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Adventures of a Plant Ecophysiologist: Studying How Tropical Forests Survive Drought

Marin Science Seminar for Teens & Community presents a free science event:

“Adventures of a Plant Ecophysiologist: Studying How Tropical Forests Survive Drought”
with Roxy Cruz of UC Berkeley

Costa Rican rain forest

Wednesday, November 20th, 2019, 7:30 – 8:30 pm

Terra Linda High School, 320 Nova Albion, San Rafael, CA – ROOM 207

Roxy Cruz in action

Roxy Cruz is a Plant Ecophysiologist, tree climber, and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. Her research takes her to Costa Rica and Peru where she studies how tropical forests respond to drought. She measures thresholds for plant survival to try and predict the fate of our tropical forests in the face of rapid changing climate.

Links:

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“Star Clusters: Many-Body Gravitational Laboratories” with Nicholas Rui of UC Berkeley

Marin Science Seminar for Teens & Community presents a free science event:

“Star Clusters: Many-Body Gravitational Laboratories” with Nicholas Rui of UC Berkeley

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019

7:30 – 8:30 pm

Terra Linda High School, 320 Nova Albion, San Rafael, CA – ROOM 207

Nicholas Rui is fourth-year physics/astrophysics undergraduate and aspiring science person at the University of California, Berkeley. You can find out more about him at his website at https://nicholasrui.com/research/.

Astrophysics at UC Berkeley

R.S.V.P. on Facebook

Join us & learn!

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Let’s Learn About Lysosomes! wth Dr. Gouri Yogalingam of Biomarin

Marin Science Seminar for Teens & Community presents another free science event:

“Let’s Learn About Lysosomes” with Gouri Yogalingam PhD of Biomarin Pharmaceuticals

Wednesday, November 8, 2019, Terra Linda High School, 320 Nova Albion, San Rafael, California, 94903, ROOM 207

Lysosomes were first identified by accident in the 1950’s by Christian de Duve, who described these sub-cellular organelles as “saclike structures surrounded by a membrane and filled with digestive enzymes”. De Duve won a Nobel prize for this discovery and since then a great deal has been learned about lysosomes. I will discuss how lysosomes can communicate with the rest of the cell to act as recycling centers of cellular waste material in good times. I will also talk about how lysosomes can act as overly-filled, toxic trash cans in bad times, contributing to cell death and the onset of disease.

Dr. Gouri Yogalingam

Dr. Yogalingam received her PhD from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in the field of lysosomal storage diseases. Her work contributed to the successful development of enzyme replacement therapy for the rare genetic disease, mucopolysaccharidosis type VI. She then completed post-doctoral research at Duke University and Stanford University, where she worked on understanding how lysosomes contribute to cancer progression and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Yogalingam is currently a Senior Scientist at Bio Marin Pharmaceutical in Novato working on the development of effective therapies for the treatment of genetically-defined diseases.

Links:

BioMarin

LinkedIn

Previous Marin Science Seminar talk

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How Dangerous are Microwaves? with Warren Wiscombe PhD of NASA Goddard

Title: “How Dangerous are Microwaves? The physics behind non-ionizing radiation and a tale of two books titled Zapped” with Warren Wiscombe Ph.D. of NASA Goddard

Date: Wed. October 16th, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Warren Wiscombe

Two books titled “Zapped” tell remarkably different stories, although both are about electromagnetic (em) radiation. One book, by a science journalist, tells a story based on 160 years of physics research on em radiation beginning with Faraday and Maxwell. The other cheerily recommends fear and loathing of em radiation based on cherrypicked factoids. In this talk, I wish to present the most basic facts in em radiation: what it is, how the energy of em radiation varies with wavelength, how em radiation interacts with matter, and the one over r-squared law. I also wish to discuss the real nature of science and how the same tactics that have been used to attack global warming science are used to attack a range of topics including nuclear power and em radiation. I will offer facts not fear, and will recommend, as the Greeks did, moderation in all things.

Bio: Warren Wiscombe got a BS in Physics from MIT and a PhD in Applied Math from Caltech. Starting in 1971, he spent his career working on radiative transfer aspects of climate, notably the interaction of sunlight with clouds and aerosols. From 1983 till retiring in 2013, he worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His core background is in e.m. radiation spanning wavelengths from UV to radio.

