It has been a busy few weeks, so let’s get right into it.
As you may have heard, there’s a lot going on up in the night sky. The Aurora Borealis has been seen quite far south again, including some sightings in the Bay Area. Alex Filippenko, famed UC Berkeley astronomer, sent this update:
The Sun has been very active the past few weeks, with many big sunspots visible (e.g., https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/) plus several energetic solar flares and/or coronal mass ejections. The energetic charged particles from the most recent eruptions have started reaching Earth and are creating auroras (northern and southern lights), after being trapped by Earth's magnetic field, drifting toward the poles, and colliding with atoms in our atmosphere. Although this geomagnetic storm isn't as strong as the one that produced auroras on 2024 May 9/10 even at relatively low latitudes such as the San Francisco Bay Area, there's a chance that a larger fraction of the energetic particles are aimed toward Earth and will create low-latitude auroras.
I encourage you to look at the sky tonight and the next few nights, especially if you live in the northern USA. Auroral intensity is notoriously difficult to predict, and you could get lucky! Indeed, a friend of mine who happens to be in Maine already saw a beautiful aurora (reproduced above). Don't rely on your eyes alone: take a photo (preferably a few seconds long) and the aurora might be visible. Smart-phone cameras work great. It's best to look north around 12-1 am, or north/northeast if earlier in the night; try to view from a dark or relatively dark location away from city lights.
You can monitor predictions here; activate the animation by clicking on the bottom arrow (but note that only the last few seconds of the animation show a bit of the future prediction): https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast .
Then there’s Comet C2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. Alex again provides some thoughts:
Comet C/2023 A3 has now conveniently moved from the morning sky to the early-evening sky. To find it, look to the west-southwest shortly after sunset (about 45 minutes) in darkening twilight. In clear skies with a low west-southwest horizon (i.e., not blocked by trees, hills, buildings, or other obstructions -- especially the next few nights when the comet is still very low and in bright twilight), the comet's nucleus might be visible to the unaided eye as a faint and fuzzy "star." You are much more likely to see it through binoculars; this will reveal the coma and also the short tail. Photographs obtained with a digital camera mounted on a tripod will reveal more of the coma and tail (typical exposure time 4-20 seconds) -- but even 3-second exposures with hand-held smartphones should reveal it. You can already find many photos of the comet online (e.g., https://www.space.com/comet-tsuchinshan-atlas-bright-night-sky -- that website also provides additional useful information).
The comet survived its closest approach to the Sun on September 27, and it was closest to Earth on Oct. 12. The next two weeks, will be the best opportunity to see it -- initially very low in the sky to the right of bright Venus (Oct. 12), then up and to the right of Venus (Oct. 16), and then directly above Venus (Oct. 21). (Venus is generally the brightest object in the sky other than the Sun and Moon.)
See the above diagram (courtesy of Sky & Telescope magazine) to determine where to look. Although the nucleus of the comet should start fading after Oct. 12, the tail will grow longer because our perspective changes, and the comet will also become higher above the western horizon (thus making it visible for a progressively longer time each evening and in darker skies, both of which are important). So, don't look at it just one evening -- keep monitoring the comet!
If you miss seeing this comet the next two weeks, you'll need to wait about 80,000 years before it returns (but the orbital period is highly uncertain right now). This is why some media articles have called viewing it a "once-in-a-lifetime experience" -- a phrase I generally dislike, in this case because there will probably be other reasonably bright comets visible in your future. Some articles have also called it the "comet of the century" -- but there will likely be at least one brighter comet by the year 2100, so this too is an exaggeration. Still, Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS could be a really beautiful one -- I'm certainly looking forward to watching it develop!
Edited to correct the name of the comet (10/13/24).
At some point in our education we all learned that the Sun is actually a star and that it will eventually “die” and Earth will be obliterated. I’m sure most of us went home that day very concerned for our future. Astronomers have found an Earth-like planet orbiting a white dwarf star, the same type that our Sun will become once it runs out of hydrogen. So this is a look into the future of our planet. But not to worry, that apocalypse is still about 5 billion years away.
Discoveries like this make our single star with our 8 (or 9) planets and moons seem downright plain and unremarkable. Except ours has life orbiting it, and so far we haven’t found that anywhere else in the Universe.
Back in January, the SHERLOC instrument aboard Perseverance ran into a problem, making it inoperative. After some hard work and testing, the team behind SHERLOC brought it back online in June 24.
NASA also released a colorized close-up of Europa’s surface, showing amazing patterns on the frozen surface. This is a reprocessed image from 1998 from the Galileo Orbiter. The Europa Clipper launch was supposed to go up this week, but hurricane Milton caused the launch to be delayed. As I wrote this, it is scheduled for tomorrow, October 14.
