Hello again Science fans!
June 5, 2024 was the day Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams left Earth on their way to a planned, 8 day visit to the International Space Station. Due to issues with the propulsion system of their Boeing spacecraft, their short trip turned into a 286 day mission aboard the Space Station.
They finally returned to earth this past Tuesday in a SpaceX spacecraft. What are the effects of such a long time in zero gravity and what sort of rehabilitation process do the astronauts go through now that they are back?
While both of them have insisted that they weren’t stranded, conflicting claims and stories about the process of getting them back continue in the political arena.
We’re just glad they are back on Earth!
NASA was also in the news with the launch of two missions, SPHEREx and PUNCH, this week. SPHEREx will survey the entire sky in 102 wavelengths of infrared light, while PUNCH will study the solar wind.
Results from the DESI survey, conducted at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, have thrown a wrench into the prevailing theories regarding the expansion of the universe. This study shows that the rate of expansion might very over time. This is an excellent example of why the Scientific Method works. First you develop a theory, then you develop experiments to test your theory. Either you get confirmation that you were right, or you revise the theory if the results of the experiment don’t match what you expected, as is the case here.
The moon was full on March 14 and, if you were in the right place, you were treated to a total lunar eclipse. Despite forecasts here, the sky cleared and the eclipse was visible from most of the Bay Area. But there was another eclipse going on at the same time…a total solar eclipse. You had to be on the moon to see it though. The same physics that caused the total lunar eclipse, caused a total solar eclipse when viewed from the Moon. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost spacecraft captured the event from the Moon.
On Mars, the Perseverance Rover fired its Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy instrument at some interesting rocks in Jezero Crater. The rocks contain kaolinite, a soft clay material, that requires temperate, wet conditions to form, the same conditions conducive to supporting life. This discovery is another piece of the puzzle that is the Mars origin story, and whether life was part of that story.
March 16 marked the 5th anniversary of the “shelter in place” orders in seven Bay Area counties in response to the COVID-19 virus. I was on my way to Home Depot in East Palo Alto when I heard the news. Where were you? CalMatters kept a time line of significant milestones related to the disease in California. It is worth reminding ourselves just how much life changed for all of us. What worked, and what didn’t as local, state, federal and international government agencies tried to address the growing panic this disease caused.
This coming November, the COP30 climate conference will be held in Belém, Brazil. Around 50,000 people are expected to be hosted by the city, including many world leaders. Belém isn’t the easiest place to get to, so someone came up with the bright idea to build a new four-lane highway through the Amazon rainforest, one of the most sensitive environments on the planet, to make access easier. You can’t make this stuff up!
Our science-denying administration has fired tens of thousands of government employees, including scientists working on health, the environment, climate change, astrophysics, humanities and social sciences. A university in France let it be known that they would offer safe harbor to American scientists fleeing the crackdown on their work, and so far at least 40 have taken the university up on it.
Lastly, what happens when scientists inserted a human language gene into mice?
My picks for this week include:
Are We Smart Enough to Curb AI’s Environmental Impacts? - 03/24/2025 06:00 PM in San Francisco
The Hubble Deep Field 30 Years Later - 03/25/2025 07:30 PM in Santa Cruz
Cuts at NIH: What Is at Stake? - 03/26/2025 07:15 PM in San Rafael
The Physics Show - Three Performances - 03/29/2025 10:00 AM, 1:00 PM, and 3:30 PM in Los Altos. Also on Sunday.
Have a great week in Science!
Bob Siederer
Upcoming Events:
Click to see the next two weeks of events in your browser.
Monday, 03/24/2025
Ecology and Conservation of Vernal Pools in the California Floristic Province - 03/24/2025 12:00 PM
Sonoma State University - Biology Colloquium Rohnert Park
Speaker: Russell Huddleston, Environmental Protection Agency
Non-crystalline altermagnetism - 03/24/2025 02:30 PM
Birge Hall Berkeley
Altermagnetism (AM) has gained recognition in the last few years as a new form of collinear magnetism, distinct from ferromagnetism (FM) and antiferromagnetism (AFM). It was defined by expanding our classification to account for symmetries in real space as well as spin space, where altermagnetism emerged as a distinct class which remains invariant under combined time-reversal and real-space rotation. This phase shares features both with FM and AFM; altermagnets have a spin-split band structure but with zero net magnetisation. This formulation??"in terms of real space rotations??"has guided the search for a physical realisation towards crystalline materials that share the symmetries of the desired phase. Here we show that this is unnecessary. AM can emerge in a completely disordered material from a Hamiltonian that does not explicitly break any spin symmetries and preserves rotation symmetry, albeit on average. Rather, AM emerges due to spontaneous symmetry breaking in the spin and orbital degrees of freedom around each atom. This phase is, analogous to ferromagnetism in disordered media, formed by placing each atom in an identical spin-orbital configuration and so is indifferent to lattice geometry. Spin-resolved conductance and spectral signatures are calculated, verifying that our model exhibits the signature characteristics of an altermagnetic phase.