Links:

Facebook event: RSVP here

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AI, VR, & 3D: Amazing Applications for Understanding Physics – with David Levitt (9/25/19)

VR from Pantomime Corp.

Title: “AI, VR, & 3D: Amazing Applications for Understanding Physics” (plus learn about Swift mobile software development) with David Levitt of Pantomime Corp.

Date: Wed. September 25th, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Dr. Levitt will present on augmented/virtual reality and Artifical Intelligence, and will show how 3D animation helps us visualize Einstein’s theory of gravity. He will also give a pep talk about becoming a self-taught Swift mobile software developer.

Dr. David Levitt

Dr. David Levitt is a cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, virtual and augmented reality innovator, mobile software developer, entrepreneur, physicist and writer. He was on the founding team of the MIT Media Laboratory, on the team at VPL Research that created the first commercial virtual reality systems, and he was a co-founder of Atari research laboratories. Levitt’s doctoral thesis ‘A Representation for Musical Dialects’ includes algorithms for classical and jazz composition and improvisation, such as piano arrangements in Fats Waller’s style. Levitt holds patents for inventions in virtual and augmented reality, and intelligent media processing software. He earned his doctorate in Artificial Intelligence at MIT and his BS in Engineering and Applied Science at Yale. Prof. Levitt has taught at MIT, NYU and SRJC.

Links:

Click –> Facebook event for this presentation

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The Deeper Roots of Climate Skepticism with Warren Wiscombe PhD of NASA Goddard

Title: “Merchants of Doubt: The Deeper Roots of Climate Skepticism ” with Warren Wiscombe of NASA-Goddard

Date, Time, Location: Wednesday, February 13th, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Description:  Climate skepticism often appears superficial — just lazy people who have anointed themselves “climate scientists” without putting in the work required to earn that title.  But there is more to it.  We dig below the surface to uncover the roots of the phenomenon in the 1980s.  After the fall of the Soviet Union and the turn of China toward capitalism, a group of Cold Warrior scientists with no communists left to fight turned their fire instead on environmentalism (which in their minds equated to “big government and regulations”).  These people were strongly rooted in “free-market fundamentalism”, an economic philosophy going back to Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s.  Their rise coincided with that of Ayn Rand and her dramatizations of the woes inflicted on entrepreneurs by socialism. The movement had the backing of powerful, wealthy interests who founded and funded a dozen or more “institutes” devoted to spreading doubt about any science that might lead to government regulations.

Dr. Warren Wiscombe has done research in climate science since its birth in the early 1970s. He worked 30 years at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and before that in the Climate Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He taught climate and atmospheric science in several countries and universities. His interest turned to exoplanets in his last few years at NASA.

RSVP on Facebook here.

Links:

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Green Building with Barry Giles of BREEAM – To Be Rescheduled

Title: “Green Building Standards: How to Make Existing Buildings Healthier and Better for the Environment” with Barry Giles of BREEAM

Date, Time, Location: Wednesday, January 16th, TBA – CANCELLED DUE TO SEVERE WEATHER – 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Description:  Most of us spend about 90 percent of our time inside buildings of one sort or another –homes, offices, schools, or shopping centers. Despite the best endeavors from those involved in building design, construction and operations, buildings have a mostly negative effect on our health and well-being as the occupiers and on the environment. Climate change will have a major effect on how efficient buildings can be – or if they will even stand up to extreme weather events.

While we could just demolish all the existing buildings and start again, that’s not practical. So what can we do to increase our health and well-being and make buildings more resilient? How can we turn all the ‘ugly ducklings’ into ‘swans’.

Barry Giles, CEO of BRE America
Barry Giles, CEO of BRE America

Barry Giles has worked in virtually every aspect of the building industry —engineer, general contractor, systems operator and facilities supervisor. He helped the US Green Building Council create the LEED Operations and Maintenance rating system for existing buildings in 2003, and from that gained LEED Fellowship and an iconic status in the green building industry. In 2016 he was appointed CEO of BRE America to bring the BREEAM standard to the USA. BREEAM was the original green building rating system and today is the most widely used program worldwide with over 2.2 million registered buildings and over 560,000 certifications.