I went to college in Northeast Ohio. I learned about the Cuyahoga River, which, at the time, was horribly polluted. In 1969, it caught on fire, and I vividly remember the news stories about this. The Cuyahoga empties into Lake Erie in Cleveland. If you follow the course of the river backwards, you find its headwaters are not all that far away from its end, but flowing in the opposite direction, away from Lake Erie. It makes a U-turn in Akron, heading towards Lake Erie, and cutting a pretty impressive gorge through the area to get there. This is a good news story, because the Cuyahoga River is now quite clean, and presents a good example of how even the most polluted waterways can be recovered and repaired.
Hurricane Milton swept across central Florida this week. It went from being a tropical depression to a Category 5 hurricane in a day, an unprecedented strengthening for that short a period of time. It weakened somewhat before coming ashore, and it missed a direct hit on Tampa Bay, although not buy much. How did it grow so strong, so fast? The Gulf of Mexico is much warmer than average. Also, it is late in the hurricane season for storms to form in the Gulf. By this time of year, they usually come off the western coast of Africa, or form in the warm Atlantic around the equator and head west. Early-season hurricanes often form in the Gulf.
Prior to Milton, Hurricane Helene formed in the Gulf, headed into the big curve area of Florida, and continued north, leaving huge amounts of rain in places not used to it. Northwestern North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee were especially hard hit. Friends of mine in NC said their area received between 18 and 30 inches of rain. Fortunately they live up in the mountains. All that water has to go somewhere though, and in mountains that means down to valleys and that’s where the flooding happened. Over 100 bridges in the area are gone. Many homes have creeks to cross from their property to the street, and those homeowners are stranded because the bridges washed away. Roads in the area are at least partially washed out.
Attempts to politicize the governments support of recovery efforts angered me. All of the states in the path of Helene declared emergencies and the Federal government approved those declarations even before the storm arrived. That’s all the states…except Tennessee. Instead, the legislature called for 31 days of prayer and fasting. The governor proclaimed September 27 “a voluntary Day of Prayer & Fasting”. Read more of about this atrocious conduct, and other attempts to rewrite current history, in Heather Cox Richardson’s letter for
I am providing links to her newsletters for October 6, October 7, and October 9 as they all relate to outrageous lies about virtually everything coming from the MAGA Republicans. I urge you all to read her well-researched reports on the day’s news and the historical perspective behind it, especially for those dates. I could have written an entire newsletter just on this, but she does a much better job of reporting about this stuff than I could.
By now you have probably received your ballots for the November General Election. Please vote. Vote for science, and people that support it. Vote for reason and logic, not for innuendo, not for the past, not because your party affiliation tells you to. Think for yourself. But above all, vote.
Getting to net zero carbon emissions will require Congress to more aggressively regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If the idea has wide support (and it does), why can't Congress muster the will to do it? David Spence (University of Texas at Austin) tackles this question in his new book Climate of Contempt: Rescuing the U.S. Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship (Columbia University Press, 2024). Spence proposes that the problem is not that members of Congress are unresponsive to voters-but that most are responsive to the most partisan voters who perceive the most negative effects of these regulations. Meanwhile, the online information environment- rife with misinformation and spin- pushes all of Americans to become more negatively partisan over time, breeding misunderstanding of the value choices the energy transition entails, and distorting each party's sense of its political opponents. The book's final chapter offers suggestions for overcoming these pathologies.
Speaker: David Spence, University of Texas
Attend in person in the Hartley Conference Room, or watch online (see weblink)
Human activities that emit greenhouse gases are undergoing rapid shifts in response to technological, economic, and regulatory pressures. In this dynamic environment, our knowledge of current emissions is often surprisingly incomplete, and this hinders society's ability to plan effective mitigation actions. In this talk I will discuss our research focused on advancing our understanding of methane emissions through airborne and satellite observations, with a focus on flares, offshore energy production, and cities. I will highlight how observations provide insights into what activities have the greatest climate impact as well as whether mitigation efforts are effective in these different contexts.
Strong interactions between particles can lead to emergent collective excitations. In the solid state, these phenomena have been extensively established in electronic systems, but are also expected to occur for gases of neutral particles like spin waves (magnons) in a magnet. In a regime where magnons are strongly interacting, they can form a propagating density oscillation - in analogy to hydrodynamic sound waves in water - with characteristic low-frequency signatures. While such a mode has been predicted in theory, particularly for spin isotropic magnets like Van der Waals CrCl3, its signatures have yet to be observed experimentally. In this talk, I will discuss the development of techniques for probing collective magnon dynamics in nanoscale CrCl3 samples down to the atomically-thin limit, utilizing the quantum coherence of nearby Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. This technique has allowed us to find evidence for viscous damping of a magnon sound mode in the ferromagnetic phase of atomically-thin CrCl3. By integrating NV detection with microwave drive to the material, we establish direct spectroscopic evidence for these propagating magnon sound waves. I will discuss the extent to which the phenomena observed here could generalize to other magnetic materials.