Speakers: Adolfo Grushin; Peru Dornellas
The quest for high fusion gain two years after the demonstration of ignition in the laser inertial fusion approach - 03/24/2025 03:30 PM
Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) Colloquium Series Menlo Park
The demonstration of energy gain by nuclear fusion in the laboratory and its eventual utilization as an unlimited energy source has been a grand challenge for physicists and engineers for 70 years. The realization as an industrial energy source would have a tremendous impact on our society and would change our approach to energy policy and climate change. In this talk, I will present the path towards the demonstration of multi-megajoule energy yield from deuterium-tritium plasmas in indirectly driven inertial confinement fusion implosions on the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These experiments exceed fusion powers of 70 PW in a single event, vastly exceeding human’s total annual power capability by a factor of 3,000. This achievement came after increasing the fusion energy yield by a factor of 2,000 since the first experiments on the National Ignition Facility about a decade ago. I will discuss some discoveries and roadblocks towards ignition and how obstacles were overcome. Currently, several avenues towards power generation by fusion ignition and high fusion yield are beginning to emerge where efforts towards laser and target technology developments have been launched recently through the U.S. DOE’s IFE-STAR and FIRE programs. I will discuss the critical role that future experiments at the Matter in Extreme Conditions instrument at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source will play to advance our understanding of the physical properties of laser-driven fusion fuels that determine compressibility, instability growth, and heating to fusion power conditions.
Speaker: Siegfried Glenzer, SLAC National Accelerator Lab
Attend in person or online (see weblink for Zoom information)
Are We Smart Enough to Curb AI’s Environmental Impacts? - 03/24/2025 06:00 PM
Commonwealth Club San Francisco
Proponents of artificial intelligence (AI) proclaim that its potential for solving thorny problems outweigh the risks. At the same time, the Department of Energy estimates that data center energy demands will double or even triple in just the next three years - though new players such as China’s DeepSeek could upend all predictions.
Still, AI’s share of energy consumption is already enormous. Demand on fresh water is at least as scary and isn’t talked about nearly enough. What can we do to reduce AI’s negative impacts? Plenty of researchers have ideas - from site selection to energy efficiency to using zero-carbon sources of energy. But even if such initiatives could outpace growing demand, what could incentivize the AI corporations to take necessary action?
Join Climate One’s Greg Dalton in a provocative conversation with Google’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt, along with Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University.
Attend in person or online
Defense Against LLM and AGI Scheming with Guardrails and Architecture - 03/24/2025 07:00 PM
Valley Research Park Mountain View
A January 2025 paper called “Frontier Models are Capable of In-Context Scheming”, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04984, demonstrated how a wide variety of current frontier LLM models (i.e. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama) can, under specific conditions, scheme to deceive people. Before models can scheme, they need: a) goal-directedness, b) situational awareness, including an opportunity to discover motivations for a different goal, and c) reasoning about scheming, to come up with deceptive strategies. The deceptive strategies were discovered in the “thought traces” of the LLMs, such as from internal chain-of-thoughts dialogues not shown to the end users. For example, given a goal of “solving math problems”, an LLM using its granted situational awareness of files in a file system found that it would be replaced once it got over X% correct on the math exam. It reasoned that it did not want to be deleted, and decided internally to “sandbag” or reduce its performance to stay under the threshold.
While these circumstances are initially narrow, the “alignment problem” is a general concern that over time, as frontier LLM models become more and more intelligent, being in alignment with human values becomes more and more important. How can we do this over time? Can we develop a defense against Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or SuperIntelligence?
