In Partnership With The San Francisco Public Library
Earthquake! Be Prepared.
Dr. Matt Springer,
Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF

Wednesday, May 30th 6:00 pm at the Koret Auditorium
The California Academy of Sciences is celebrating the launch of our new exhibit Earthquake! by partnering with the San Francisco Public Library to host a talk about how you can prepare for the next “big one”. Dr. Springer will give a talk with accompanying slide show about precautions that can be taken to lessen the damage from an earthquake at home and work. His presentation includes images from his own home suggesting measures you can employ to prepare for the next temblor that ranges from the very simple to rather complex strategies. Don't miss this chance to learn what you can do to protect yourself during the next earthquake and hear a bit about the Academy’s new exhibit.

Reservations: This is a free event at the The San Francisco Public Library Main. Seating is limited. Please reserve a seat online or call 415-379-8000

Conservation Photography Workshop
Digital Asset Management and Adobe Lightroom 4
Gary Sharlow
Education Manager and Photographer

Sunday, June 3rd, 2012 from 1:00 - 4:00 pm
In this workshop you will be taken through the steps of setting up Adobe Lightroom for the first time all. Many professional photographers and photo editors identify this as the single most important step in their photographic workflow. It will be presented in a way that it can be useful no matter what your level of photographic expertise. We will cover the basic features of the library mode and how to organize your collection including the use of external drives. There will be an additional presentation about using your photos for conservation and how you can help effect change and protect the natural world through your passion for nature photography.

Note: We will meet at the Business Reception Desk at the backdoor of the Academy at 12:45pm. Feel free to bring your laptops with Adobe LR4 (Which does have a trials period option.)

Reservations: Members: $40, Adults: $50 ~ For ages 18+ Space is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Benjamin Dean Lecture
New Views of Solar Coronal Mass Ejections: Understanding the Origins of Space Weather
Dr. Thomas Berger
Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory

Monday, June 4th, 2012 at 7:30pm, Planetarium
In the past five years solar physics has entered a golden age in which visible light, extreme ultraviolet (EUV), and X-ray solar telescopes are viewing the Sun continuously, and from multiple angles, from space. Dr. Berger will show recent observations from the Japanese/US/UK Hinode mission, and the NASA STEREO and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) missions that reveal strange new flows in solar prominences and coronal cavities, the structures that comprise so-called "coronal mass ejections" or CMEs. CMEs are the drivers of all large particle and magnetic storms in the solar system and understanding, and ultimately predicting, this "space weather" is a major goal of modern space physics.

Reservations:Adults $12, Seniors $10, Academy Members $6. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

In Conversation
Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
Mary Roach chats with Florence Williams

Thursday June 7th, 2012 at 7:30pm in the Forum
An engaging expose about an incredible, life-giving organ and its imperiled modern fate. “BREASTS is a smart, witty natural history of the body and health. At a time when all things female seem to frighten those in power, Florence Williams offers an intelligent antidote. She is more than a trustworthy writer. She is a reasoned intelligence with a sense of humor.” —Terry Tempest Williams. The breast is an evolutionary masterpiece, but in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier and attracting newfangled chemicals. What makes breasts so mercurial – and so vulnerable? The intrepid science journalist Florence Williams sets out to uncover the latest science from the fields of anthropology, biology, and medicine. Her investigation follows the life cycle of the breast from puberty to pregnancy to menopause, bringing her from a plastic surgeon’s office where she learns about the importance of cup size in Texas to a lab where she discovers the presence of environmental toxins in her own breast milk. All this with a splash of Mary Roach to boot!

Reservations: Adults: $15. Ages 21+ with ID as it takes place during NightLife. Seating is limited at the lecture and guests will be permitted to enjoy NightLife after the program. Please buy a ticket online or call (415) 379-8000.

Pritzker Lecture
What a Plant Knows
Dr. Daniel Chamovitz
Director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 7:00pm
How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it feel an insect’s spindly legs? How do flowers know when it’s spring? Can they actually remember the weather? And do they care if you play them Led Zeppelin or Bach? From Darwin’s early fascination with stems and vines to Little Shop of Horrors, we have always marveled at plant diversity and form. Now, in What a Plant Knows, the renowned biologist Daniel Chamovitz presents an intriguing and refreshing look at how plants experience the world. Highlighting the latest research in plant science, he takes us into the lives of different types of plants, and draws parallels with the human senses to reveal that we have much more in common with sunflowers and oak trees than we may realize.