Quasicrystals are exotic materials with symmetries once thought to be impossible for matter. This talk will describe the decades-long adventures searching for them in nature and other exotic environments that continues to this day, resulting in one of the stranger scientific stories you will ever hear.
Speaker: Paul Steinhardt, Princeton University
Attend in person or online (see weblink for Zoom information)
Cellular processes are orchestrated by many biomolecules in a spatially and temporally coordinated manner within a tiny volume. To uncover the underlying organizational principles and their functional relevance, we take microscopy visualization as the primary approach to systematically map their spatial localization, temporal dynamics, and activity profiles. By combining small tags engineered from split fluorescence proteins and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing, we have enabled the creation of the OpenCell library: > 1300 human cell lines with endogenously tagged proteins for both microscopy visualization and biochemical analysis. We have further developed the deep-learning framework to connect cellular images of proteins to their amino acid sequences.
Dr. Lauren Corlies, Public Education Manager at Lick observatory will present a talk about navigating a career path in Astronomy Outreach, as well as identifying the skills and experiences that have helped along the way.
In 1976 Kroger and Reich established the existence of a low-lying nuclear excited state in 229Th through the spectroscopy of rays emitted following the decay of 233U. The prospects of a laser-accessible nuclear transition touched off a flurry of proposals to utilize this apparently unique nuclear transition as a sensitive probe of both nuclear structure and chemical environment, to constrain physics beyond the Standard Model, and to construct a clock with unprecedented performance. Unfortunately, Kroger and Reich could only tell us that the transition energy was less than about 100 eV and therefore scientists have spent the intervening 48 years searching for the thorium nuclear transition.
I'll describe our efforts over the last 16 years to construct the first thorium-doped crystals and their use to perform nuclear laser spectroscopy, resulting in a measurement of the nuclear transition energy as 8.355733(2)stat(10)sys eV in 229Th:LiSrAlF6. I will also discuss recent work observing the nuclear transition in thin films of 229ThF4; ongoing work to understand and harness the effect of the crystalline host on the isomeric transition; and the next steps for using this transition to probe new physics and build better clocks. This work was funded by the NSF and ARO.
The ability to prepare highly functionalized molecules in general and predictable ways is central to modern drug design and discovering new treatments for human disease. The aim of our program is to create new methods to solve the longstanding synthetic challenge of asymmetrically constructing biologically active small molecules. Classical synthetic approaches based on CH activations are ubiquitous but limited by the inherent directing effects of embedded heteroatoms. This presentation will discuss our recently discovered scheme to access highly basic ion pairs with organolithiums which provides a new pathway to override intrinsic heteroatom directing effects. In addition, we will describe our progress in developing new methods for carbon-oxygen bond formation reactions that utilizes primary ozonide intermediates.
Juno mission was designed to study Jupiter. But, over time, the torque from the Sun and Jupiter's oblateness rotated Juno's orbit, allowing the investigation of Jupiter's satellite system, which was the primary objective of Juno's extended mission. The Juno spacecraft performed close and distant flybys of Ganymede, Europa, and Io between 2021 and 2024. The data collected during these flybys provided unprecedented views of these Jovian moons. In this talk, I will focus on Juno's multi-instrument view into the internal structure of Jovian moons using microwave radiometry, gravitational sounding and high-resolution imagery from Juno. I will describe how these datasets allow drawing comparisons between surface and subsurface properties of Ganymede, Europa and Io. Finally, I will outline how the new Juno data can help analyze and interpret the data from future Europa Clipper and JUICE missions.
Using more than 20 state-of-the-art 3D core-collapse simulations tounprecedented late times (fully in 3D), I provide correlations betweencore-collapse supernova observables and progenitor core structures thatemerge. This is the largest such collection of 3D supernova models evergenerated and allows one to witness and derive testable patterns thatmight otherwise be obscured when studying one or a few models inisolation. From this panoramic perspective, we have discoveredcorrelations between explosionenergy, neutron star gravitational birthmasses, the yields of the chemical elements, and pulsar kicks andtheoretically important correlations with the compactness parameter ofprogenitor structure. We find a correlation between explosion energy andprogenitor mantle binding energy, suggesting that such explosions areself-regulating. We also find a testable correlation between explosionenergy and measures of explosion asymmetry, such as the ejecta massdipole. However, while I contend the core-collapse supernova problem isnow qualitatively solved, there is much yet to do in supernova theorybefore it can robustly and quantitatively explain the variety of supernovaobservations. I will close with suggested paths forward to achieve thisultimate goal.
Electrolytes, polyelectrolytes, and hydrogels are essential components in energy and biotechnology applications, offering unique potential for designing materials that replicate biological functions. Our research explores the physical properties of materials containing electrical charges, explains organization and transport mechanisms, and identifies strategies to control emerging functionalities.