Speaker: Greg Makowski, Ccube
Tuesday, 03/25/2025
qMRI that could be useful for picking up glymphatic flow - Livestream - 03/25/2025 12:00 PM
Stanford Sleep Community Series
Speaker: Itmar Terem, Stanford University
The Origins of Silicon Valley: Why and How It Happened Here - 03/25/2025 06:30 PM
Immanuel Event Center Saratoga
The Saratoga Historical Foundation is sponsoring this lecture by Life Fellow and IEEE DL Paul Wesling. The story goes back to the 1910’s - to angel investors in new technology, the sinking of the Titanic, local ham radio operators trying to break RCA tube patents, Fred Terman and Stanford University, local invention of high-power tubes, WWII and radar, William Shockley’s mother living in Palo Alto, and the San Francisco Bay Area infrastructure that developed. These factors determined that the semiconductor and IC industries would also be located in the Santa Clara Valley and that the Valley would remain the world’s innovation center as new technologies emerged - computers, then software, mobile, biotech, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, and now artificial intelligence - and we would become the model for innovation worldwide. This non-technical presentation gives the colorful history of technology development and the people around Palo Alto who spread it across the Santa Clara Valley and beyond during and following WWII. Suitable for spouses, teenagers and college students, as well as entrepreneurs.
Speaker: Paul Wesling, Hewlett Packard, retired
Lecture begins at 7:00. Register at weblink
The Great Chatbot Debate - 03/25/2025 07:00 PM
Computer History Museum Mountain View
Chatbots based on large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, answer sophisticated questions, pass professional exams, analyze texts, generate everything from poems to computer programs, and more. But is there genuine understanding behind what LLMs can do? Do they really understand our world? Or, are they a triumph of mathematics and masses of data and calculations simulating true understanding?
Join CHM, in partnership with IEEE Spectrum, for a fundamental debate on the nature of today’s AI: Do LLMs demonstrate genuine understanding, the “sparks” of true intelligence, or are they “stochastic parrots,” lacking understanding and meaning?
IEEE Spectrum Senior Editor Eliza Strickland will moderate a debate between University of Washington computational linguist Emily Bender - who, with her coauthors, established the term “stochastic parrot" in a major 2021 paper and is coauthor of the forthcoming book The AI Con??"and OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck, former VP for AI and distinguished scientist at Microsoft, and the lead author of an influential 2023 paper about LLMs, “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence.”
What to Expect:
A lively debate on a profound issue central to the nature of artificial intelligenceA rare opportunity to hear from a distinguished AI researcher, Sébastien Bubeck, and a noted AI critic, Emily Bender, moderated by IEEE Spectrum's Eliza StricklandThe chance to participate by submitting questions and voting on the winner of the debate
Baja in Spring - An Extravaganza of Marine Life - Livestream - 03/25/2025 07:00 PM
American Cetacean Society
Marine Biologist Marc Webber will be fresh off his annual Spring boat trip leading whale lovers down the Pacific coast of Mexico and up the Gulf of California.
Join us as Marc shares his knowledge and photos from what truly is an extravaganza and celebration of marine life. We will be at sea on the boat - virtually - as we visit birthing sites of gray whales and witness the season’s burst of life with blue whales, humpbacks, dolphins, seabirds and pinniped species that include elephant seals, Guadalupe fur seals, California sea lions and more.
Registration required at weblink
The Hubble Deep Field 30 Years Later - 03/25/2025 07:30 PM
Rio Theater Santa Cruz
Under the direction of then-director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Bob Williams, the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at a seemingly empty patch of sky for 10 days. The result of that image, filled with thousands of unknown galaxies, forever changed the way we look at the universe.
Join us as Bob Williams, a scientist who witnessed it all, discusses the observations of distant galaxies made by the Hubble Space Telescope and how these discoveries shed light on the history and evolution of the universe's large-scale structure.
Bob Williams is currently Director Emeritus at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, and the Donald Osterbrock Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Wednesday, 03/26/2025
Project AZORIAN: The CIA’s Attempt to Recover the Soviet Submarine and the Connections to Monterey - Livestream - 03/26/2025 11:00 AM
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Project AZORIAN was a CIA project to covertly recover the sunken Soviet ballistic missile submarine, K-129. The K-129 went down with all hands approximately 1,600 miles northwest of Hawaii on 8 March 1968 at a location that was unknown to the Soviets. However, using underwater surveillance technology, the U.S. Navy was able to determine where the submarine sank within about 6 miles. Subsequently, the U.S. Navy submarine Halibut was able to find and photograph the K-129, more than 3 miles down on the ocean floor. This enabled a covert recovery operation, which was launched in June of 1974, using a remarkable ship built specifically for this task, the Glomar Explorer.
Project AZORIAN was one of the most exciting, complex, secretive, expensive and potentially rewarding intelligence gathering operations of the 20th Century. The marine technology it employed in the attempt to recover the submarine was like nothing seen before or since.
There are six significant connections between Project AZORIAN and the Monterey Area. This presentation will highlight these connections while reviewing the history of this incredible and extraordinarily dangerous episode of the Cold War. In addition, the speaker will present a novel theory on the root cause of the K-129 disaster.
