Autonomous Vehicles & the City: Policy, Deployment and Ecosystem LeadershipAs autonomous vehicle technology reaches maturation, the most urgent challenges are no longer just technical - they are civic and systemic. The 2026 Autonomous Vehicles and the City Symposium marks our 10th anniversary, and goes “Beyond the Tech” to focus on building a robust automation ecosystem that works for people and ...
Atmospheric N2 is a cheap, abundant resource with great potential for energy storage and chemical synthesis, but it is difficult to convert it into other compounds (“fixing” nitrogen). This seminar will describe some challenges and opportunities of nitrogen fixation, as well as my students’ discoveries of how to break the ...
The state of video compression standards is strong and dynamic, and more compression is coming in their future. To explain why will start by presenting deployment and adoption of the two most recent video compression standards: AV1 and VVC. Will then discusses new deep learning-based video compression technologies that standards ...
Where: Santa ClaraCost: $5 General, Free for members
Saturday, 04/18/26
Butterfly Garden Volunteer Work Day at the EECHelp us with maintaining and improving the habitat and trails at the Environmental Education Center at the Don Edwards SF Bay NWR while enjoying wildlife and scenic views! Activities may include removing invasive plants, picking up litter, or maintaining trails! All gloves and tools will be provided, so just make ...
Where: AlvisoCost: Free
Earth Day 2026With the focus on "Species and Habitats" come learn how important the health of our watersheds are for wildlife and our communities and the small actions we can all take for a healthy Bay Area.Connect with our incredible conservation partners and local environmental organizations at interactive booths, where you can ...
Where: OaklandCost: Free with admission
Mt. Sutro Geology & Paleo TourLearn about fascinating geologic evidence contained in the rocks underneath Mt. Sutro of ancient island arcs, lost marine basins, oceanic trenches and subduction along the Pacific Ocean Ring of Fire and the important role played by radiolarian fossils contained in chert beds. All part of the interesting story of California's ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $25
PBC Earth Day EcoFest 2026Pacific Beach Coalition's annual Earth Day EcoFest is a free, family-friendly outdoor community event. Starting off the day at 9am across more than 15 site locations for cleanup and habitat restoration events across San Mateo County, the fun continues from 10:30am - 1:30pm with our main festival event at Pacifica ...
Where: PacificaCost: Free
2026 Earth Day Festival & Green Business Expo Join the fun and kick off Earth Month and SF Climate Week with a bang at the Yerba Buena Gardens 2026 Earth Day Festival! The San Francisco Green Business Program is hosting an exciting Green Business Expo in partnership with the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy and Climatebase. This will be ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
SkeptiCAMPTo quote our friends at the Manchester Skeptic Society, “you don’t need to be a published author, famous podcaster or professional communicator to get involved.” Just an interested skeptic.Attend, and/or consider presenting a 20 minute talk yourself.
NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.The discovery of this so-called exoplanet is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from ...
Where: Santa CruzCost: Free
Junior Rangers at the Refuge: Native Plant ProtectorsLove learning about new habitats? Curious about wildlife? Our Junior Rangers at the Refuge program is perfect for your family! Join us each month as we explore the Don Edwards SF Bay National Wildlife Refuge through fun, educational activities.This April, we'll learn about the hidden superpowers that help our California native species ...
Where: AlvisoCost: Free
'Climate Wayfinding'Join us for readings and a conversation about Dr. Wilkinson’s new book, Climate Wayfinding.As climate disruption reshapes landscapes, politics, and daily life, a deeper question lingers beneath the headlines: How do we live - fully, honestly, boldly - within this moment? Where do we turn for steadiness and imagination as ...
Water demand projections are essential for urban water supply planning. Yet, long-term demand projections are highly overestimated and uncertain, potentially warranting unneeded costly infrastructure, which may lead to irreversible environmental impacts and exacerbate water affordability outcomes. While demand forecasting methods have improved, uncertainty in long-term demand projections remains poorly understood. ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Speed & Scale’s Reality CheckIn 2021, legendary investor John Doerr outlined his plan to solve climate change in his bestseller Speed & Scale. The plan outlines 10 objectives, each with their own set of key results, to cut emissions to net zero. And in true John Doerr style, the results are to be measurable ...
From Ellie's LinkedIn Bio: "...I am the fisheries biologist for the United Anglers of Casa Grande High School (UACG), a student-founded conservation hatchery dedicated to the conservation of Steelhead Trout in the Petaluma Watershed. I primarily care for the steelhead trout reared in the facility, and instruct participating high school ...
