[15 Aug 2010 | No Comment | ]
Monday, 8/23 – A Star is Born

When: Monday, August 23rd 7-9 PM
What: A Star is Born
Who: Steven Stahler, Astrophysicist, UC Berkeley
Where: Atlas Cafe, 3049 20th St @ Alabama St. in the Mission District
The Deets:
On a clear night, away from city lights, the sky glows with thousands of stars. The number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone is one hundred billion, and there are countless galaxies like it. Starbirth is happening all around us, all the time. Somehow, Nature finds it extraordinarily easy to make these objects.

But how, exactly, are stars born? How did this process forge our present-day Universe, and how will it shape our destiny? Within the last few decades, astronomers have unraveled many of the key elements in this cosmic mystery. We now understand how star formation underlies not only the creation of galaxies, but also how it leads, as a byproduct, to orbiting planets like the Earth. Despite such basic advances, deep questions remain in this active field of research.

Dr. Steven Stahler is an astrophysicist at U. C. Berkeley. Raised in Maryland, he attended graduate school at Berkeley in physics. He was a professor at MIT before returning to the Bay Area in 1992. His research centers on the grand problem of star formation, and he coauthored the first textbook in this field. Steve is an accomplished artist, and especially delights in the deep esthetic appeal of his subject. This is an aspect he tries to convey in his numerous public appearances.

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Aliens »

[12 Aug 2009 | No Comment | ]

Seth Shostak

Seth Shostak…you are my new hero. What an event on Monday night! There was an incredible blend of science and humanity represented, as we continue to search for an answer to the question: “Are We Alone?”

40 years of the scientific search has been fruitless so far, but that does not daunt the hopes of our crowd last night. Almost everyone believed life exists out there, though not everyone was convinced we’ll find something considering we’ve only been broadcasting for 200 years. In either case, the search remains important as this seems to poke at a fundamental curiosity most of us share.
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General »

[5 Aug 2009 | No Comment | ]

Foraged Food
Local food has long ruled the roost here in the Bay Area. Slow Food Nation was started here, The Omnivore’s Dilemma was first posed here, and the farm to table dinners reign supreme. But the next evolution in local food is foraged food.

The idea of hunting for wild food of the land is crazy for someone like myself…I haven’t even adjusted to the farmers markets at this point. But when I ask Iso Rabins, founder of ForageSF, why eat wild…his first answer isn’t about climate change or connection to the land…it’s taste.
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Aliens »

[29 Jul 2009 | No Comment | ]

SETI@Home
You know the deal with Down to a Science, the cafes are meant to serve as a launching point for a conversation…at home, at work, on the MUNI….wherever.

SETI@Home is the posterchild for getting peeps involved in scientific research, at least while your screen saver is active. The project started back in 1999 to help explore the huge amount of data (requires teraflop/s of processing power)….the solution posed was a distributed computing concept. After a few attempts, SETI decided upon a background processing client that could be installed on a home computer.
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