Lectures

The California Academy of Sciences presents an evening of whales. Bill Keener and Jonathan Stern from the Golden Gate Cetacean Research organization talk with Robert Brill, the set designer from the San Francisco Opera, which recently staged the opera Moby-Dick. Also joining the conversation is Samuel Otter, a professor of English at U.C. Berkeley, Jonathan Stern who studies whales, and Bill Keener, an environmental lawyer and the former executive director of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito.

Nadav Ahituv, assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, discusses the future of genomic sequencing. He explores the current methods for analyzing the human genome, and describes the potential benefits of knowing exactly how our DNA affects our health. We are in the midst of a renaissance in the biological sciences, which is spurring the growth of brand new fields like functional and comparative genomics. These new fields are revealing novel insights into evolutionary biology, medicine, developmental biology and many other areas, transforming the way scientists look at life. Join the California Academy of Sciences to learn about genomics, hear about compelling current research, and explore the future of this rapidly advancing field.

We are in the midst of a renaissance in the biological sciences, which is spurring the growth of brand new fields like functional and comparative genomics. These new fields are revealing novel insights into evolutionary biology, medicine, developmental biology and many other areas, transforming the way scientists look at life. Join the California Academy of Sciences to learn about genomics, hear about compelling current research, and explore the future of this rapidly advancing field. Katherine Pollard received her Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley Division of Biostatistics under the supervision of Mark van der Laan. Her research at Berkeley included developing computationally intensive statistical methods for analysis of microarray data with applications in cancer biology. After graduating, she did a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Sandrine Dudoit. She developed Bioconductor open source software packages for clustering and multiple hypothesis testing. In 2003, she began a comparative genomics NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the labs of David Haussler and Todd Lowe in the Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. She was part of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium that published the sequence of the Chimp Genome, and she used this sequence to identify the fastest evolving regions in the human genome. In 2005, she joined the faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center and Department of Statistics. She moved to UCSF in Fall 2008.

Featuring Anne Wojcicki in conversation with Dr. Moira Gunn of NPR's Tech Nation. What will it mean when most of us can afford to have the information in our DNA—all six billion chemical letters of it—read, stored and available for analysis? Hear from 23andme co-founder Anne Wojcicki as she forges the path into a new era of personalized, gene-based data.

Terrance Gosliner Senior Curator and Dean of Science and Research Collections, Department of Invertebrate Zoology, California Academy of Sciences The California coast includes some of the most diverse marine habitats in the world, but the health of our coastal habitats is at risk. Climate change, pollution, and overfishing threaten to diminish the vitality of the marine ecosystems which play an important role in San Francisco Bay Area life.

Learn how research on chimpanzee and gorilla anatomy has been applied to understanding differences in females and males, the transformation of infants to adults, and evaluating fossil humans. This research even played a role in the creation of the movie "Tarzan of the Apes."

New anthropological research proves that our early ancestors Lucy and Selam climbed trees. So what, and what does that mean for humans? Lucy and Selam are famous skeletons that belong to Australopithecus afarensis, a direct ancestor of humans that lived between 4 and 3 million years ago. In this Pritzker lecture, Dr. Zeray Alemseged, Irvine Chair and Curator of Anthropology at the Academy, discusses the evidence for climbing behavior in A. afarensis based on new evidence from his own find "Selam," currently the most complete and earliest skeleton of a juvenile human ancestor.

Dr. Robert Sapolsky discusses his work as professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and as a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. His enviable gift for storytelling led the New York Times to print, "If you crossed Jane Goodall with a borscht-belt comedian, she might have written a book like A Primate's Memoir." Dr. Sapolsky's account of his early years as a field biologist. He is sure to dazzle and delight with tales of what it means to be human.

This event is the first part of a two-part discussion featuring Timothy Beatley, professor of sustainable communities at the University of Virginia, along with Dean Macris, former director of city planning for San Francisco, and Cathy Simon, design principal at Perkins+Will. Presented in partnership with Island Press.

Explore the mysteries of quantum mechanics, black holes, strings, branes, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions. In this engaging and concise introduction to the main ideas in string theory, Steven Gubser gives a quick tour of the basic laws of physics as we understand them today. And then, he demonstrates how string theory seeks to go beyond them. Read more at http://library.fora.tv/2010/09/07/Steven_Gubser_The_Little_Book_of_String_Theory#5VvSp3XT506kbFK9.99