Alchemy is an annual San Francisco event, packed with interactive art installations built to connect and amaze you. Participation highly encouraged — but we know you won’t be able to resist picking up that joystick, paintbrush, or microphone. This year brings some new science-y flavored talks.

A plea for enhanced scientific literacy, Unscientific America urges those who care about the place of science in our society to take unprecedented action. We must begin to train a small army of ambassadors who can translate science’s message and make it relevant to the media, to politicians, and to the public in the broadest sense. An impassioned call to arms worthy of Snow’s original manifesto, this book lays the groundwork for reintegrating science into the public discourse–before it’s too late.

People often grow personal gardens, hoping for a handful of vegetables after a summer of work. And yet, with his own garden, a man with little biology training and severe test anxiety discovered the rules which govern plant, animal and human inheritance. Many think of Gregor Mendel as the monk-creator of tedious high school biology lectures on pea plant whatever. But the reasons Mendel worked for eight long years in a tiny monastery garden to discover the rules of heredity, rules that ultimately supported Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, are surprising.

But why does genetics “work”? We’ll discuss Mendel’s motivations, illustrate why meiosis (sex!) and Mendel are the same thing, and teach you how to follow your own inherited traits. (Can you roll your tongue? Do you have hairy knuckles? Did mom have an affair with the mailman?)