Speaker: Monica Olvera de la Cruz, Northwestern University
Join us as industry-leading experts from Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford's Doerr School, and SRI explore ocean health and the impact on our future. We are pleased to host Julie Packard - marine biologist and Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium - who will talk about her groundbreaking work in ocean conservation, sustainable seafood practices, and more.
Attend in person or online. Register for both at weblink
Keynote Speaker: Julie Packard, Monterey Bay Aquarium
Additional Speakers: Fiorenza Micheli, Stanford University; Rosa Tuirán, KQED, Moderator
Gary Griggs will be diving into his new book, California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State. Meet Gary and learn about the history of the state's vulnerability to natural hazards and how we can better prepare going forward.
Dr. Dennis E. Desjardin is Professor Emeritus of Biology/Mycology at San Francisco State University and Director Emeritus of the H.D. Thiers Herbarium. He has spent the past 40 years teaching mycology at universities and conducting field studies throughout the world, primarily in understudied tropical forests documenting mushroom diversity. He was recently bestowed the Distinguished Mycologist Award by the Mycological Society of America in honor of his long career of outstanding research, teaching, and service to the mycological community. He has published over 160 refereed scientific papers, described over 300 new species, and co-authored two popular field guides, Mushrooms of Hawaii (Ten Speed Press) and California Mushrooms (Timber Press). Dr. Desjardin will discuss exciting new species that he has discovered during his travels that have changed our understanding of mushroom evolution and ecology, and embraced the 'fun' in fungi. But his mycological journey is not over. Currently, as the Chief Mycologist at Sempera Organics, Inc., he will touch on their goal to feed and heal the world with mushrooms.
Attend in person or online (see weblink for Zoom information)
On tap this month, we have Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Steward Observatory astronomers Drs. Wesley Tucker and Michael Jones taking us on a journey from our own planetary neighbor, Venus, out into the cosmos to find galaxies.
The Bay Area Planetary Science (BAPS) Conference was created to bolster collaborations among planetary enthusiasts around the Bay Area, CA. We welcome participants at all academic levels, students and professionals alike. BAPS does not focus on any specific sub-field within the planetary sciences, and welcomes contributions from all areas relevant to the advancement of knowledge in the planetary sciences.
The deep sea is one of Earth's most diverse and least understood ecosystems, where biodiversity is shaped by both natural and anthropogenic processes. This seminar explores the intricate dynamics of deep-sea life through three key phenomena: woodfalls, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DWH), and sediment patchiness. Woodfalls create ephemeral but rich habitats, fostering specialized communities that thrive on decaying organic matter. Sediment patchiness - driven by factors such as current flow, topography, and organic input - creates a mosaic of microhabitats, promoting biodiversity and supporting complex food webs. In contrast, the catastrophic DWH event represents a major human disturbance, with far-reaching impacts on deep-sea biodiversity. Examining the ecological aftermath of this disaster provides insights into the resilience and vulnerability of deep-sea species. By integrating these topics, I will discuss how natural processes and human interventions shape the deep-sea environment and influence biodiversity patterns. The seminar highlights the importance of protecting this fragile ecosystem and understanding the drivers of its resilience.The deep sea is one of Earth's most diverse and least understood ecosystems, where biodiversity is shaped by both natural and anthropogenic processes. This seminar explores the intricate dynamics of deep-sea life through three key phenomena: woodfalls, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DWH), and sediment patchiness. Woodfalls create ephemeral but rich habitats, fostering specialized communities that thrive on decaying organic matter. Sediment patchiness - driven by factors such as current flow, topography, and organic input - creates a mosaic of microhabitats, promoting biodiversity and supporting complex food webs. In contrast, the catastrophic DWH event represents a major human disturbance, with far-reaching impacts on deep-sea biodiversity. Examining the ecological aftermath of this disaster provides insights into the resilience and vulnerability of deep-sea species. By integrating these topics, I will discuss how natural processes and human interventions shape the deep-sea environment and influence biodiversity patterns. The seminar highlights the importance of protecting this fragile ecosystem and understanding the drivers of its resilience.
Speaker: Craig McClain, University of Louisiana, Lafayette
The rapid emergence of generative AI technologies has been shaped by a wave of early excitement and hope for a broad range of use cases. Yet, the impacts of the latest models on historically marginalized communities is still relatively understudied, including the potential for sociotechnical harm.
In this session, the speakers present a line of research uncovering intersectional biases in generative language models when they are used for open-ended writing, drawing connections between their synthetic text outputs and known linguistic patterns that have psychosocial impacts for diverse learners in educational settings.
Speaker: Faye Marie Vassel
Attend in person or online (see weblink for streaming link)
As global food demand grows, new approaches are needed to produce food in resource-limited environments beyond traditional agricultural systems. I will discuss two areas of research from our group: (1) our development of a hybrid inorganic??"biological artificial photosynthesis system that uses electrochemically derived acetate to cultivate food-producing organisms independent of biological photosynthesis. To enable the heterotrophic growth of plants using acetate as a carbon source, we are also working to understand and engineer plant acetate metabolism; and (2) our efforts to engineer tomato plants for vertical farming and spaceflight by altering genes that control plant architecture, including those regulating plant height and branching, to optimize growth in confined environments. These efforts are providing new insights into plant metabolism and development while bringing us closer to solutions for future food systems.
