity
Dear science aficionado,
Join us in another romp through recent (and not so recent) science revelations. But first, “Infinity.” Somehow i missed the Netflix movie, “A Trip to Infinity,” when it came out last year. Carve out 80 minutes this week to watch it. You won’t be sorry. The movie reminded me of a book i ‘absorbed’ during my senior year in high school: “One Two Three... Infinity” by George Gamow. In 1956 Gamow was awarded the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for popularizing science. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sean Carroll, and Steven Pinker credit the book with informing or downright setting their careers. It was largely responsible for my majoring in physics at Cal. However, the book was first published in 1947 -- so i’m recommending more recent books.
CLIMATE
The CBAM
Some materials essential to industry - especially steel, aluminum, and cement - require a great deal of energy to produce and come with the potential of releasing great quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. As the United States, Canada, and the European Union clamp down on industrial CO2 release, it becomes more expensive to produce these materials domestically and cheaper to import them from countries with less stringent CO2 regulations. (Ex: steel from China) The typical strategy to boost domestic production is to levy import duties - a strategy fraught with political infighting and international tensions. ¿What to do? Enter CBAM - the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism just adopted by the European Union. The E.U. will gradually implement CBAM over the next three years at which time their imports will be taxed on the basis of how much more it is carbon-dirty compared to domestic production of that material - i.e., not taxed on political considerations. You get the gist: at the same time that E.U. domestic production is provided some protection, foreign producers are incentivized to clean up their production methods. It becomes a win for our planet but debate continues as to implementation details and fairness. Canada is working toward a similar system. The U.S. is making no progress in this direction. Here is a deep academic video discussion of CBAM made last December.
¿Want to do something for our planet? Encourage your federal representatives to implement a CBAM in the U.S.
Central Valley Flooding?
Tulare Lake continues to grow, submerging farmlands. A levee protecting Corcoran State Prison is being enlarged. Whether flooding becomes disastrous depends on how quickly snow melts in the Sierra Nevada. It does not bode well. The expected high temperature in Truckee today is 47°F (8°C). Next weekend they are expecting a high of 68°F (20°C). If heavy warm rains soon blanket the Sierra, flooding will indeed be disastrous.
Manda B. from Hartford, Maine won the Galileo Thermometer with her guess of 903, which was spot on. She chose to receive the Celsius version - a true nerd (meant in the nicest possible way). The prize this time is a SciSchmooze coffee mug with your name on it. Just send an email before noon Friday to david.almandsmith [at] gmail.com with an integer between 0 and 1,000.
My Picks of the Week
– Music of the Spheres - Tickets go on sale Monday (and sell out fast!)
– A Star is Born - (Not the movie) 7:30pm Monday, Cal Academy, San Francisco, $
– Women in Astrophysics - 3:30 Wednesday, Stanford
– Extraterrestrial Life? - Livestream 7:30pm Thursday
– Climate Parables: Reporting from the Future - Live & Livestream Friday & Saturday 8pm
SPACE
Hungry Star
About 5 billion years from now, Sol will eat Terra. That is, our Sun will eat the Earth. Throughout the cosmos, suns are engulfing their planets but until now astronomers had not seen such an event. Well, they didn’t see it in ‘real’ time but found the event in data from NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer). Watch a reënactment video of the planet’s last moments. The actual ‘swallow’ only took a moment.
Not so Tasty
It’s not a surprise, but extensive analysis of data collected in the last 50+ years agrees that our Moon has a solid core mostly of iron - and no green cheese.
BIOLOGY
¿Dancing Lessons?
Honeybees communicate the location of good nectar sources to other honeybees by using the waggle dance. It’s been assumed that the waggle dance comes ‘naturally’ to honeybees, and that’s partly true. Young honeybees raised separately did indeed use the waggle dance to communicate the location of nectar sources, but they were terrible at it. Apparently, young bees in a normal hive learn how to dance correctly from older bees, a surprising case of social learning among invertebrates.