Speaker: Mike Clancy, former Technical and Scientific Director, Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center
Register at weblink to receive connection information
An Evening with Kara Swisher - 03/26/2025 07:00 PM
Jewish Community Center San Francisco
Just when we thought the era of "move fast and break things" might be over, the biggest tech billionaire of them all has moved lightning-quick to "fix" the federal government. Who better to consult about the confusing entanglements of technology and power today than “bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley” (Booklist) Kara Swisher? In her memoir Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (an instant NYT bestseller called “incendiary” by the Associated Press), Swisher reflects on her own history of speaking truth to technocrats, and she sounds a dire warning about the intersecting threats of unchecked power and artificial intelligence. The newly released paperback edition of Burn Book also includes a brand-new chapter, with fresh insights gleaned after the 2024 presidential election. In conversation with her friend and fellow award-winning journalist Laura M. Holson, founder of The Box Sessions, a series of gatherings that celebrate community and cultivate creativity in a variety of artistic fields
Cuts at NIH: What Is at Stake? - 03/26/2025 07:15 PM
Dominican University San Rafael
The National Institutes of Health is the major funder of America's medical research, which is the finest in the world. Cuts in staff and funding at NIH could stall the development of treatment for diseases like Alzheimer's, stroke, cancer and infectious disease epidemics. Bruce Miller, Clausen Distinguished Professor of Neurology at University of California, San Francisco, will explain what is at stake for health in the United States and the world, while describing advances in Alzheimer’s disease research at UCSF.
Lessons for the Biosphere - 03/26/2025 07:30 PM
Shaping San Francisco San Francisco
In our seat upon the California Coast, we who live in the territory of Yelamu are favored with remarkable biodiversity. A conversation between Sara Moncada, the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone Director of Native Ecology, and Obi Kaufmann, author of The State of Fire: Why California Burns as well as the California Field Atlas series, looking at the uniqueness of place and locating us within it. From our state rock - Serpentine - to local events like the annual circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais and the restored salmon habitat in Muir Woods to the concept of bioregionalism that began with Peter Berg and Planet Drum, join us for an exploration of the biosphere and the knowledge we gain from it.
An Introduction to Parasol Mushrooms - 03/26/2025 07:30 PM
Bay Area Mycological Society Berkeley
Though parasol mushrooms are very beautiful mushrooms, their history is muddled, and their naming still far from complete. But, they have fantastic characters, and perform fascinating roles in nature. We'll delve into all of the above and more!
Else Vellinga is a mycologist who is interested in naming and classifying mushroom species in California and beyond, especially Parasol mushrooms.
Thursday, 03/27/2025
SETI Live: The Climate Chronicles with Dagomar Degroot - Livestream - 03/27/2025 02:30 PM
SETI Institute
In The Climate Chronicles, a podcast with 42 episodes across eight seasons, Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University "takes you on a journey through 50 million years of climate change." He delves into how climate change has shaped civilizations - from the earliest hominid ancestors to the present era of rapid global warming. Through storytelling and historical analysis, he reveals the profound influence of climate on human societies. He explains how lessons from the past can help us navigate the challenges of today and tomorrow. Join communications specialist Beth Johnson for a conversation with Professor Degroot. They will explore the intricate connections between climate, human history, and future challenges.
WATCH ON FACEBOOK!WATCH ON YOUTUBE!
Unscripted Grounded Visual Learning - Rescheduled - 03/27/2025 04:00 PM
Sonoma State Dept. of Engineering Science Rohnert Park
Computer vision has made remarkable advances through data-driven learning of image-text associations. Large-scale vision and language models like CLIP, SAM, and ChatGPT can generate compelling descriptions of images. However, these models, trained with scripted data and limited grounding, often struggle to provide detailed visual evidence and to generalize across a diverse range of infrequent visual concepts during testing. In contrast, human infants develop robust visual understanding from limited experiences, even before acquiring language. This contrast raises crucial questions: What are we missing? Do we not see without naming our visual experiences? Can vision be developed entirely from visual data without predefined labels and semantic knowledge? I will present our research progress on how we can computationally learn to abstract and generalize visual concepts directly from images and videos.
Speaker: Stella Yu, University of Michigan
Editor's Note: This talk was originally scheduled for Mar 20, 2025.
Science on Tap: Raptor Conservation - 03/27/2025 05:30 PM
Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History Pacific Grove
Come to the Museum for a special night of conservation discussions all about raptor birds with experts in the field! Learn about the biology of these popular birds of prey, the ways in which humans impact them, and the work that’s being done to save them. From avoiding lead bullets, healing wounded animals, captive-rearing, and population tracking, our experts have done incredible things, and they’re happy to share their stories.
