There are many admirable conservation organizations around the world, but zoos and aquariums have a unique advantage: they welcome 175 million people through their gates each year. On a nice, affordable day out, these zoo-goers can be exposed to conservation messages at a variety of levels. In fact, zoos were ranked among the top most trusted messengers of wildlife conservation.

Zoos and aquariums are now on the forefront of wildlife protection. They raise and donate funds, send medical, educational and operational supplies to projects, raise awareness through lectures, classes and publications, donate expertise by sending vets and other staff to project sites and sell indigenous wares in their gift shops. They band together with other zoos in their ecosystem to work on local conservation issues, breed and release species, and provide medical attention to local wildlife. They are full service.

The conservation of wildlife is central to the mission of the Oakland Zoo as well, and we fully embrace the projects we are closest to. The Budongo Snare Removal Project in Uganda is a good example.

A chimp from the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda

This project protects endangered chimpanzees by providing a snare patrol and removal team, an educational outreach program and a means for getting protein for ex-poachers: goats!

The Oakland Zoo Conservation Fund has been the sole financial supporter of the project since 2001. The funding is raised through an evening event and silent auction, called For the Love of Primates, in February, giving us a chance to raise awareness about the project, as well as funds. Discovering Primates Day also happens in February, where guests participate in fun, hands-on stations and learn about all primates and what each of us can do to help them.

Kids participate in The Oakland Zoo's "ZooCamp"

In 2011, the Oakland Zoo’s ZooCamp selected the Budongo Snare Removal Project as their beneficiary, thereby designating one dollar of every camper registration as a donation to the project.

During the week, 1000 plus children donned in yellow t-shirts with the Budongo logo, connected to chimps and the project in a variety of ways. They visited our dynamic group of chimpanzees, created enrichment for them and participated in a theatrical, live presentation called Budongo Hour. Their ZooCamp gift was a Kibale Bead bracelet made by an artisan group in Uganda.

Meanwhile, an intrepid group of adults and an enthusiastic group of teens collected cameras, laptops, books, school supplies, medical supplies and notes of appreciation from staff and ZooCampers, and set sail for Uganda to visit the project. After a very warm welcome, each group delivered their goods, walked the forest with the snare patrol team, attended ex-poacher meetings, got schooled in their outreach programs, and experienced first-hand the joys and challenges of maintaining a successful conservation program. I think the highlight for many of us was the day spent working to de-worm the many goats in the program.

The Oakland Zoo team in Uganda

Back at the zoo, a new concept launched: Quarters for Conservation. This program donates $.25 from each zoo admission to one of three featured conservation programs, and in our inaugural year, the Budongo Snare Removal Project was selected. Visitors receive a token at the gate and vote for their favorite project at the conservation voting station. Signage and often a volunteer, enlighten all Oakland Zoo visitors about the plight of these Ugandan primates.

As we have reached a critical time in the history of conserving wildlife, now is the time for all of us to care and take action. It is fortunate that most zoos do just that. We look forward to creating more ways our zoo can fully embrace the Budongo Snare Removal Project and all of our planet’s precious wildlife.

Hypothetical Space Shuttle at Epsilon Eridani. Credit for base image: NASA

Once again I have drifted off thinking about the size and scale of space–the things in it and the distances between them–and once again have brought pen and paper, math, and a spreadsheet to bear on the question: are the stars in our destiny, or is the notion of physically reaching them (in person, at least) beyond the available realities?

With all of the science fiction stories devised to get their characters to other stars not only within their lifetimes, but sometimes within a few paltry days, it’s easy to think of interstellar travel as something we might eventually get around to, given the technology, time, and money. We just need to figure out how warp drive or hyperspace work, and how to exploit them, and we’re off!

But putting teleportation and wormhole expressways and their ilk on the shelf labeled, “Cool, but probably just fancy” for a moment, what are the Newtonian-Einsteinian requirements to get us to, say, the nearest known extrasolar planet, which orbits the star Epsilon Eridani, 10.4 light years away from us? It’s a gas giant planet larger than Jupiter and orbits well beyond its star’s habitable zone, but it’s a planet after all, and we star-seekers just love planets.