Transportation Crisis
We are intimately aware of the COVID-19 Pandemic and many of us are - by now - aware of the Flu Pandemic of 1918, but few of us have heard of the Equine Flu of 1872. It is estimated that New York City at that time had 70,000 horses and mules drawing carriages, carts, fire-fighting pump wagons, streetcars, canal boats, and more. The equine flu spread rapidly throughout North America incapacitating horses and mules for weeks, but killing only about one percent of them. Imagine what would happen if all of today’s gasoline pumps suddenly went dry: commerce, transportation, shipping, and major events would come to a halt and fighting fires and transporting patients would be more difficult. That is what happened during the Equine Flu of 1872.
Squirrels
I rather like squirrels. We had a pet squirrel when i was just five years old and he was affectionate and delightful. (Today, keeping native animal species as pets is generally illegal.) So i was intrigued to learn that Eurasian Red Squirrels had been trained to sniff out drugs - in Chongqing, China - for real. Yes, dogs are great at sniffing out drugs, but dogs cannot crawl in and between large piles of packages.
FUN NERDY VIDEOS
Taking care of other animal’s young - SciShow - Hank Green, MS - 8 mins
Earliest galaxies too large? - Dr. Becky - Becky Smethurst, PhD - 19 mins
Fusion startups - Sabine Hossenfelder, PhD - 30 mins
Blueberry magic? - Cup o’Joe - Joe Schwarcz, PhD - 3 mins
How quantum computers break the Internet - Veritaseum - Derek Muller, PhD - 24 mins
What if alien life were silicon-based? - PBS Space Time - Matt O’Dowd, PhD - 22 mins
Get together and enjoy yourself with your friends this week,
Dave Almandsmith, Bay Area Skeptics
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
– Stephen Hawking (1942 - 2018) English theoretical physicist
Upcoming Events:
Click to see the next two weeks of events in your browser.
Monday, 05/08/2023
Observations of turbulent dissipation in the coastal ocean from an autonomous underwater vehicle - 05/08/2023 12:30 PM
Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2) Stanford
The location and intensity of mixing in the world’s oceans is a fundamental topic of modern oceanography, yet the range of dynamical scales in oceanic flows has challenged efforts to quantify when and where dissipation of mechanical energy occurs. Such knowledge is essential to global climate science and prediction. Although global ocean models can resolve some turbulence in the ocean (quasigeostrophic turbulence at scales of O(1-10 km)), they do not resolve the O(1 mm) Kolmogorov scale at which kinetic energy is ultimately dissipated. Even regional ocean models with grid spacing at O(10-100 m) cannot directly resolve this transfer of energy. As such, in situ measurements are still essential to advancing knowledge of mixing, particularly in the coastal ocean. This talk will present high-resolution observations of turbulent dissipation collected in a number of coastal environments using a microstructure-equipped REMUS 600 autonomous underwater vehicle. These observations will be discussed in the context of both the challenges involved in collecting these data and perceived patterns of mixing visible with remote sensing.
Speaker: Nick Nidzieko, UC Santa Barbara
Landscape of Particle Accelerators, Snowmass Planning for Future, and Ultimate Colliders - 05/08/2023 03:30 PM
Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) Colloquium Series Menlo Park
For over half a century, high-energy particle accelerators have been a major enabling technology for particle and nuclear physics research as well as sources of X-rays for photon science research in material science, chemistry and biology. We will briefly review recent advances worldwide to increase the energy and improve the performance of accelerators, reduce their cost, and make them more power efficient.
Numerous ideas and proposals of future accelerators were discussed in the course of the “Snowmass’21" - the US HEP community forum to develop a scientific vision for the future of particle physics in the U.S. and worldwide. One of the main outcomes of the Snowmass’21 Implementation Task Force was a comparative evaluation of future HEP accelerator facilities, their realization strategies, costs, timelines, and challenges. Finally, we will take a look into limits of the ultimate future colliders based on traditional as well as on advanced accelerator technologies.