Steady advancement in microelectronics technology over the past six decades have had transformative impact on life in modern society, as they have enabled exponential growth in information collection and processing, ushering in the age of artificial intelligence. Challenges for sustaining the AI revolution will require disruptive innovation and collaboration to overcome. This talk will give some examples of such opportunities to drive continued progress in our increasingly technology-dependent world.
The electricity sector is the linchpin in any path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Over a decade of research, Prof. Jenkins has explored what it will take to build an affordable, reliable, carbon-free grid. Wind power, solar photovoltaics and lithium-ion batteries are now affordable, mature, rapidly scaling industries, providing the key foundations for a decarbonized grid. But one critical piece remains missing: firm low-carbon resources, technologies that can ensure a decarbonized electricity supply remains reliable whenever needed, for as long as needed. In a highly-cited 2018 paper, Jenkins and colleagues first defined the role of firm-low carbon (or 'clean firm') resources in deep decarbonization of the power sector, explaining why these technologies are critical complements to weather-dependent variable renewables and batteries. In subsequent work, Jenkins has led studies to understand a wide range of potential firm resources, including long-duration energy storage, flexible carbon capture systems for gas-fired power plants, advanced fission reactors, fusion power plants, and enhanced geothermal systems. Once 'science fiction' concepts appearing only in academic studies and the minds of scientists and entrepreneurs, each of these technologies has now attracted billions of dollars of investment, with first-of-a-kind commercial projects under construction or planned this decade. Jenkins' work has quantified key cost and performance targets for these technologies, helped define and popularize the entire asset class, and guided policy and funding from both public sector agencies and private investors.
The adoption of renewable energy technologies hinges on the availability of many critical minerals. To meet the large demand for critical minerals, it is vital to scale up mineral supply chains that are resilient and sustainable. In this talk, Karan will introduce the STEER program at Stanford which is guiding policy and innovation for the energy transition by conducting systems analysis that incorporates materials availability, technology learning, and energy markets. The talk will focus on models that evaluate how supply and demand for critical minerals will evolve, and quantify the life-cycle impacts from the production. He will cover case studies on battery minerals, showing how electric vehicle costs and deployment are impacted by: i) restricting environmentally-damaging nickel production pathways, and ii) trade disruptions due to geopolitical tensions. Discussion will focus on necessary policy mechanisms to support sustainable domestic production for critical minerals.
Space exploration is increasingly privatized, from Earth's orbital space to the Moon and beyond. This has led to increasing congestion and environmental degradation of low-Earth orbits. Along with dramatic rises in ground-based light pollution, this has caused brightening night skies worldwide. The loss of dark skies and increasing space debris are already affecting astronomical observations as well as broader constituencies across humanity and the health of many ecosystems. I also share perspectives from numerous Indigenous communities and the growing impacts of these issues on their scientific-cultural practices and sky traditions. Space is an ancestral global commons, and the skies represent our shared heritage needing advocacy and protection more than ever.
Speaker: Aparna Venkatesan, University of San Francisco
In this talk, Jesse Conklin will discuss how his own career in ornithology, including 18 years of research on Alaska-breeding Bar-tailed Godwits, has been irreparably entwined with the quest to understand just how far a bird can fly. Jesse will discuss how our understanding of the godwits' incredible trans-Pacific migration has evolved over time with advancements in tracking technology, and how much we still don't know.
Speaker: Jesse Conklin, ornithologist
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Lunch Break Science is a dynamic live web series featuring fascinating short talks, engaging interviews, and lively Q&A with Leakey Foundation scientists. Each episode digs deeper into the latest human origins discoveries, with topics like Neanderthals, chimpanzee behavior, and more! Even better, you can interact with researchers during the show and have your questions answered on air.
The complexity of life is a critical driver of animal biodiversity. Complex phenotypes, which are those that integrate both co-opted and novel features at multiple levels of biological organization (e.g., genes, tissues, behaviors), are commonplace in biology. Many even require other organisms to function, but we know little about how many of these phenotypes evolve. These types of complex phenotypes include the theft of extrinsically generated features of other organisms, including the ability to sequester useful cells, organelles, or chemicals from dietary sources (i.e., their prey). Research in my lab centers on investigating the theft of nematocysts, which are stinging organelles exclusively made by members of the phylum Cnidaria. One of the major goals in my lab is to identify the critical genes, tissues, behaviors, etc. that are necessary for the sequestration of nematocysts, and determine the evolutionary steps that led to the origin of this ability in metazoans. In nudibranch gastropods, we have identified at least two origins of the ability to sequester nematocysts, uncovered evidence for coevolutionary changes between the preference for specific prey types and key morphological changes and started to identify genes that may be useful for nematocyst sequestration. Ultimately, these investigations into the sequestration of extrinsically produced structures will provide important insights into how the evolution of complex phenotypes is tied to the fantastic amounts of biodiversity we see today.