Now the math that will get us there. I had to assume a mass for our would-be starship, conservatively chosen as 2000 metric tons, or about the weight of the Space Shuttle. In reality that’s far too small a ship for any human interstellar journey, unless the crew are all frozen. And keep in mind, my calculation does not take into account the weight of any fuel we need to carry with us. I’m also choosing a top cruising (coasting) speed of one-tenth the speed of light, or 30,000 kilometers per second. A tenth light speed is pretty darned fast, but not so fast that we need to worry much about relativistic mass—that is, the increase in the spaceship’s effective mass when traveling a significant fraction of the speed of light.

If our engines can produce thrust sufficient to accelerate our 2000 ton spaceship at a rate of “1 gee”, or one Earth-gravity equivalent (~10 meters per second, per second), then to achieve a velocity of one-tenth light speed we’ll need to run those engines for about 35 days, non-stop. We should assume our engines are powered by nuclear fusion or even antimatter reaction (possible future technologies that today present technical challenges, but which aren’t on that shelf of sci-fi fancy).

The energy required for this 1-gee, 35-day engine burn of our 2000 ton spaceship is about 900,000,000,000,000 (yes, 900 trillion) MegaJoules, or 250 trillion kilowatt-hours. That’s the same amount of energy required to launch 20 million normal Space Shuttle flights to low Earth orbit, or almost twice the world’s annual energy consumption. And that’s just to get this little ship accelerated to cruising speed. We’d need another like amount of energy to slow it down to its destination in the Epsilon Eridani system.

As for how long the trip would take, forgetting the 35 days spent getting up to speed and the 35 days spent slowing down again, traveling 10.4 light years at one-tenth the speed of light would take 104 years, one way. (Although, moving at a tenth light speed, the trip would only feel like 103.5 years due to relativistic effects.)

What about the weight of fuel required to do the job? Forget normal rocket fuel; we’d need the energy contained in about 20 billion tons of it just to get to cruising speed—and that doesn’t take into account the mass of the fuel itself, which would also need to be accelerated. Two-thousand ton spacecraft + 20 billion tons of fuel = not practical.

If our engine is powered by hydrogen fusion, we may only need about 3000 tons of fuel (and I’m assuming our fuel is also our propellant—the mass we need to fling out of the engine to accelerate the ship by reaction force; probably not a conservative assumption, in reality).

And if we could use antimatter as our fuel, as does the Starship Enterprise, releasing energy by mixing equal parts antimatter with normal matter, we could carry in our fuel tanks as little as 5 tons of the stuff (plus, I think, 5 tons of normal matter to react with) to achieve cruising speed.

And of course double the fuel amounts if you plan to come to a stop at your destination, 104 years from now.

In summary: tiny cramped ship, 20 tons of antimatter/matter fuel to pack the necessary 500 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy, and 104 years to delivery you to the fabulous Epsilon Eridani system with its one known super-Jupiter sized planet. Anyone interested? Or should we leave space travel to the robot crowd….

The little rain we've had this year, thanks to La Nina, has still managed to trigger some important winter activities in nature. One of the joys of being a naturalist is venturing out with intrepid hikers — rain or shine — to catch the action.  On a recent rainy day at Redwood Regional Park, our three-mile hike followed the eastern side of the park, from Canyon Trail to East Ridge, then dropped down Prince Trail to the Stream Trail for the return trip.  Some of the things I love about this hike is touring three different habitats as you follow the route.  It's a physically demanding hike with a steep ascent at the start of the trail, so you get a little workout while you're out there.  I also appreciate the quiet seasonal beauty of the park with highlights that change throughout the year.  Some of the seasonal wonders you'll find in the park this time of year include fungus, migrating rainbow trout, and overwintering ladybugs.

Since the East Bay Regional Park District doesn't allow collecting of any natural resources, a fun alternative for fungi fans is "mushroom watching."  Most of us enjoy wildflowers without picking them, likewise there is an amazing diversity of fungus to learn about and appreciate.  The shapes range from round balls to your standard mushroom on a stem with  every shape in-between, along with multiple colors and patterns.  For a sampling of different types to look for, check out this website from further north at Redwood National Park.  It showcases the many types of fungi found in their park.  One of the amazing things about fungi is the extensive, web-like underground system, called mycelium, that gives rise to the fruiting body, or mushroom.  The mushroom's main job is to elevate the spores above ground level to allow them to be distributed so new organisms can start.  Scientific American reported that honey mushrooms, a species of fungus in Oregon, qualifies as both the largest and possibly oldest living thing.  See more about the honey mushrooms of Eastern Oregon in this article from Scientific American.