RSVP on Facebook here.

Links:

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Air Quality in the Bay Area and Around the World

Title: “Air Quality in the Bay and Around the World” with Kaitlyn Lieschke of Ramboll, Novato

Date, Time, Location: Wednesday, February 27th, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Description:  The air around us impacts the health and happiness of everyone in the community, but how do we know what it is that we’re breathing? Is there anyone making sure that the quality of our air is maintained? Come learn about the measurements, models and scientists dedicated to learning about and protecting your air quality, as well as how they do it!

Presenting for Fresh Air February: Kaitlyn Klieschke

Kaitlyn Lieschke is an atmospheric scientist, currently employed as an air quality analyst / consultant with Ramboll in Novato. Originally from Australia, she holds a Bachelor of Science Advanced (Honors) in Chemistry from the University of Wollongong. While in Australia she studied long-term trends in atmospheric composition Australia, the ozone hole over Antarctica and atmospheric composition over the Southern Ocean. Since moving to the Bay Area in 2016 she studied spatial and temporal changes in air quality around the Bay Area at UC Berkeley before joining the team at Ramboll. When she’s not working, Kaitlyn enjoys being outdoors in any capacity; hiking, climbing, scuba diving or traveling to new places.

RSVP on Facebook here

Links:

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Learn about the Higgs Boson with Dr. Heather Gray (Cal/LBL) Wed. 1/9/19

Title: “The Higgs Boson” with Dr. Heather Gray of UC Berkeley

Date, Time, Location: Wednesday, January 9th, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Description:  In 2012, the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. I will explain what this Higgs boson is and why it is so important that we spent 10 billion dollars to build an enormous collider (and detectors) to find it. I’ll introduce the complex experiments that we use to study the Higgs and explain how we actually go about measuring its properties. I will also review what we currently do and don’t know about the Higgs, while focusing on some of its weird features. We’ll conclude with a short discussion about what the Higgs boson might tell us about the future of the universe.

Professor Heather Gray of UC Berkeley

Heather Gray is an Assistant Professor in physics at UC Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley Lab. She splits her time between Berkeley and Geneva while working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. She specializes in the Higgs boson and also works on silicon pixel detectors and algorithms to figure out the paths of particles based on the information they leave in detectors. Heather is originally from Cape Town, South Africa, where she did her undergraduate degree and spent 7 years working for CERN in Switzerland. When not at work, she can usually be found in the mountains or the ocean.

RSVP on Facebook here.

Links:

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“Redwoods, Roots, and Fungi” with Claire Willing of Cal’s Dawson Lab

Title: “Redwoods, Roots, and Fungi: Exploring Plant Physiology and Ecology” with Claire Willing of UC Berkeley

with an opening presentation from students from the Marin School of Environmental Leadership (MSEL) on Air Pollution in the Bay Area (7:15 – 7:30 pm)

Date, Time, Location: Wednesday, November 14th, 2018; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Description: The plant microbiome has proven to be an essential and often overlooked aspect of plant physiological ecology. Plant interactions with microbes are thought to have enabled the transition of plants from aquatic to terrestrial systems and the co-evolution of these relationships has been shown to have important consequences for plant performance, nutrient cycling, and potentially even plant species ranges. However, our knowledge of these processes derives from only a few model systems. Claire’s dissertation research explores these relationships in coast redwood forests where, despite their notoriety, plant-microbial relationships remain unexplored. Redwoods are the largest and some of the oldest plants on Earth, yet their geographical ranges are very constrained. As such, redwood forests serve as an excellent system to explore plant-microbial interactions and how they might expand or limit species ranges.

Claire Willing is interested plant-fungal symbioses including with mycorrhizal fungi, a group symbiotic, root-associated fungi. Her work has taken her from throughout the coast redwood range up through the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and most recently, even to Brazil. Her overall interest is in linking fungal community ecology to plant physiological performance, a trend which she hopes to continue to explore throughout her future work.

RSVP on Facebook here.

Links:

Redwoods, Roots, and Fungi Talk Teaser from Marin Science Seminar on Vimeo.

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