Speaker: Jessica Goodheart, American Museum of Natural History
This presentation shows the steps to design a bandpass filter starting with a specification of the passband, then to derive a prototype lowpass filter using network synthesis, and finally to convert to a bandpass filter.
Speaker: Robert Lee Bruce, Retired
Attend in person or online (see weblink for Zoom information)
California's Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. Recently, however, it has also become ground zero in the new "lithium gold rush"??"the race to power the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage market. The immense quantities of lithium lurking beneath the surface have led to predictions that the region could provide a third of global demand. But who will benefit from the development of this precious resource?
Join us as Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, authors of the new book Charging Forward, show that the questions raised by Lithium Valley lie at the heart of the "green transition." They weave together movement politics, federal policy, and autoworker struggles, stressing that getting the lithium out from under the earth is just a first step: the real question is whether the region and the nation will get out from under what they say has been the environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and racial injustice that have been as much a part of the landscape as the Salton Sea itself.
What happens in Lithium Valley, the authors argue, will not stay there. This tiny patch of California is a microcosm of the broad climate challenges we face; Benner and Pastor argue that understanding Lithium Valley today is the key to grasping the future of our economy and our planet.
Speakers: Chris Benner, UC Santa Cruz; Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California; Andrew Dudley, Earth Live, Moderator
Discover the science behind decision-making at After Dark. Explore our galleries for eye-opening exhibits that reveal the psychology and sociology behind elections, voting, and collective decision-making. How do we reach consensus, and how do we influence each other in the process? Make the best decision of your week by joining us at the Exploratorium this Thursday night.
Discover the future of creativity and technology at our event with a panel discussion on "Generative AI & The Future of Innovation." This gathering brings together professionals from various industries to explore how generative AI is revolutionizing everything. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a business leader, or a creative thinker, this event offers a unique opportunity to see how AI is reshaping the landscape of innovation. Join us for a day of exploration and inspiration!
Join POST and Dr. Emily Fairfax - ecohydrologist, beaver dam enthusiast, and Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota - for an engaging evening where we'll gnaw through the big issues and chew on the critical role of beavers in our climate.
This event offers a unique opportunity to interact with the speaker in real-time. Don't miss tuning in live to participate in the interactive quiz and ask your questions directly to Dr. Fairfax.
In this event, Dr. Fairfax will cover:
Beavers and Climate Change: Discover how beavers play a crucial role in addressing climate challenges and why they are integral to ecosystem health.Historical Context and Reintroduction: Learn about the historical significance of beavers in California and why reintroducing them now is essential for restoring natural balance.Ecosystem Engineering and Collaboration: Explore how beavers act as ecosystem engineers, their impact on wetlands and atmospheric rivers, and the importance of collaborating with them to improve our environment.
This talk will be filled with gnawledge and insights, making it an evening you won't want to miss. Register now to join us for a thought-provoking discussion and learn how beavers are making waves in the fight against climate change.
Celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the East Bay Regional Park District with an evening of short presentations about the history of the Park District and its role in protecting birds.
Speakers:
Amelia Marshall is a local history author; Natalie Reeder is a Wildlife Biologist at East Bay Regional Park District; Glenn Phillips is the Executive Director at Golden Gate Bird Alliance
Join fellows from Audubon Canyon Ranch's Fire Forward fellowship program for Sonoma County residents to learn about Good Fire.
Join fellows from Audubon Canyon Ranch's Fire Forward fellowship program for Sonoma County residents to learn about good fire. Land x Good Fire is part of the Resilient Forests and Watersheds Workshops series, funded in part by National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Sonoma County.
Through this series, landowners and managers will feel more empowered to take action on their property by exploring the possibilities and skills needed to reintroduce good fire in a similar environment. Workshops will explore concepts in fire ecology while learning more about what prescribed fire and natural resources work is being conducted nearby.
Each fellow will lead a standalone workshop in different environment types to see how prescribed fire is planned and conducted. These local community leaders across the North Bay are dedicated to learning the intricacies of good fire, increasing the region's capacity to safely implement prescribed burning in support of healthy ecosystems.
Urban air mobility (UAM) enables highly automated, cooperative passenger- or cargo-carrying air transportation services in and around urban areas. In order to increase the volume of UAM operation, the key is to understand and enable the "highly automation." The highly automation does not just apply to vehicle automation but to whole ecosystems, including air traffic services (ATS). Lina Yang will discuss the building blocks necessary to enable high-density UAM operation in this talk.