Another treat as you descend Prince Trail at the intersection with the Stream Trail is a large group of overwintering ladybugs.  We discovered hundreds clustering on fence posts, tree trunks, and on sunny days, you may find them flying about the clearings.  You can see them in action in this QUEST video, Ladybug Pajama Party.

Following the Stream Trail back along the canyon bottom, we kept a lookout for migrating rainbow trout.  When the creek rises it signals the adult rainbow trout to make the journey from San Leandro Reservoir to their natal creeks.  Redwood Creek is a tributary of San Leandro Creek, the place the first rainbow trout was collected and named by Dr. Gibbons from the California Academy of Natural Sciences in 1855.  Shortly after that, Lake Chabot dam was built effectively landlocking the anadramous fish but also preserving the genetic integrity.

So go out and try a rainy hike. You might discover some of the wonders that abound on a wet winter day!

To learn more about mushrooms check the Mycological Society of San Francisco's website.

Photo submitted to the Bear Valley Visitor Center in Point Reyes National Seashore by an unknown visitor.

On December 27, 2011, a hiker snapped some photos of a whale carcass stranded in a cove just south of Alamere Falls. Point Reyes ecologists forwarded the report to the Bay Area Marine Mammal Stranding Network team, a specialized group of volunteers and representatives from the California Academy of Sciences (which collects tissue samples and bones for its research collections) and the Marine Mammal Center (which leads any necropsy proceedings). In responding to such calls, their goal is to learn as much as possible from the animal's body. When you're talking about a body the size of a whale (literally), the logistics get complicated.

If you've ever hiked or biked to Alamere Falls, you'll know the beautiful spot is not easy to access. Luckily the team received special permission from the National Park Service to drive to Wildcat Camp, shortening their walk to a mile each way. Upon arriving at the scene, they quickly realized that between its location, the tide schedule, and ocean conditions, it would be impossible to access the whale during daylight hours. Unable to perform a necropsy to determine the cause of death, they left it to roll in the surf. This turned out to be a mixed blessing.

Photo submitted to the Bear Valley Visitor Center in Point Reyes National Seashore by an unknown visitor.

After just eleven days, the surf and surge had cleaned the skull and deposited it on the beach. The upside was that nature took care of the dirty work in record time. Typically to recover a skull, the team has to remove enough tissue by hand in order to transport the bones off the beach (not a task for the faint of heart). Then the skull is either buried or left to steep in a saltwater maceration tank for one to two months to finish the cleaning process. The downside to the "surf method" is that most of the smaller bones and tissue were lost in the ebb and flow.

Volunteer Rick James and Academy Collections Manager Moe Flannery of the Bay Area Marine Mammal Stranding Network towed the skull down the beach at Alamere Falls, using a cart rigged out of two dollies and some inflatable "beach wheels." Photo courtesy of California Academy of Sciences.

A week later, the tides were right to collect the skull specimen, estimated at 200 pounds. The team sought special permission to drive to a point just one mile from the skull, greatly reducing the distance they needed to carry the heavy skull. It took five people two hours and a cart rigged from "beach wheels" and a pair of dollies to get the skull to their truck.

Today, the skull is degreasing on the Academy's living roof, visible to museum-goers from the viewing deck. Over the course of the next year, its weight is expected to decrease by about half as rain and gravity work the grease out of the bones, providing nutrients for the native plants below.

When complete, the skull will be the largest of five in the Academy's mammalogy collection, and the first collected since 1992.

For the scientific community, specimens like this one serve as a record of an animal at a specific location and time, as part of a valuable library of life. For future generations, it can be used to help answer questions about the health of whale populations through time, phylogenetic relationships, even what our ancestors used to eat.

The minke whale population is considered stable through most of its range, with an estimated 500-1,000 animals along the California-Oregon-Washington coastline. Beachgoers in the Bay Area should note that all marine mammals are protected by federal law, even after death. If you spot a dead marine mammal, contact the Academy's Ornithology & Mammalogy Department. For sick or injured marine mammals, please contact The Marine Mammal Center.

Orion rising in Death Valley - Credit: Ben Burress

What brings this on? Well, the skies of Death Valley, actually, which I just returned from (Death Valley, not its skies!) over the holiday break. My daughter and I went down there, mainly to crawl around the sand dunes and canyons, visit sites of the Gold Rush pioneers who gave the valley its [English] name, and get another good, up-close look at the raw Earth….

