lectures

The new season of Science in the News starts next week with a great schedule of science lectures by Harvard grad students free and open to the public. If you're in the Boston area, definitely check it out! Here's the schedule: September 22: Evidence-based Medicine: A Case Study of Vaccines and Autism September 29: Bots That Mimic Bugs: Flying, Crawling, and Squishy Robots October 6: You Are What Your Mother Ate: The New Science of Epigenetics October 13: Beyond Agribusiness: New and Old Ways to Grow Food October 20: The Laser Turns 50: A Brief History and New Frontiers October 27: Forget-Me-…
A coral atoll, from Darwin's The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 1842. For those teeming millions near Hanover, N.H., here's notice that I'll be giving a talk at Dartmouth at 4pm today -- Thu, Feb 5 -- about Darwin's first, favorite, and (to me) most interesting theory, which was his theory about how coral reefs formed. This is the subject of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, and I'll be posting more about it next week, during the Blog for Darwin festival. But the short version -- and the topic of my talk -- is this: Darwin's coral…
I vaguely knew that the U.S. Geological Survey's Menlo Park office runs a series of public lectures, but I didn't realize they were all videotaped and archived online for my blogging convenience. Ace! Now we just need to chop them up into bits and put them on YouTube. Anyway, Thursday night's lecture was about the ongoing eruption of the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia (which Chris has covered in the past). You can watch it here. It's a little long, but quite suitable to put on as background material for your weekend housecleaning. The good science bits start about 15 minutes in. Now, I've got…