The reductive chemistry of the rare-earth and actinide metals has undergone major changes in recent years. New +2 oxidation states are available for these elements in molecular complexes and these new complexes expand the range of physical properties observable for compounds of the f orbital metals. This includes their use as quantum bits, i.e., qubits. This seminar will present some perspective on these developments and will illustrate the importance of interaction between synthetic chemists and researchers that are developing new physical properties. In addition, some recent developments the chemistry of the d1 ions, Th(III) and Sc(II), will be presented.
Ancient and unhurried, long-lived and majestic, turtles - some individuals living longer than 200 years - have a lineage that stretches back to the time of the dinosaurs. In literary terms, turtles are "the perfect conduits for meditations on aging, disability, and chosen family," according to Scientific American. Such meditations suffuse the book Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell. Author Sy Montgomery and illustrator Matt Patterson join BookShop West Portal, the Turtle Survival Alliance, and Wonderfest for this special book event.
Speakers: Sy Montgomery, author; Matt Petterson, Illustrator
Join YSI as we walk around Alum Rock Park and teach you about our feathered friends! Learn how to identify birds by their key characteristics, how to use binoculars, and then make a craft that will help you attract birds into your backyard!
A registered adult must accompany their child(ren) for this event.
This fall, Acterra: Action for a Healthy Planet (Acterra) invites the public to explore innovative, electrified homes across the Bay Area. Homeowners throughout San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties will open their doors to showcase the electric appliances and equipment they've installed as replacements for gas-powered products. Building on the success of last year's tour, the 2024 edition promises an even richer experience with new features and expanded participation. Attendees will have the chance to see firsthand a wide variety of electric appliances and equipment including energy-efficient heat pumps for home heating and cooling, heat pump water heaters, induction cooktops, electric fireplaces, electric vehicles (EVs), EV chargers, solar panels, battery storage systems, and more. Attendees will also be able to engage with homeowners to learn about their choices, including financial considerations, rebate programs, contractors, and appliance models. More information about the tour is here.
Come join the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers for free public stargazing of the Moon, planets, globular clusters and more!
The event will take place in Tunnel Tops National Park, parking is located adjacent to Picnic Place (210 Lincoln Blvd for GPS) with the telescopes setup in the East Meadow.
Dress warmly as conditions can be windy or cold in the Presidio. Rain, heavy fog or overcast skies cancel the event. Check the SFAA website for a cancellation notice before leaving for the star party.
SFAA members with telescopes are encouraged to attend and share their views of the stars with the general public.
Editor's Note: This event was originally scheduled for October 12, 2024.
In the evolution of the Universe, there remains a gap in understanding the formation of first stars and galaxies, ~300,000 years after the Big Bang. These early stars brought with them the first light in the Universe, thus leading to 'Cosmic Dawn'. Although this is an event of the past, the spin-flip transition of an electron in the neutral hydrogen (called the 21 cm signal) remains a tracer of the early Universe. This talk is about how we use this tracer in radio astronomy to bridge the gap between formation and the present day Universe.
Speaker: Akshatha Vydula, Arizona State University
Join fellows from Audubon Canyon Ranch's Fire Forward fellowship program for Sonoma County residents to learn about Good Fire.
Join fellows from Audubon Canyon Ranch's Fire Forward fellowship program for Sonoma County residents to learn about good fire. Land x Good Fire is part of the Resilient Forests and Watersheds Workshops series, funded in part by National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Sonoma County.
Through this series, landowners and managers will feel more empowered to take action on their property by exploring the possibilities and skills needed to reintroduce good fire in a similar environment. Workshops will explore concepts in fire ecology while learning more about what prescribed fire and natural resources work is being conducted nearby.
Each fellow will lead a standalone workshop in different environment types to see how prescribed fire is planned and conducted. These local community leaders across the North Bay are dedicated to learning the intricacies of good fire, increasing the region's capacity to safely implement prescribed burning in support of healthy ecosystems.
Global Encryption Day (GED) is an annual event organized by the Global Encryption Coalition (GEC), designed to raise awareness about the importance of encryption in protecting privacy and securing digital communications. It brings together various stakeholders, including civil society organizations, technology companies, and individuals, to advocate for strong encryption policies and practices.
The Internet Society - San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (ISOC SF) has partnered with the Association of Computing Machinery - San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (ACM SF) to put on the local edition of the GED event.
This is a free event (both locations). You must be registered at least two days prior to attend either event. One registration includes both tracks each at a different (but close) location.
We encourage both engineers and non-engineers to attend either track. While basic computer administration experience is useful, it is not required. Come learn about the power of encryption.
This local GED event will include two tracks at two near-by locations:
Track 1 - Education - Details
Participants will spend the day training on encryption related technologies ending with a certificate of completion. There is limited space for this training in-person (unlimited online), first come first serve, limited to 80 participants. Training agenda to be announced September 9th.