Speaker:Vladimir Shiltsev, Fermilab
Attend in person or online (see weblink)
The epigenetic regulation of gene expression plasticity - 05/08/2023 04:00 PM
James H. Clark Center (Bldg 340) Stanford
Speaker: Ben Williams, Stanford University
Room: Auditorium
A Personal Reflection on Thirty Years of Energy Transitions - 05/08/2023 04:30 PM
Stanford University Energy Seminar Stanford
Mike Morgan will share his reflections and lessons learned from 30 years as a leader and venture investor in a range of energy businesses that have seen significant transitions, including: natural gas infrastructure, residential solar, batteries + AI, and energy-optimizing software.
Michael Morgan is Founder, Chairman and CEO of Triangle Peak Partners
Attend in person or online.
May LASER Event - 05/08/2023 07:00 PM
LASER Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous Stanford
Ravi Majeti(Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine) on "Stem Cells and Reprogramming in Human Acute Leukemia" TBA ...
Thomas Haakenson (California College of the Arts) on "Kurt Schwitters and the Space, Sound, Sexuality of Dada Resistance" The year 2023 marks roughly the centennial of some of the avant-garde’s most radical revisions of Western art and culture...Read more David Stork(Visiting Lecturer, Stanford University) on "Rigorous computer-assisted lighting analysis of the works by Johannes Vermeer "Computer vision techniques provide a powerful and enhanced view into the lighting in Vermeer's paintings...Read more Paige Emery (Media Artist) on "On Divinatory Ecologies for More-Than-Human Time" A poetics of divination for how humans might relate to more ecologically-conscious futures through sensing alongside space for otherness...Read more
LiKaShing Building, Room LK101
Wave-like Dark Matter: Listening Through A Dark Matter Radio - 05/08/2023 07:00 PM
Hewlett Teaching Center Stanford
The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries of the modern era. All the matter that we see makes up just one sixth of the total mass of the Universe - there’s five times as much again in this mysterious stuff we call ‘dark matter’. We know it’s there, but we know close to nothing about what it’s made of. Different people have proposed new particles and objects ranging from the very small - lighter than a single subatomic particle - to the very large - heavier even than the Sun. The lighter, wave-like and heavier, particle-like dark matter candidates, behave differently and require different strategies to detect. In this lecture, Dr. Maria Simanovskaia will discuss a particular, promising dark matter candidate called an ‘axion,’ which, if detected, would also explain why the neutron is missing an electric dipole moment. She will also introduce the DM Radio collaboration, a team she is part of to build the world’s most sensitive radio that interacts with axion dark matter. Dr. Simanovskaia will wrap up the lecture by discussing the requirements needed for detecting a weak dark matter signal and the current technology development for tackling these challenges.
Speaker: Maria Simanovskaia, KIPAC
Register at weblink to attend in person or online
This event was originally scheduled for May 2.
A Star is Born - 05/08/2023 07:30 PM
California Academy of Sciences San Francisco
The birth of stars is one of the most complex problems challenging modern astrophysics. Understanding their origins is of fundamental importance to many areas of astronomy, from exoplanet studies to cosmology. While the study of the initial conditions of star formation in molecular clouds has accelerated during the past couple of decades, at the same time, new data and discoveries have exposed new mysteries regarding the birth of stars. In this talk, Dr. Imara will outline the current state of our understanding of stellar nurseries and present some innovative approaches toward advancing our knowledge of these environments in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond. With an eye toward the future, she will highlight some breakthroughs that have been achieved - as well as those we would like to achieve - in our journey to unravel the mysteries of star birth.
Speaker: Nia Amara, UC Santa Cruz
Tuesday, 05/09/2023
Subpolar gyres and the Southern Ocean overturning circulation - 05/09/2023 03:30 PM
Natural Science Annex Santa Cruz
Speaker: Earle Wilson, Stanford University
Unsettling Raciolinguistic Barriers: Redefining Communicative “Problems” and Reimagining Decolonial Possibilities - 05/09/2023 04:30 PM
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg 460) Stanford
Colonial and imperial histories and contemporary realities often lead to the framing of marginalized populations’ linguistic practices as learning impediments, thereby scapegoating them as primary causes of educational and broader societal problems. This presentation draws on critical decolonial perspectives to understand the historical and contemporary consolidation of borders delimiting languages, identities, and geographies. Such a reconceptualization points to opportunities for reckoning, redress, and reimagination that emerge when we approach marginalized communities not as communicatively deficient, but rather as dynamic linguistic contexts that unsettle conventional assumptions about knowledges, institutions, and possible worlds.