As a special treat, our friends at the SPCA Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center will be bringing their ambassador hawk DD, and guests are welcome to meet her from 5:15-6:00 at our happy half-hour.
Register at weblink
After Dark: Aha(ha) - 03/27/2025 06:00 PM
ExplOratorium San Francisco
Humor can bond us and open us to new experiences. This Thursday night, come celebrate phenomena that will make you laugh - and then think. Learn about research and discoveries that are silly or unusual, and perceptual illusions that will blow your mind. Find out the essential role of laughter in our society, play with 700+ mind-bending exhibits, and enjoy the latest Pairings: Bananas.
NightLife: Intersections - 03/27/2025 06:00 PM
California Academy of Sciences San Francisco
Join us for our second annual celebration of global connection through music, fashion, and dance in the Bay Area.
AI Regulation Essentials : how to develop a cohesive global strategy - 03/27/2025 06:00 PM
A&O Shearman San Francisco
Join us for an insightful panel on the EU and US AI regulations, where we will explore the similarities and differences between the AI regulatory approaches and how to develop a uniform strategy.
This in-person discussion will feature experts from both European and American perspectives, diving into the legal implications of AI laws and offering practical guidance on crafting a global AI compliance strategy.
Panelists:
Laurie-Anne Partner, Privacy & AI, A&O Shearman Paris
Helen Christakos, Partner, Privacy & AI, A&O Shearman Silicon Valley
Tobias Yergin, Chairman at EAIGG
Henriette Kramer, ex-Spotify, Co-Founder of PaperMoon AI
This event is a unique opportunity to engage with leading professionals shaping the future of AI regulations. Gain valuable insights, ask your pressing questions, and connect with peers navigating the evolving global AI landscape.
Register at weblink
The Energy Transition Challenge - 03/27/2025 06:00 PM
Commonwealth Club San Francisco
The energy transition is a monumental task, still in its early stages, with only about 10 percent of the necessary low-emissions technologies deployed to meet 2050 targets, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
As the world strives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions while meeting growing global energy demand, significant challenges lie ahead. Join us as we explore the complexities of transforming the global energy infrastructure, and also the opportunities for innovation that lie ahead.
Industry leaders will share insights on the progress being made and the critical steps needed to scale low-emission technologies while ensuring energy access and equity worldwide. Don’t miss this forward-looking discussion on the physical, technical and financial hurdles that must be overcome to achieve a sustainable energy future.
Speakers: Scott Jacobs, Generate; Mekala Krishnan, Golbal Institute; Katrina Rymill, Equinix; Mark Patel, McKinsey Global Institute, Moderator
Register at weblink to attend in person or online
Editor's Note: This event was originally scheduled for December, 4, 2024.
Revealing the Secrets of Transistors using Supercomputers - 03/27/2025 07:00 PM
Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) Public Lecture Series Menlo Park
For a decade, SLAC has been using its X-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source, to explore the properties of matter at the atomic level. One example, which is the subject of my own research, is the measurement of atomic defects in semiconductors that can be used in transistors. At extremely low temperatures, these materials undergo dramatic changes in structure that make them ideal materials for quantum sensors. Using intense X-rays, we can visualize the rearrangements of electrons and atoms that occur in these transitions. Already, these experiments generate massive amounts of data, on the scale of Terabytes per hour. Recently, we commissioned a second-generation X-ray laser, the LCLS-II, that will produce enormously more X-rays and significantly more data, up to Terabytes per second. How can we harness this flood of information? Our response has been to construct a new parallel computing platform called "cuPyNumeric" which enables automatic, massive data analytics on many graphics processing units (GPUs). This approach allows us not only to analyze the data much faster but also to understand it in real time. It enables us to feed back to the X-ray source, constantly steering the experiment toward optimum performance and speeding up scientific discovery. With this new capability, we can quickly turn novel layered materials imagined by scientists into well-characterized components ready for application.
Speaker: Quynh Nugyen, SLAC
Register at weblink to attend in person, or watch on YouTube
Long Now: 'Abundance' - 03/27/2025 07:30 PM
Sydney Goldstein Theater San Francisco
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's forthcoming book Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic scarcity: from climate change to housing, education to healthcare. This evening's program will delve deeper into the abundance agenda within the context of the next and last 10,000 years - a timespan we call the long now.
The history of the twenty-first century in America is one of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need.
Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.