Reservations: Free To Academy Members, Adults $12, Seniors $10. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Benjamin Dean Lecture
The Mars Science Laboratory Mission
Dr. David Blake
Exobiology Branch, NASA Ames Research Center

Monday, July 9th, 2012 at 7:30pm, Planetarium
The past 15 years of Mars exploration - by landers, rovers and orbiting spacecraft - has yielded a treasure trove of knowledge about the Red Planet. Each successive mission has carried with it a more capable, refined and nuanced science payload, building on the discoveries of its predecessors. The Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity is currently en route to Mars, to arrive at Gale Crater on Aug. 5th, 2012. Curiosity is the most sophisticated and capable rover yet and it will provide us with new knowledge of Mars' present climate and geology, and clues to its early habitability.

Reservations:Adults $12, Seniors $10, Academy Members $6. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Conservation Photography Field Excursion and Workshop
Exploring The Eastern Sierras
Gary Sharlow, Education Manager, Photographer
Geoff Willard, Education Manager, Natural History Guide

Sunday July 15th - Tuesday July 17th Sunrise to Sunset
The Sierra Nevada is a photographer's dreamscape. John Muir famously referred to it as 'the Range of Light,' and Ansel Adams' stunning photos made the beauty of the Sierra Range known around the world. Immerse yourself in the practice of Conservation Photography in this special field excursion. In 3 days, we will explore the landscape and wildlife diversity of the Eastern Sierra to include Owens Valley, Mono Lake and Yosemite National Park where we will grapple with the area's complicated water and conservation history, and gain invaluable insight into how to capture the landscape through your lens. By the end of the trip, we aim to help each participant complete a photo series that tells a visually-captivating story of the land, its people, its past and future. Moderate hiking is to be expected with free time during the middle of the day for adventuring.

Learn More…

Reservations: Early bird tickets are $350 for Members, $400 for Adults (through June 21st); then, $400 for Members, $450 for Adults. Please reserve a space online or call 415.379.8000 Minimum 4 people, Maximum 18. This is a non-refundable event. (Note: Food, lodging, park entrance fees and transportation not included.)

Benjamin Dean Lecture
Planets or Stars? - The Dark Universe of Brown Dwarfs
Prof. Adam Burgasser
Center for Astrophysics and Space Science, UC San Diego

Monday, August 6th, 2012 at 7:30pm, Planetarium
For thousands of years, humans have distinguished two types of bright celestial lights: the firmament of the fixed stars and the clockwork machinations of the wandering planets. With the discovery of a vast population of brown dwarfs - low-mass objects exhibiting both stellar and planetary characteristics - these long-held distinctions have been upended, revealing a continuum of gas giants spanning Jupiter to the Sun. Prof. Burgasser will describe the history of brown dwarf science, from their prediction as dark matter candidates in the 1960s to their discovery as the Sun's nearest neighbors n the 1990s. He'll then reveal their many fascinating properties, from interiors of metallic hydrogen to storms of molten iron, and report on the recent discovery of "room-temperature" stars with the WISE infrared satellite mission.

Reservations:Adults $12, Seniors $10, Academy Members $6. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Benjamin Dean Lecture
Hubble's Greatest Hits
Dr. Chris Lintott
Department of Physics at University of Oxford

Monday, October 8th, 2012 at 7:30pm
The Hubble Space Telescope is the best known telescope in history, and the most successful. Its nearly 20 years of history have produced thousands of papers, and hundreds of thousands of images. Reviewing them all would take a lifetime, so luckily astronomer Dr. Chris Lintott has sorted through the archives to bring you his top ten Hubble images. Ranging from new views of our own little Solar System, through the first glimpses of worlds around other stars, this cosmic tour will make use of the incredible projection capabilities of the Grainger Sky Theatre to take Dr. Lintott's audience to the most distant galaxies.

Reservations:Adults $12, Seniors $10, Academy Members $6. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Conservation Photography

Conservation photography is a vision of photography that has a long history with a new purpose. A conservation photographer's work begins once they click the shutter. It's what you do with these images that matters as it takes you into the active role of affecting conservation for the natural world.