…but, as always, at night, when the campfire sparks warmly, I end up looking to the stars, which are extraordinarily bright in the dark desert skies. And I just get to thinking…again….

My touchstone on the vastness of the Universe is the knowledge that all the stars we can see in the night sky, with our unaided eyes, are quite starkly the closest things to us in the Universe—and even from those objects, light, traveling at 186,300 miles per second, takes years, decades, even centuries just to reach us. These "local neighborhood" stars are all within our Milky Way galaxy, and all among the very closest of them.

So, the stars of the night sky are a sort of "front drop"—like a big sheet of paper with stars printed on it, held before us–and the stars and galaxies of the rest of the Universe, beyond this "front drop," are too far away for our eyes to perceive their light (without the help of a telescope).

Trying to put the scale into perspective (trying very hard!), if this "sheet of paper" with stars printed on it, held in front of our collective Earthly "face", was, say, 1000 light years away (6000 trillion miles—which is actually about the greatest distance that our unassisted eyes can detect individual stars, and only stars of the most luminous type at that), this would be analogous in scale to an individual person holding a star-printed sheet of paper about two tenths of an inch before their eyes (yeah, I know, too close to focus on the printed stars…), with the surrounding Bay Area representing "the rest of the Universe."

What? I didn’t hear you…. What I said was, if the entire Bay Area represents the Universe, then the stars we can see with our eyes are found within two tenths of an inch of our eyeballs…. Even the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object unaided human eyes can perceive (and which I did spot as a very faint smudge on the dark Death Valley sky!), at a distance of about 2.5 million light years, would be less than 4 feet away from you in your Bay-Area-scaled Universe.

It’s here that my mind boggles, and it becomes doubtful to me that our brains have the capacity to really wrap around the Universal scale. It’s hard enough imagining the distances to the "nearby" local stars, a space in which light spends centuries crossing; trying to see beyond that big sheet of paper, to the 13.7 billion light year extent of space and time…boggle…fail….

So, the next time you find yourself gazing at the stars, remember that those are just the spots flittering around in front of our collective eyeball, no more than an eyelash away….

And if that makes you feel small, cheer up; you live in a Universe that is altogether astonishing and magnificent, and not just a run-of-the-mill Universe of comprehendible size. I feel honored and proud….

Animals are doing surprisingly well in the radioactive areas around Chernobyl.

Imagine people’s worst fears are realized and the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon here in California has a Chernobyl-style meltdown. The effects on people are obvious: high rates of thyroid and other cancers, permanent resettlement elsewhere, increased rates of birth defects and so on. But as the area around Chernobyl is showing, the effects on the environment may be more subtle.

Over the break I watched a Nature special called, "Radioactive Wolves". This is a documentary about wildlife in a radioactive exclusion zone around Chernobyl.

Even though the area around Chernobyl is still so contaminated that humans can only go in for limited amounts of time, the wildlife appears to be doing surprisingly well. Birth defects are higher than in surrounding areas but life is thriving. Wolves are doing great, beavers have returned and everything looks hunky dory.

This seemed strange to me. I would think that so much radiation should be having pretty severe effects on these animals. And as noted in this in this NIH study, for certain individuals it definitely is.

The difference is in perspective. For the individual, the area around Chernobyl is terrible. Your kids have a higher rate of being stillborn or having birth defects, you have a much higher rate of developing various cancers, and so on. But for the species as a whole, things aren’t so bad. The higher background radiation appears to hardly be affecting their numbers at all.

Now this isn’t to say that the initial fallout wasn’t catastrophic to wildlife. It was. Untold numbers of animals died a terrible death in Chernobyl’s aftermath.

For the lucky survivors and new immigrants, though, Chernobyl is a different story. It is a chance to live a life without human interference. At least for now it looks like the high background radiation is preferable to man for these animals.

It is important that scientists keep studying this ecosystem though. The DNA of the animals in this area are under constant attack from the radiation. There may come a tipping point where the genetic burden becomes too high and populations start to crash. We’ll have to wait and see.

Additional Reading: NY Times Review of Radioactive Wolves

Asteroid Vesta - Images from the Dawn Spacecraft

With the New Horizons spacecraft hurtling toward its 2014 encounter with Pluto, and with the Dawn spacecraft now at its most up-close and personal encounter with Vesta, we are in the process of learning scads of information about two objects that are among the poorest understood and least explored bodies in the Solar System.