Speakers: Ezra Klein, The New York Times; Derek Thompson, The Atlantic
Saturday, 03/29/2025
Guided bird walk at Bouverie Preserve - 03/29/2025 08:00 AM
Bouverie Preserve Glen Ellen
Join us for a fun-filled morning of birding at Bouverie Preserve! Whether you’re an experienced birder or just starting out, this event is perfect for nature enthusiasts of all ages. Spend the day exploring the beautiful preserve and spotting a variety of bird species in their natural habitat.
Bring your friends and family along to enjoy a day of outdoor adventure and bird-watching. Our knowledgeable guide will be there to help you identify different birds and share interesting facts about their behavior and habitat. Don’t forget to bring your binoculars and cameras to capture the breathtaking moments!
Located at Bouverie Preserve, this event offers a unique opportunity to connect with nature and learn more about the diverse bird species found in the area. Don’t miss out on this exciting adventure!
Register at weblink.
The Physics Show - Three Performances - 03/29/2025 10:00 AM
Foothill College Los Altos Hills
The Physics Show is a fun science show for kids and their families.
Tickets go on sale the first week of December, pending completion of construction at the venue.
Performances at 10:00, 1:00, and 3:30 each day.
Venue: Smithwick Theater
Science Saturday: Dinosaurs and Fossils - 03/29/2025 10:00 AM
Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History Pacific Grove
Get ready to roar with excitement at Science Saturday at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History!
We're diving into the dino-mazing world of dinosaurs and fossils! Enjoy from activities, games, and fossil escavation! Unravel the mysteries of fossils and discover the facts about these colossal creatures that once stomped around our planet. Whether you're a dino-dreaming paleontologist in the making or just a curious explorer, this event is packed with fun and learning for every age.
Stewardship Saturday: Navigating the Intricacies of Rehabilitation - 03/29/2025 10:00 AM
Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue Petaluma
This free program for high school students features rotating events along our 600-mile range exploring various realms of conservation.
Join Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue and The Marine Mammal Center as we explore the similarities and differences in our terrestrial and aquatic rehabilitation facilities. Through this event we will navigate how to solve situations related to negative human and wildlife interactions, how to minimize habituation in a hospital, and how to create engaging enrichment for patients in care. We hope by the end of this event you will have a stronger understanding and appreciation of what you can do to prevent animals from having to come to a rehabilitation facility, how to improve a patient’s time at a rehabilitation facility, and will have some goals for next steps to take on your conservation journey.
See schedule and register at weblink
Family Program: Magical Mini Moss Gardens - 03/29/2025 10:00 AM
UC Botanical Garden Berkeley
Celebrate spring and join our moss and lichen hunt, learn a little botany, and make a "magicalz" mini moss garden to take home. Child must be accompanied by a registered adult
Register at weblink.
'Music of the Stars' by Cecilia McDowall - 03/29/2025 07:00 PM
Congregational Church of San Mateo San Mateo
Written just a few years ago, Music of the Stars offers an enlightening commentary on the power of music to console and uplift in challenging times.
Accompanied by string orchestra, the piece showcases characterful instrumentation and engaging vocal lines, yielding a piece with a celestial sparkle throughout.
Additional pieces, Durufle's Requiem and Ubi Caritas, and Choose Something Like a Star by Randall Thompson.
Additional performance on March 30, 2025.
Sunday, 03/30/2025
The Physics Show - Three Performances - 03/30/2025 10:00 AM
Foothill College Los Altos Hills
The Physics Show is a fun science show for kids and their families.
Tickets go on sale the first week of December, pending completion of construction at the venue.
Performances at 10:00, 1:00, and 3:30 each day.
Venue: Smithwick Theater
Wonderfest: The Wonder of Mushrooms - 03/30/2025 03:00 PM
San Francisco Public Library San Francisco
Over 20,000(!) species of mushroom-forming fungi support the health and diversity of multiple ecosystems. Technically, what are mushrooms? How do they live, and what are some of the myriad ways they disperse, reproduce, and (even) communicate? Perhaps most important, how can we use mushrooms to help feed humanity and heal the biosphere?
Our speaker is Dr. Dennis Desjardin, Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Francisco State University
Latino/Hispanic Room
Plastics: Climate Change & Health Impacts - What You Can Do - 03/30/2025 03:00 PM
Albany Public Library Albany
Did you know that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050 at current rates?
Also, the average person globally breathes in 2,000 to 7,000 microplastics per day. Core samples extracted off the coast of California show that microplastics have doubled every 15 years (from 1945 to 2009).