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are driving the need for fundamentally new information processing paradigms that exceed the limits of existing nanoscale technologies in energy, performance, and functionality. Biological systems offer a compelling model, tightly coupling sensing, computation, and memory within distributed architectures that achieve remarkable energy efficiency and adaptability. ...
Gottesman, Kitaev, and Preskill proposed to encode a qubit in a remarkable wavefunction, which satisfy location and momentum constraints simultaneously. Such a state offers superior error correction, but is rather hard to achieve and stabilize. We propose a circuit architecture for a dissipatively error-corrected GKP qubit. The device consists of ...
In most condensed matter systems we think of electrons as delocalized particles that roam about the energy terrain of a material much like waves in the ocean. But what happens when Coulomb repulsion between electrons becomes the dominant energy in a material? In this regime you might expect electrons to ...
The promise of quantum is real, and we are beginning to see where this technology can have the greatest impact. Decades of quantum research and development point to one primary class of practical application for quantum computing next to cryptanalysis: the simulation of quantum systems, especially for chemistry and materials science. As we ...
Across the globe, more than 30 million people make their living collecting, sorting, and recycling what we throw away. Often overlooked, these waste pickers are increasingly recognized as a vital “green workforce,” helping reduce emissions and support more sustainable resource systems.?In this lecture, Kate O’Neill, Professor of Environmental Science, Policy ...
Across the globe, more than 30 million people make their living collecting, sorting, and recycling what we throw away. Often overlooked, these waste pickers are increasingly recognized as a vital “green workforce,” helping reduce emissions and support more sustainable resource systems.In this lecture, Kate O’Neill, Professor of Environmental Science, Policy ...
What is consciousness - and how might we describe it scientifically? Neuroscience can map neural activity with extraordinary detail, yet the relationship between electrical signals and subjective experience remains one of humanity’s most enduring questions.Mathematician and machine learning researcher Nina Miolane approaches this question from an unexpected direction: geometry. In ...
Chemically induced proximity of bimolecular complexes is a powerful modality to rewire signal transduction networks. Most extensively studied in the context of protein degradation, the full scope and potential of chemically induced proximity for novel targets and pharmacological mechanisms has yet to be realized. I will discuss structure-based strategies to ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Meet a Wildlife ScientistDid you know mountain lions are roaming the hills right here in the Bay Area? Come meet Alys Granados, Wildlife Ecologist for the Felidae Conservation Fund, an organization dedicated to protecting wild cats and their habitats, and hear all about her incredible work tracking and studying these majestic big cats ...
Where: San MateoCost: Free with admission
Who Pays? Private and Public Funding Innovation for Flooding and Sea Level Rise ResilienceAs climate change and sea level rise increase flood risk to shoreline and inland communities, the cost to adapt can seem daunting. Public dollars alone won’t cut it. In this session, thought leaders from the Bay Area to the East Coast will share insights for how we pay to address ...
Can gravity and extra directions of space emerge from systems that naively lack them? Holography - the celebrated AdS/CFT correspondence - predicts that this can happen via one magic ingredient: entanglement, or strong quantum correlations. I will present in an accessible manner recent advances on this longstanding theoretical idea, using ...
A key frontier of modern condensed matter is to harness light??"matter interaction to coherently engineer quantum states in materials. Under optical driving, quantum materials exhibit emergent many-body phenomena, from ultrafast switching to dynamical quantum states without equilibrium analogs. Progress hinges on using light to both uncover new nonequilibrium states and ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Nature-based solutions in the fight against Climate Change Secretary Wade Crowfoot (California Natural Resources Agency) will discuss California’s groundbreaking work on nature conservation. He will explore the State’s critical partnerships with American Indian Tribes, the creative ways that California is achieving climate and biodiversity goals and how California’s leadership is being recognized by the UN Climate and Biodiversity Conferences. The Secretary’s comments will be followed by a ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
Popping the Science Bubble: Chimpanzee alcohol consumption & animal opticsLearn about cutting-edge research happening at UC Berkeley, directly from the scientists themselves. Join Popping the Science Bubble at the Central Library in the second floor Mystery Room or join us virtually on Zoom: http://bit.ly/PtSBBerkeley (register at the link).This month's presentations will be:What the chimpanzee diet tells us about the ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
Next-Generation Pathology: How Is Technology Changing the Way We Diagnose Disease?Pathology - the study of disease through the examination of tissues and cells - is undergoing a technological transformation. New tools in imaging, computational analysis, and spatial biology now allow scientists to study how cells interact within the architecture of human tissue at unprecedented resolution. These advances are helping researchers ...