Before NASA's Dawn settled into orbit around the asteroid Vesta—the second largest object in the Main Asteroid Belt, after the Dwarf Planet Ceres—we knew very little about it. That it is mega-mountain of rock 330 miles across that rotates rather quickly in space and is slightly egg-shaped, these things we knew—but not much more.

What Dawn has revealed to us, however, is a tiny world with unexpected complexities, inside and out.

Inside, Vesta's anatomy may not be unlike Earth and the other Terrestrial planets, which all developed cores heavy with iron and mantles and crusts made of lighter silicate rocks when they were young and molten. This "differentiation" occurs for the same reason that gold particles sink to the bottom of a gold-pan as a prospector shakes the water-sand slurry back and forth: the gold is denser, the sand lighter, so the materials separate.

Outside, Vesta's surface offers amazing landscape vista opportunities for a future robot lander or astronaut: complex topography of valleys, cliffs, troughs, ridges, and a huge mountain, with elevation differences deviating above and below the global average elevation by as much as 15 miles—that's three Mount Everests, or two Marianas Trenches!

Parts of the surface resemble some of the basaltic formations of cooled lava in Hawaii, suggesting that, long ago, there may have been active volcanoes on Vesta, spewing out lava to shape the young surface.

What a sight it must have been—and it makes me smile when I think about the children's book "The Little Prince." My favorite part of that story was the description of how the Prince, on his little asteroid world (which was only twenty or thirty feet across, I'd guess), cooked his meals on a frying pan held over a miniature volcano, which he made sure to keep clean and functional with a periodic cleaning using a giant Q-tip….

All of these revelations—the core/mantle differentiation, complicated geography, possible tectonic features, and signs of past volcanism–have prompted some scientists to ask, should Vesta be reclassified as a Dwarf Planet, along with Ceres, Pluto, and the others thus dubbed?

I have on my desk at work a letter from a 3rd Grader. It starts, "I think Pluto should be a planet (not a Dwarf Planet)…." The letter continues in richer detail and quite a bit of passionate defense of Pluto, but I was struck by the fact that this 3rd Grader was, at the time Pluto was originally "demoted," three years old. (And some thought the Pluto controversy would end with the previous generation of kids….)

But it did get me wondering. If Dawn has changed our view of Vesta from a mere large asteroid to something maybe worthy of promotion to Dwarf Planet, what might New Horizons do to our current view of Pluto? I'm not suggesting the International Astronomical Union will reinstate Pluto as a planet when we get our first up-close images of its surface—after all, no matter what Pluto's surface may hold in store for us, this Dwarf Planet can't meet one of the three conditions for planethood: being massive enough to clear the region of space in which it revolves. Alas, Pluto shares its orbital space with other objects.

But I fully expect that New Horizons will change our perspective on Pluto, as Dawn is doing for Vesta. The more we learn of the rich details of mysterious places like these, the more, I think, we regard them as "worlds"—regardless of their classification as asteroid, dwarf planet, or planet.

"Attack of the Alien Invaders," produced by WVIZ/PBS, was first created as an educational series called "LSI: Life Science Investigation."

Lake Erie is considered to be the most productive of all five of the Great Lakes.Within its waters are diverse and interdependent plants and animals that make up an intricate web of life. Mostly due to human carelessness, the lake has become home to an increasing number of non-native plants, animals, and micro-organisms which threaten the balance of the entire ecosystem.

In the WVIZ/PBS program, Attack of the Alien Invaders, Dante Centuori, Director of Creative Productions at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio, traveled in and around Lake Erie visiting with scientists and government officials who are investigating Lake Erie’s ecosystem, the challenges it has faced in the past, as well as those it may face in the future. Of particular interest was one of the biggest potential threats to the lake- a voracious invasive species collectively called “Asian carp.”

Bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis) and Silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) were first introduced to the U.S. in the 1970s as a chemical-free and “environmentally friendly” way of cleaning up algae in southern fish farms and water treatment plants. During the Mississippi River floods of the early 1990s, these fish escaped into “The Big River” and its tributaries. Since then, these big, hungry, and prolific fish have made their way north all the way up to the back door of the Great Lakes. If they enter the Great Lakes, it is feared that these fish will continue on to Lake Erie where they could further disrupt the Great Lakes’ most productive ecosystem, with unknown long-term consequences.