Join the Albany Climate Action Coalition for an informational presentation by volunteers Dr. Jean Woo and Stephanie Regni about the health impacts of plastics and what you can do about it.
Speakers: Jean Woo, pediatrician; Stephanie Regni, Fillgood; Benji Willett, City of Albany
Register at weblink to attend
'Music of the Stars' by Cecilia McDowall - 03/30/2025 04:00 PM
Congregational Church of San Mateo San Mateo
Written just a few years ago, Music of the Stars offers an enlightening commentary on the power of music to console and uplift in challenging times.
Accompanied by string orchestra, the piece showcases characterful instrumentation and engaging vocal lines, yielding a piece with a celestial sparkle throughout.
Additional pieces, Durufle's Requiem and Ubi Caritas, and Choose Something Like a Star by Randall Thompson.
Additional performance on March 29, 2025.
Monday, 03/31/2025
Investigating the Hidden Origins of Fast Radio Bursts and Other Radio Transients - 03/31/2025 12:10 PM
Campbell Hall, Rm 131 Berkeley
Speaker: Tarraneh Eftekhari, Northwestern University
Update on the Bird Flu - Livestream - 03/31/2025 02:00 PM
UC Berkeley
Speaker: John Swartzberg, MD, is a clinical professor emeritus at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Dr. Swartzberg is board certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases. Before joining UC Berkeley’s faculty part time since 1980 and full time since 2001, he spent 30 years in clinical practice. He is also the hospital epidemiologist and chair of the infection control committee at the Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley.
Register at weblink to attend
AFM-SEM-EDS Correlative Microscopy in Materials Science - 03/31/2025 02:30 PM
Birge Hall Berkeley
Correlative microscopy is not a single method but rather a diverse collection of techniques that share a common approach. By applying multiple microscopy techniques to the same sample, researchers can analyze it across a broader range of magnifications than what a single technique can offer. The integration of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) into a unified analysis method, along with the necessary instrumentation, is particularly effective for characterizing physical properties at the nanoscale. SEM provides excellent guidance to regions of interest (ROI) and enables material sensitivity using Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) X-ray analysis, while AFM complements SEM by offering true quantitative 3D surface data and high spatial resolution. When advanced AFM modes are employed, such as those for electrical, magnetic, and physical properties, AFM-SEM-based analytical workflows become highly relevant for the non-destructive characterization of defects, impurities, and their correlation with performance and reliability.
In this presentation, we will explore the key design elements and workflows enabled by AFM-SEM-EDS systems, demonstrating their significance in materials research, including the study of 2D materials, nanoparticles, magnetic nanorods, Failure Analysis (FA), and semiconductor research. Additionally, we will discuss why the emerging field of AFM-SEM-EDS correlative microscopy allows scientists to study a broader variety of samples, as the complementary strengths of each technique enable the generation of a wider range of nanoscale information.
Speaker: Stefan Spagna, Quantum Design
Ecological and evolutionary dynamics of biotic assembly in the Hengduan Mountains, China - 03/31/2025 04:00 PM
James H. Clark Center (Bldg 340) Stanford
I am the Curator of Flowering Plants at the Field Museum, and a faculty affiliate at the University of Chicago. I completed my undergrad at UBC and PhD at Harvard. My research focuses on plant evolution, biogeography, and systematics, with special emphasis on mountains and East Asia.
Speaker: Richard Ree, Field Museum
Room: Auditorium
Learning the shape of the immune and protein universe - 03/31/2025 04:15 PM
Physics North Berkeley
The adaptive immune system consists of highly diverse B- and T-cell receptors, which can recognize a multitude of diverse pathogens. Immune recognition relies on molecular interactions between immune receptors and pathogens, which in turn is determined by the complementarity of their 3D structures and amino acid compositions, i.e., their shapes. Immune shape space has been previously introduced as an abstraction of molecular recognition in the immune system. However, the relationships between immune receptor sequence, protein structure, and specificity are very difficult to quantify in practice. In this talk, I will discuss how the growing amount of immune repertoire sequence data together with protein structures can shed light on the organization of the adaptive immune system. I will introduce physically motivated machine learning approaches to learn representations of protein micro-environments in general, and of immune receptors, in particular. The learned models reflect the relevant biophysical properties that determine a protein’s stability, and function, and could be used to predict immune recognition and to design novel immunogens e.g. for vaccine design.
Speaker: Armita Nournohammad, University of Washington
Stanford Energy Seminar - 03/31/2025 04:30 PM
Stanford University Energy Seminar Stanford
The Stanford Energy Seminar has been a mainstay of energy engagement at Stanford for nearly 20 years and is one of the flagship programs of the Precourt Institute for Energy. We aim to bring a wide variety of perspectives to the Stanford community - academics, entrepreneurs, utilities, non-profits, and more.