Wonderfest comes to San Francisco’s BookShop West Portal for a special author event featuring cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. In her latest book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein “embraces cosmic wonder and takes us on a mind-altering journey to the boundaries of the ...
Over the past three years, a collaborative partnership between community scientists and academic mycologists, organized through the Fungal Diversity Survey (FunDiS) and funded by the California Institute for Biodiversity, has transformed our understanding of California’s macrofungal diversity. Together, we have documented, DNA barcoded, and accessioned more than 11,000 fungal collections ...
Where: San FranciscoCost:
Wednesday, 04/22/26
The Frozen Frontier - A Journey into Antarctica - LivestreamAntarctica is the coldest, driest and windiest place on Earth, filled with geological marvels and remarkable wildlife. In celebration of Earth Day, join Road Scholar expert Nicole Flores for an introduction to this remote continent. Explore the secrets beneath its icy surface and its fascinating history. Meet the intrepid explorers ...
AI for Climate Adaptation and Disaster Response: Public Sector Pathways to ImpactArtificial intelligence is increasingly being applied to climate challenges, from wildfire detection and flood forecasting to public health surveillance and disaster response. But fully realizing that potential requires grappling with real barriers: under-resourced public agencies, fragmented data infrastructure, procurement and equity gaps, and the distance between what a tool can ...
From the reintroduction of beavers for natural flood management to the managed grazing of cattle for biodiversity gain, the inclusion-or use-of nonhumans in/as environmental interventions is gaining traction as ‘win-win’ governance techniques for the Anthropocene, associated with a policy turn towards ‘Nature-based Solutions’ (NbS) to climate change and biodiversity loss. ...
The emergence of large language models has prompted a surge of interest into theoretical models that might give us insight into both their successes and their shortcomings. We’ll give an overview of recent work in this direction, focusing on a surprising line of positive results that shows it is possible ...
Stanford Public Humanities invites you to join us for an event and lively conversation celebrating the release of historian Jessica Riskin's new book The Power of Life (Riverhead Books/Penguin, March 24, 2026). The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented figures in the history of science. Working in ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Virtual Skeptics on the PubThis is a casual night of socializing with fellow science-forward skeptics and with others inhabiting our oblate spheroidal planet.Please join us! This is a free event brought to you by Bay Area Skeptics. All are welcome.Click here to join.
Where: Cost: Free
Consumers and the Future of Energy AffordabilityThis panel will explore how rising energy costs, new technologies, evolving climate & energy policies are influencing households nationally.Moderated by award-winning energy reporter Mary Catherine O'Connor and featuring Neil Chatterjee, Former FERC Chairman, Chris Kemper, CEO of Palmetto, and Arnab Pal, Deploy Action, the discussion will examine the impact of ...
Where: San FranciscoCost:
Thursday, 04/23/26
Cortical Areas involved in motor control of the limbs: Plasticity within and across lifetimesForelimb morphology and use in mammals is extraordinarily diverse. Evolution has produced wings, flippers, hooves, paws and hands which are specialized for a variety of behaviors such as flying, swimming and grasping to name a few. While there is a wealth of data in human and non-human primates on the ...
Lina Li is Winokur Family Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University. She is a Scientific Advisor of Singularity Energy, Inc, a startup providing a suite of innovative products, developer APIs, and intelligent tools for companies to build the future of decarbonization solutions, and Elastro ...
Decarbonizing the electricity sector is essential for mitigating climate change, but planning low-carbon power systems under uncertainty requires balancing tradeoffs among costs, climate impacts, and socio-environmental considerations. In this talk, I present findings from a study of low-carbon power system pathways in Southern Africa under uncertainties in technology costs, socio-environmental ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
After Dark: Climate JourneysLearn about creative ways to navigate climate change, and don’t miss a preview of our new exhibits on local ecosystems.Ages 18+
Where: San FranciscoCost: $22.95
Fighting Wildfires from the Sky: Toward Safer, Around-the-Clock Aerial OperationsAircraft have been supporting wildfire response for decades - dropping water and retardant, tracking fire movement, and helping protect communities. Yet most aerial firefighting today is still limited to daytime operations using crewed aircraft, with only limited capability in challenging conditions like heavy smoke or low visibility. This leaves critical ...