John Hageman from Ohio State's Stone Laboratory shows Dante Centuori an invasive Silver Carp.

Dante first visited Stone Laboratory, a research facility located in the Western Basin of Lake Erie in Put-in-Bay, Ohio. There, he met John Hageman who displayed, and dissected a Silver carp; revealing an anatomical structure that makes these fish particularly threatening to the food energy balance so important to Lake Erie’s native inhabitants. Dante then accompanied another Stone Lab researcher on a good old fashioned Lake Erie “fish trawl” where he came across many of the lake’s native and invasive species– such as the omnipresent zebra mussel and the abundant quagga mussel, two detrimental invasives brought in to the Great Lakes by the ballast water of ocean-going vessels.

Dante continued on to Old Woman Creek, a national research center and fresh water estuary in nearby Huron, Ohio, where he encountered some frisky common carp (Cyprinus carpio) whose behavior may help scientists predict what may happen to Ohio’s interior rivers and streams, if their distant relatives from the east choose to join them. Next, he returned to Stone Lab to investigate how the Bighead and Silver carp have influenced and impacted the native species of the Mississippi and Illinois River ecosystems. He next traveled to Lake Erie’s Central Basin- to Cleveland, Ohio for a rendezvous with a federal employee who explained how Asian carp are being monitored and controlled in one of the most probable points of entry into the Great Lakes, Chicago’s Shipping and Sanitary Canal at the southern end of Lake Michigan.

Lastly, Dante returned to Put-In-Bay where he talked with Jeff Tyson of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, who described the management techniques used to control one of the harmful invasive species in Lake Erie; the Sea Lamprey. Could techniques similar to those used to control the Lamprey be applied in the event of an Asian carp invasion? What other plans are in place if these strange and dangerous "jumping fish" make it to Lake Erie? If they do, and these strategies don’t work, what’s next? Even though each expert interviewed had his or her own theory, in the end, they all agreed that it is not a scenario that they’d want to see play out.

Before Attack of the Alien Invaders was broadcasted to a general audience in January of 2011, WVIZ Education produced “LSI: Life Science Investigation,” a multi-media resource created for the classroom. Scott Barber, a teacher in Berea, Ohio, explained how this “fish story,” presented as an interactive mystery, and accompanying classroom resources on the web, has helped his students learn core life science concepts.

Be amazed at the Bay Area Science Festival! Photo: Bay Area Science Festival.

The Bay Area Science Festival, a 10-day celebration of science, starts this week. There are over 50 exciting events throughout the Bay Area, including hikes, lectures, and concerts. From a day of hands-on activities with Stanford’s Genetics department to a hawk talk in the Marin Headlands, from an exploration of food at the farmers’ market to a screening of the movie Contact with astronomer Jill Tarter (on whom Jodie Foster’s character was based), there is something for everyone.

Here are some of the highlights: MythBuster Adam Savage will talk with author Mary Roach about her book Packing for Mars. Science writer Carl Zimmer will talk with two UCSF scientists about tiny friends and foes in Gut Check: The Hidden World of Microbes. RadioLab will be live at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

Check out Dinosaurs vs. Robots at the Lawrence Hall of Science on Sunday, October 30.

At Dinosaurs vs. Robots at the Lawrence Hall of Science, you can do hands-on activities to see for yourself which is the most awesome: paleontology or engineering. KQED will moderate a discussion, The Challenge and Promise of Artificial Intelligence, with researchers from Microsoft and Google at the Computer History Museum in San Jose. And there are three Discovery Days, packed with free shows, exhibits, and games. The Discovery Days are at Cal State East Bay (10/29), Infineon Raceway (11/5), and AT&T Park (11/6). If you go, keep an eye out for QUEST’s table! Find more fun stuff on the calendar—be sure to click over to see the events in November, too.

The Bay Area Science Festival is part of a growing movement to celebrate science in the community. The festivals bring together different organizations and individuals to engage diverse audiences in science. The Bay Area Science Festival is organized by the Science and Heath Education Partnership at the University of California, San Francisco—along with dozens of partners. Science festivals started in the UK; now there are annual festivals in Philadelphia and Cambridge, Mass. And last year the first USA Science and Engineering Festival descended on the National Mall in Washington DC. To find a science festival near you, check out this map.

I’ll be representing the Lawrence Hall of Science at the Discovery Day in AT&T Park on Sunday November 6—the Festival’s finale. Hope to see you there!