Training and certification provided by RX-M (
https://rx-m.com/
). You can observe and learn, we encourage participation, please bring a laptop (be sure to charge your battery) to learn and reach the certification.
Google Community Space 188 The Embarcadero (enter Via Embarcadero), San Francisco, CA 94105 9am - 5pm (potential evening talk 6-9) online link - tbd
Track 2 - Edutainment - Details
A series of in-depth and informative talks will be presented. Talks will range from the basics of quantum encryption to legal concerns of encryption usage. Limited to first 100 in person, unlimited virtual.
Cloudflare 101 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94107 2pm - 9pm online link - tbd
Please plan to learn and share all about encryption! No experience necessary. Watch this meetup page for updates (and the primary website gedsf.org).
Further information about the local event can be found here:
What can we learn about the structure of individual minds, human or artificial, using large-scale social data, such as the textual or visual data flowing through search engines and social media platforms? In this talk, I present a range of studies showing that large-scale social data can reveal striking insights into the mind, ranging from the structure of embodied cognition to the psychological biases that underlie stereotypes. I will give special attention to presenting the results of a study we recently published in Nature which demonstrates how combining large-scale image and text data from online sources, analyzed via artificial intelligence, can reveal the latent multimodal structure of gender stereotypes. I will then share ongoing work that builds on these results by revealing the multimodal structure of intersectional stereotypes (e.g., gendered ageism) not only in human minds, but also in the judgments and associations formed by generative AI. Throughout, I will emphasize that big data and artificial intelligence are useful not only for testing existing theories about cognitive structure, but also for discovering and testing new theories. As an example, I will briefly describe ongoing work that harnesses this suite of algorithmic methodologies to unveil deep connections between the representational structure of gender and the concreteness and abstractness of concepts across domains, using visual and textual data, as well as behavioral outputs from AI. Opportunities for further advancing the integration of computer science, cognitive science, and cultural sociology will be discussed.
Join our butterfly docent specialist Sally Levinson and Andy Liu for a guided walk through the Garden in search of butterflies, as you learn about their plant relationships and amazing life cycle. Bring binoculars if you have them.
Registered children welcome. Pre-registration is required, space is limited. Groups larger than 6 people, please contact us to make separate arrangements for a private tour.
Topology plays a key role in describing quantum matter, which has been greatly explored in recent decades [for an introduction: Hasan & Kane, Rev. of Mod. Phys. 82, 3045 (2010)]. I present how tuning a topological insulator featuring a Dirac fermion can be used as a platform to realize emergent Weyl fermion and "fractional" Fermi surfaces; and can also lead to correlated magnetic, Chern, or many-body states. The kagome lattice, which features Dirac fermions, flat bands, and van Hove singularities, can serve as the platform to explore topology, strong correlation, exotic superconductivity and many-body density-wave phenomena as shown in a series of most recent works. These novel topological quantum matter harbor properties that may lead to the development of next-generation quantum devices.
Neutrinos, the only neutral elementary fermions, have provided many surprises. Flavor oscillations reveal the non-conservation of the lepton flavor number and demonstrate that neutrino masses are finite; yet they are surprisingly much smaller than those of other fermions (by at least six orders of magnitude!) It is then natural to ask if the mechanism providing the mass to neutrinos is the same that gives masses to the other (charged) elementary fermions and if neutrinos are described by 4-component Dirac wavefunctions or, as is possible for neutral particles, by 2-component Majorana ones.
The hypothetical phenomenon of neutrino-less double-beta decay can probe the Majorana nature of neutrinos and the conservation of the total lepton number. It may also help elucidating the origins of mass in the neutrino sector. This is the Frontier of neutrino physics.
Following the well-known principle that there is no free lunch in life, interesting half-lives for neutrino-less double-beta decay exceed 1025 years (or ~1015 times the age of the Universe!) making experiments rather challenging. I will describe nEXO, a 5-tonne, enriched Xenon experiment with a sensitivity reaching beyond 1028 years, or >100 times the current state of the art. The nEXO detector derives directly from EXO-200, a very successful, rogue detector built by a collaboration with a heavy SLAC-Stanford participation.
Dr. Nancy Aggarwall of UC Davis conducts precision measurements of fundamental physics. She uses techniques from Quantum Optics, atomic physics, and condensed matter physics to look for new physics in the form of dark matter candidates or gravitational waves from astrophysical, cosmological, and exotic sources.
The spins of black holes in binaries observed with gravitational waves are an essential probe of physics on multiple scales, from the astrophysical formation environments of compact binaries to fundamental physics. At the same time, the imprint of spin on the observed signals is weak, making constraints more challenging compared to the other key properties of black holes, namely their mass. I will discuss how spins affect the mergers of black holes, the current status of spin measurements and its astrophysical implications, and the challenges in ensuring robust and unbiased measurements.
Speaker: Katerina Chatziioannou, California Institute of Technology