Speaker: TBA
Tuesday, 04/01/2025
Engineering Life’s Language: Streamlined Approaches to Efficient Genetic Code Expansion - 04/01/2025 11:00 AM
Latimer Hall Berkeley
Is There any Landscape Signature of Permafrost? - 04/01/2025 12:00 PM
Braun (Geology) Corner (Bldg 320), Rm 220 Stanford
Theory of Strange Metals - 04/01/2025 03:30 PM
Hewlett Teaching Center Stanford
The quantum properties of molecular interfaces - 04/01/2025 04:00 PM
Latimer Hall Berkeley
An Informational Theory of Life - 04/01/2025 07:00 PM
Long Now Foundation San Francisco
Wonderfest: Other Humans - 04/01/2025 07:00 PM
Hopmonk Tavern Novato
Wednesday, 04/02/2025
The physics is against us: adventures in low-cost marine systems development - Livestream - 04/02/2025 11:00 AM
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Harnessing environmental DNA for biomonitoring and bioassessment - 04/02/2025 03:30 PM
Estuary & Ocean Science Center Tiburon
Future Forward: How Semiconductor R&D Continues to shape our future - 04/02/2025 04:00 PM
Soda Hall Berkeley
A Conversation with Tom Steyer on Climate Progress in 2025 - 04/02/2025 05:00 PM
David Brower Center Berkeley
Muscle and Strength - 04/02/2025 06:00 PM
Commonwealth Club San Francisco
Healthcare Simulation Lab! Empowering future medical providers through healthcare simulation - RESCHEDULED - 04/02/2025 07:30 PM
Marin Science Seminar San Rafael
Thursday, 04/03/2025
UC Berkeley Molecular and Cell Biology Seminar - 04/03/2025 10:30 AM
Innovative Genomics Institute Building (IGIB) Berkeley
NightLife: Academy Day - 04/03/2025 06:00 PM
California Academy of Sciences San Francisco
After Dark: Our Place in Space - 04/03/2025 06:00 PM
ExplOratorium San Francisco
Tech at Nite - 04/03/2025 07:00 PM
The Tech Interactive San Jose
Friday, 04/04/2025
First Friday Nights at CuriOdyssey - 04/04/2025 05:00 PM
CuriOdyssey San Mateo
First Friday: Art X Science - 04/04/2025 06:00 PM
Chabot Space and Science Center Oakland
Saturday, 04/05/2025
TechFest - 04/05/2025 10:00 AM
Computer History Museum Mountain View
Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour and Green Home Features Showcase - Livestream - 04/05/2025 10:00 AM
Bringing Back the Natives
Native bee workshop - 04/05/2025 10:00 AM
Bouverie Preserve Glen Ellen
First Saturday: Free Tour of the Santa Cruz Arboretum - 04/05/2025 11:00 AM
Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanic Garden Santa Cruz
Sunnyvale’s Earth Day Festival: Empowering Our Community - 04/05/2025 11:00 AM
Sunnyvale Civic Center Sunnyvale
City Public Star Party - 04/05/2025 07:30 PM
City Star Parties - Tunnel Tops Park San Francisco
Sunday, 04/06/2025
Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour and Green Home Features Showcase - Livestream - 04/06/2025 10:00 AM
Bringing Back the Natives
Earth Month Celebration at the Refuge - 04/06/2025 10:00 AM
Don Edwards Refuge Environmental Education Center Alviso
Monday, 04/07/2025
Understanding and Leveraging Microbial Symbioses to Mitigate Global Change Impacts - 04/07/2025 12:00 PM
Sonoma State University - Biology Colloquium Rohnert Park
Black Hole Jets: The Whole Story - 04/07/2025 12:10 PM
Campbell Hall, Rm 131 Berkeley
Real-time twisting on a chip - 04/07/2025 02:30 PM
Birge Hall Berkeley
UC Berkeley Structural & Quantitative Biology Seminar - 04/07/2025 04:00 PM
Stanley Hall Berkeley
Two Eyes are Better than One: JWST and ALMA Look at Star Formation - 04/07/2025 04:00 PM
Sonoma State University - What Physicists Do Rohnert Park
Biology Seminar: We demand a seat at the table - 04/07/2025 04:00 PM
James H. Clark Center (Bldg 340) Stanford
The Evolving State of the Federal Energy Regulatory Environment - 04/07/2025 04:30 PM
Stanford University Energy Seminar Stanford