Room 126
Wednesday, 05/10/2023
How our sensory/cognitive biases influence our study of visual modalities: Three tales of failure from the open sea - Livestream - 05/10/2023 11:00 AM
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
It has long been appreciated (and celebrated) that certain species have sensory capabilities that humans do not share, for example polarization, ultraviolet, and infrared vision. What is less appreciated, however, is that our position as terrestrial human scientists can significantly affect our study of animal senses and signals, even within modalities that we do share. For example, our acute vision can lead us to over-interpret the relevance of fine patterns in animals with coarser vision, and our Cartesian heritage as scientists can lead us to divide sensory modalities into orthogonal parameters (e.g. hue and brightness for color vision), even though this division may not exist within the animal itself. This talk examines three cases from marine visual ecology where a reconsideration of our biases as sharp-eyed Cartesian land mammals can help address questions in visual ecology. The first case examines the enormous variation in visual acuity among animals with image-forming eyes and focuses on how acknowledging the typically poorer resolving power of animals can help us interpret the function of color patterns in cleaner shrimp and their client fish. The second case examines eye size and visual range in deep-sea cephalopods and shows that increasing pupil diameter is often far less advantageous in water than in air. The final case examines the how the typical division of polarized light stimuli into angle and degree of polarization is problematic, and how a Stokes vector interpretation is both closer to the physiological truth and resolves several issues, particularly when considering the propagation of polarized light through water.
Speaker: Sonke Johnsen, Duke University
Register at weblink to receive Zoom information
Women in Astrophysics - 05/10/2023 03:30 PM
Hewlett Teaching Center Stanford
There are proportionally more women in astrophysics than in many other branches of physics, but they are still in a minority. For many years the IAU (International Astrophysical Union) has recorded separately its male and female membership. Using this data base I will review how the fraction of astrophysicists that are female has varied with time and by country.
Speaker: Jocelyn Bell Burnell, University of Oxford
An Eclipse Double-Header: Two U.S. Eclipses of the Sun in 2023-2024 - 05/10/2023 07:00 PM
Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series Los Altos Hills
Two eclipses of the Sun are coming to North America during the 2023-24 school year - an annular (“ring of fire”) eclipse Oct. 14, 2023 and a total eclipse Apr. 8, 2024. People in two narrow paths will have the full eclipse experience each time. Everyone else (an estimated 500 million people, including all of us in the Bay Area) will see a nice partial eclipse, where the Moon covers a good part of the Sun. The talk will describe how eclipses come to be (and why they are total only on Earth), what scientists learn during eclipses, exactly when and where the eclipses of 2023 and 2024 will be best visible, and how to observe the eclipses and the Sun safely.
NOTE: Everyone attending this lecture will receive a free pair of certified eclipse-viewing glasses courtesy of the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation.
Speaker: Andrew Fraknoi retired a few years ago as the chair of the astronomy department at Foothill College and still teaches short, noncredit courses on astronomy at the University of San Francisco and SF State.
Thursday, 05/11/2023
Investigating Pop Psychology: Pseudoscience, Fringe Science, and Controversies - Livestream - 05/11/2023 04:00 PM
Skeptical Inquirer
Science-based advances in the field of psychology continue to grow at an impressive rate; however, even more claims in psychology have little-to-no research support. What does it mean for a mental health treatment to be considered “evidence-based” and “science-based” - and how can you tell the difference?
Psychologist Stephen Hupp will offer recommendations for how to resist false claims and avoid the pseudoscience of pop psychology, and he’ll speak to a wide range of topics such as phrenology, extrasensory perception, dream interpretation, learning styles, brain training, energy psychology, and the role of alternative medicine in the field of mental health. Hupp’s presentation includes new contributions from several fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and several other prominent skeptical scholars.