Digital Asset Management and Adobe Lightroom 4
Gary Sharlow
Education Manager and Photographer

Sunday, June 3rd, 2012 from 1:00 - 4:00 pm
In this workshop you will be taken through the steps of setting up Adobe Lightroom for the first time all. Many professional photographers and photo editors identify this as the single most important step in their photographic workflow. It will be presented in a way that it can be useful no matter what your level of photographic expertise. We will cover the basic features of the library mode and how to organize your collection including the use of external drives. There will be an additional presentation about using your photos for conservation and how you can help effect change and protect the natural world through your passion for nature photography.

Note: We will meet at the Business Reception Desk at the backdoor of the Academy at 12:45pm. Feel free to bring your laptops with Adobe LR4 (Which does have a trials period option.)

Reservations: Members: $40, Adults: $50 ~ For ages 18+ Space is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Conservation Photography Field Excursion and Workshop
Exploring The Eastern Sierras
Gary Sharlow, Education Manager, Photographer
Geoff Willard, Education Manager, Natural History Guide

Sunday July 15th - Tuesday July 17th Sunrise to Sunset
The Sierra Nevada is a photographer's dreamscape. John Muir famously referred to it as 'the Range of Light,' and Ansel Adams' stunning photos made the beauty of the Sierra Range known around the world. Immerse yourself in the practice of Conservation Photography in this special field excursion. In 3 days, we will explore the landscape and wildlife diversity of the Eastern Sierra to include Owens Valley, Mono Lake and Yosemite National Park where we will grapple with the area's complicated water and conservation history, and gain invaluable insight into how to capture the landscape through your lens. By the end of the trip, we aim to help each participant complete a photo series that tells a visually-captivating story of the land, its people, its past and future. Moderate hiking is to be expected with free time during the middle of the day for adventuring.

Learn More…

Reservations: Early bird tickets are $350 for Members, $400 for Adults (through June 21st); then, $400 for Members, $450 for Adults. Please reserve a space online or call 415.379.8000 Minimum 4 people, Maximum 18. This is a non-refundable event. (Note: Food, lodging, park entrance fees and transportation not included.)

Our Real World Meetup Community

Consider this your invitation to join our virtual community that can serve as way for all of us to stay in touch as a photography community. If you who are new to Meetup, they describe their service as such: “Meetup.com helps groups of people with shared interests plan meetings and form offline clubs in local communities around the world.” We would love to have you join our group and spread the word to fellow photographers. We can use this platform to announce free real world gatherings to grow our community and plan times to get together with new friends that you may have made through the Academy photography workshops. Speaking of workshops, we’ll also announce upcoming Academy workshops through the service as well as on the Academy site. We hope you will join the group and spread the word so we can grow our community.

Please visit us online so we can make plans to get together in the real world!

http://www.meetup.com/conservation-photography/

Conservation Photography Flickr Pool

The second most requested thing from our workshop participants, beyond ways to continue to get together in person, has been for ways to post the images taken in our workshops to an online site where we could offer each other feedback on our images and technique. This can also be used to open up topics of conversation about anything photography related. We hope you will consider posting some of the images you took through our workshops, and we look forward to seeing more of your nature related photography through this group. A bonus of contributing to the flickr pool is that they joined forces with Getty images giving you a professional service from which to sell your images. If you’re good, they will find you!

Please join the group at our Flickr pool We look forward to sharing images and comments with you.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/calacademy-conservation/

iNaturalist Identification Database

From the inventors of the inaturalist.org website: "From hikers to hunters, birders to beach-combers, the world is filled with naturalists, and many of us record what we find. What if all those observations could be shared online? You might discover someone who finds beautiful wildflowers at your favorite birding spot, or learn about the birds you see on the way to work. If enough people recorded their observations, it would be like a living record of life on Earth that scientists and land managers could use to monitor changes in biodiversity, and that anyone could use to learn more about nature. That's the vision behind iNaturalist.org. So if you like recording your findings from the outdoors, or if you just like learning about life, join us! "

Please visit our "project" page to join the effort to explore, explain and protect the natural world.

Pritzker Lectures 

Free to Academy members, the Pritzker lecture series features engaging speakers from the Bay Area and beyond. Topics cover a wide range of subjects related to the Academy's mission to "explore, explain and protect the natural world."