Register at weblink to receive connection information
Nightlife - 05/11/2023 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 40,000 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 Amazon’s 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.
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 Café and head to the West Garden outdoor bar to drink and dine under the stars. For adults 21+.
After Dark: Thought and Action - 05/11/2023 06:00 PM
ExplOratorium San Francisco
How can art help us understand the world around us? How can it help us adapt to change? Tonight, use art as a lens to explore how we understand ourselves and our connected futures on this planet. Discover the experimental documentary Stitching the Future with Clues, which centers neurodivergence as a roadmap for how the mind makes meaning. And hear from the artists and thinkers behind Tools for a Warming Planet - a project fueled by collaborators across the globe, who, through science, art, activism, and design, are building a creative toolbox for adapting to climate change.
Fiction and Medicine - 05/11/2023 07:30 PM
Sydney Goldstein Theater San Francisco
Abraham Verghese is Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a best-selling author and a physician whose focus on healing and empathy stands out in an era when technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. His books include the celebrated novel Cutting for Stone and two works of nonfiction, My Own Country and The Tennis Partner. Verghese writes about the body and medicine in a way that is all his own, and in his newest novel, The Covenant of Water, he tells much of the story of twentieth-century India through a single family.
In conversation with Michael Krasny
Extraterrestrial Life? - Livestream - 05/11/2023 07:30 PM
Bay Area Skeptics
This talk will include a discussion of UFOs/UAPs and associated conspiracy theories, the strange object ‘Oumuamua, and more realistic ways of searching for extraterrestrial life. I’ll also share some of my thoughts on the likelihood of there being any other intelligent beings in our Milky Way Galaxy.
Speaker: Dr. Alex Filippenko, UC Berkeley
Click here to watch the lecture.
Tick, tick, tick pulsating star, how we wonder what you are - Livestream - 05/11/2023 07:30 PM
Stanford University
In this talk I will describe how pulsars (pulsating radio sources) were accidentally discovered during a research project to find quasars.
Prof. Bell Burnell was responsible for the discovery of pulsars while a radio astronomy graduate student in Cambridge and has subsequently worked in gamma ray, X-ray, infrared and millimeter wavelength astronomy. Her discovery of pulsars would eventually earn the Nobel Prize in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.
See weblink for instructions on how to receive the Zoom password to attend.
Ask a Science Envoy: Poison Frogs & Quantum Chemistry - Livestream - 05/11/2023 08:00 PM
Wonderfest
Stanford biologist Billie Goolsby on Family Feud: Familial Decision-Making in Poison Frogs - Cooperation between parents tends to ensure family success, especially among poison frogs. Through direct observation, sound recordings, and hormone analysis, researchers test how coordination of parenting happens in nature - and how it predicts offspring survival.
UC Berkeley physicist Ashwin Singh on Exploring Quantum Chemistry with Earth's Mightiest Laser - Quantum mechanics helps describe cold chemical reactions, like those that occur in outer space. By building the world's strongest laser to hold molecules in place, we can watch quantum chemistry happen in real time.
Friday, 05/12/2023
Coastal Walk at Pillar Point Bluff - 05/12/2023 10:00 AM
Pillar Point Bluff Moss Beach
Join Peninsula Open Space Trust for an afternoon walk at Pillar Point Bluff just north of Half Moon Bay! You will be guided by a POST representative who will share details about the area’s interesting natural history, from the coastal scrub habitat to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve that hosts tide pools and breeding grounds for harbor seals.
The walk is moderate at about 2.5 miles round trip with around 350 feet of gradual elevation gain.
In 2004, POST stepped in to fund protection of the bluff, restore it to ecological health, and construct a 1.6-mile section of the California Coastal Trail that now runs across it. Today, all 161 acres of the bluff are fully protected in perpetuity - a process that took four transactions, 11 years of work, and an array of visionaries, landowners and donors, both public and private.
Please note that all minors must be accompanied by a parent or guardian for the entire duration of the hike. While dogs are allowed on this trail, we kindly ask that your pups stay home for this community hike.
Register at weblink
Second boiling of the Long Valley Caldera resolved by fiber-seismic tomography - 05/12/2023 12:00 PM
Earth and Marine Sciences Building Santa Cruz
Geophysical characterization of calderas is fundamental in assessing their potential for future catastrophic volcanic eruptions. The mechanism behind the unrest of Long Valley Caldera in California remains highly debated, with recent periods of uplift and seismicity driven either by the release of aqueous fluids above the magma chamber or by the intrusion of magma into the upper crust. We employ distributed acoustic sensing data recorded along a 100-km fiber-optic cable traversing the caldera to image its subsurface structure. Our images highlight a definite separation between the shallow hydrothermal system and the large Pleistocene magma chamber intruded at ~12 km depth. The combination of the geological evidence with our results shows how fluids exsolved through second boiling provide the source of the observed uplift and seismicity.
Speaker: Ettore Biondi, CalTech
Nocturnal: Climate Conversations - CANCELED - 05/12/2023 06:00 PM
Chabot Space and Science Center Oakland
When we think about nature in the San Francisco Bay Area, we tend to think its most iconic features like the redwoods, beaches, wildlife and especially the fog. As climate change continues to alter Northern California, we examine how this impacts some of our favorite natural treasures and what scientists are learning about the impacts. Join us for a special live science presentation on ocean acidification, take a nature hike in the surrounding redwood forest and learn about how climate change is affecting native ocean animals in a presentation from the Marine Mammal Center.
Climate Fiction Storytellers The Climate Parables: Reporting from the Future - 05/12/2023 08:00 PM
St. Joseph's Art's Society San Francisco
The series starts with the idea that survival in the Anthropocene depends on upgrading not just our technology, but also our collective imagination. From there, acclaimed storytellers will perform work from some of the most creative science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Eliot Peper, speculating on what life could be like after we’ve actually mitigated climate change and adapted to chronic environmental stresses.
Think of it as climate reporting from the future. Tales of how we succeeded in harnessing new technology and science to work with nature, rather than against it. It’s all wrapped up in an evening of performed journalism that blends science and technology, fiction and non-fiction, video, art, and music. What could possibly go right?
Saturday, 05/13/2023
Family Nature Walks - Foothills Nature Preserve - 05/13/2023 11:00 AM
Foothills Nature Preserve Los Altos
Environmental Volunteers’ Family Nature Walks program is designed to help students and their families get to know our local open space areas. Small family groups will be guided by a knowledgeable environmental educator during an exploration of a local open space. These small groups will be introduced to fun nature-based activities, and a chance to learn more about the plants and animals all around us. Join us for some fun, outdoor learning!
Each group will have a maximum limit of 12 participants.
Families/groups are welcome to sign up for as many as they like. The nature walks are intended for children aged 6 to 11, and we ask that each group is accompanied by an adult.
Climate Fiction Storytellers The Climate Parables: Reporting from the Future - 05/13/2023 08:00 PM
St. Joseph's Art's Society San Francisco
The series starts with the idea that survival in the Anthropocene depends on upgrading not just our technology, but also our collective imagination. From there, acclaimed storytellers will perform work from some of the most creative science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Eliot Peper, speculating on what life could be like after we’ve actually mitigated climate change and adapted to chronic environmental stresses.
Think of it as climate reporting from the future. Tales of how we succeeded in harnessing new technology and science to work with nature, rather than against it. It’s all wrapped up in an evening of performed journalism that blends science and technology, fiction and non-fiction, video, art, and music. What could possibly go right?
Monday, 05/15/2023
Natural variation provides insights into the evolution of social behavior - 05/15/2023 04:00 PM
James H. Clark Center (Bldg 340) Stanford
Sarah integrates methods from many different areas of biology to study social behavior and its evolution. She was one of the first graduates of the Integrative Biology program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where discovered her love of behavior, genetics, and neurobiology. She went on to study the genetic and physiological underpinnings of queen-worker interactions in honey bees as a graduate student with Christina Grozinger and Trudy Mackay. Later, she wanted to study a group of species that encompassed a full range of social forms and began her work on the socially variable sweat bees as a postdoctoral fellow with Naomi Pierce and Hopi Hoekstra at Harvard. She is now an Assistant Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton.