Pritzker Lecture
What a Plant Knows
Dr. Daniel Chamovitz
Director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 7:00pm
How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it feel an insect’s spindly legs? How do flowers know when it’s spring? Can they actually remember the weather? And do they care if you play them Led Zeppelin or Bach? From Darwin’s early fascination with stems and vines to Little Shop of Horrors, we have always marveled at plant diversity and form. Now, in What a Plant Knows, the renowned biologist Daniel Chamovitz presents an intriguing and refreshing look at how plants experience the world. Highlighting the latest research in plant science, he takes us into the lives of different types of plants, and draws parallels with the human senses to reveal that we have much more in common with sunflowers and oak trees than we may realize.

Reservations: Free To Academy Members, Adults $12, Seniors $10. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Benjamin Dean Lectures

This series of talks for the general public is given by noted scientists in the fields of astronomy and space science. It is held in the Morrison Planetarium, home of the most accurate and interactive digital Universe ever created, which is shown on the world's largest all-digital dome.

New Views of Solar Coronal Mass Ejections: Understanding the Origins of Space Weather
Dr. Thomas Berger
Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory

Monday, June 4th, 2012 at 7:30pm, Planetarium
In the past five years solar physics has entered a golden age in which visible light, extreme ultraviolet (EUV), and X-ray solar telescopes are viewing the Sun continuously, and from multiple angles, from space. Dr. Berger will show recent observations from the Japanese/US/UK Hinode mission, and the NASA STEREO and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) missions that reveal strange new flows in solar prominences and coronal cavities, the structures that comprise so-called "coronal mass ejections" or CMEs. CMEs are the drivers of all large particle and magnetic storms in the solar system and understanding, and ultimately predicting, this "space weather" is a major goal of modern space physics.

Reservations:Adults $12, Seniors $10, Academy Members $6. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

The Mars Science Laboratory Mission
Dr. David Blake
Exobiology Branch, NASA Ames Research Center

Monday, July 9th, 2012 at 7:30pm, Planetarium
The past 15 years of Mars exploration - by landers, rovers and orbiting spacecraft - has yielded a treasure trove of knowledge about the Red Planet. Each successive mission has carried with it a more capable, refined and nuanced science payload, building on the discoveries of its predecessors. The Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity is currently en route to Mars, to arrive at Gale Crater on Aug. 5th, 2012. Curiosity is the most sophisticated and capable rover yet and it will provide us with new knowledge of Mars' present climate and geology, and clues to its early habitability.

Reservations:Adults $12, Seniors $10, Academy Members $6. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Planets or Stars? - The Dark Universe of Brown Dwarfs
Prof. Adam Burgasser
Center for Astrophysics and Space Science, UC San Diego

Monday, August 6th, 2012 at 7:30pm, Planetarium
For thousands of years, humans have distinguished two types of bright celestial lights: the firmament of the fixed stars and the clockwork machinations of the wandering planets. With the discovery of a vast population of brown dwarfs - low-mass objects exhibiting both stellar and planetary characteristics - these long-held distinctions have been upended, revealing a continuum of gas giants spanning Jupiter to the Sun. Prof. Burgasser will describe the history of brown dwarf science, from their prediction as dark matter candidates in the 1960s to their discovery as the Sun's nearest neighbors n the 1990s. He'll then reveal their many fascinating properties, from interiors of metallic hydrogen to storms of molten iron, and report on the recent discovery of "room-temperature" stars with the WISE infrared satellite mission.

Reservations:Adults $12, Seniors $10, Academy Members $6. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000

Hubble's Greatest Hits
Dr. Chris Lintott
Department of Physics at University of Oxford

Monday, October 8th, 2012 at 7:30pm
The Hubble Space Telescope is the best known telescope in history, and the most successful. Its nearly 20 years of history have produced thousands of papers, and hundreds of thousands of images. Reviewing them all would take a lifetime, so luckily astronomer Dr. Chris Lintott has sorted through the archives to bring you his top ten Hubble images. Ranging from new views of our own little Solar System, through the first glimpses of worlds around other stars, this cosmic tour will make use of the incredible projection capabilities of the Grainger Sky Theatre to take Dr. Lintott's audience to the most distant galaxies.

Reservations:Adults $12, Seniors $10, Academy Members $6. Seating is limited. To reserve a place today, buy a ticket online or over the phone at 415-379-8000