Stanford Energy Seminar: Meagan Mauter - 05/15/2023 04:30 PM
Stanford University Energy Seminar Stanford
Meagan Mauter is Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and a Center Fellow, by courtesy, in the Woods Institute for the Environment.
Attend in person or online.
Tuesday, 05/16/2023
Stanford Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium - 05/16/2023 03:30 PM
Hewlett Teaching Center Stanford
A cycle of memory creation, erasure, and phase transitions in granular assemblages sheared by natural faults - 05/16/2023 03:30 PM
Natural Science Annex Santa Cruz
Popping the Science Bubble: Two talks - Livestream - 05/16/2023 05:30 PM
Berkeley Public Library
Cortinarius 101 - Livestream - 05/16/2023 07:00 PM
Mycological Society of San Francisco
Wednesday, 05/17/2023
Coastal Walk at Cowell-Purisima Trail - 05/17/2023 10:00 AM
Cowell Purisima Coastal Trailhead Half Moon Bay
Gas Transfer Membranes: Recreating Deep Sea Water at Sea Level - Livestream - 05/17/2023 11:00 AM
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
What Would You Do with an Extra 10 Years of Healthy Life? - 05/17/2023 06:00 PM
Commonwealth Club San Francisco
Human-Centered Design for VR Training - Livestream - 05/17/2023 07:00 PM
SF Bay Association of Computing Machinery
Thursday, 05/18/2023
Innovation and Progress in Concentrating Solar Power - Livestream - 05/18/2023 12:00 PM
Acterra
NightLife Says Who? Culture - 05/18/2023 06:00 PM
California Academy of Sciences San Francisco
After Dark: Plants and Place - 05/18/2023 06:00 PM
ExplOratorium San Francisco
Pushing Back Plants: The Invasive Spartina Project - Livestream - 05/18/2023 07:00 PM
Golden Gate Audubon Society
Nerd Night SF #132 Urine, Minerals, & a Botanical + Legal History of Abortion! - 05/18/2023 08:00 PM
Rickshaw Stop San Francisco
Friday, 05/19/2023
Hypersomnolence in Psychiatric Disorders - Livestream - 05/19/2023 12:00 PM
ChEM-H/Neuroscience Building, Gunn Rotunda (E241) Stanford
Planet Mixology: Stirring the Mantle of Water Worlds - 05/19/2023 12:00 PM
Earth and Marine Sciences Building Santa Cruz
Saturday, 05/20/2023
NextGen Hackathon - 05/20/2023 08:00 AM
Nextgen Hackathon Palo Alto
5th Annual Tinkerfest - 05/20/2023 10:00 AM
Chabot Space and Science Center Oakland
East Bay Green Home Tour - Livestream - 05/20/2023 10:00 AM
Ecology Center
Family Nature Walks - Baylands Nature Preserve - 05/20/2023 10:30 AM
Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve Palo Alto
Biomedical scientists making their mark in clinical research: Experience on a journey without a map - Livestream - 05/20/2023 10:30 AM
California Section American Chemical Society
Family Nature Walks - Foothills Nature Preserve - 05/20/2023 11:00 AM
Foothills Nature Preserve Los Altos
Living with Wildlife on Oona-pa’is (Sonoma Mountain) - 05/20/2023 11:00 AM
Jack London State Historic Park Glen Ellen
Sunday, 05/21/2023
Presidio: Changes Through Time - 05/21/2023 11:00 AM
The Presidio San Francisco
Finding Joy & Justice in the Outdoors: Special Event with NatGeo Explorer James Edward Mills - 05/21/2023 03:00 PM
Hillsdale High School San Mateo
Monday, 05/22/2023
Stanford Energy Seminar: Thomas Rutherford - 05/22/2023 04:30 PM
Stanford University Energy Seminar Stanford
Ethernet @ 50 - 05/22/2023 06:30 PM
Computer History Museum Mountain View