Up-Coming Events

Experiences at different times in life may alter aspects of personality: appetite for risk, tolerance for delayed gratification, interest in music, etc. Our brains seem to develop particularly rapidly during a staggered sequence of "sensitive periods" that stretch late into the second or third decade of life. Such periods of high neuroplasticity are ripe for specific types of learning; they are also susceptible to negative experiences that can lead to mental illness. Understanding sensitive-period brain plasticity will help us to improve education and personality development.

Our speaker, Dr. Linda Wilbrecht, is Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Dr. Wilbrecht conducts research through the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and she directs The Wilbrecht Lab.

The stars beckon. Alas, interstellar distances are fantastically challenging. (A lightbeam needs 1/7th of a second to go around the world, but over 4 years to reach our Sun's nearest-neighbor star, Proxima Centauri.) Determined explorers at Breakthrough Starshot are developing miniature robot space probes — to be accelerated by laser light from Earth — whose cameras can reach Proxima Centauri in just 20 years! Among the wonders to be explored are Proxima's three known planets, including Proxima b, which orbits in this red dwarf star's "habitable zone."

Our speaker, Dr. Pete Worden, is Executive Director of Breakthrough Starshot, and former Director of NASA Ames Research Center.

If your native language (Irish, Igbo, Ilocano, . . .) is threatened by competition from another language (likely English!), and if preserving that language is important, what options do you have? Which approach to language preservation is most likely to be effective? Or... How much time do you have before the language is effectively dead? Surprisingly, tools from mathematical ecology, physics, and other seemingly remote fields have been adapted to answer questions about the evolution, competition, and even origin of human languages.

Our speaker, Dr. Ben Ford, is Professor of Mathematics at Sonoma State University. His research background lies in combinatorics and group theory, and he works to further equity in math education.

Research indicates that all animals sleep. For humans, sleep is essential for physical and mental health — as necessary as food, water, and oxygen. Yet many of us get insufficient and/or low-quality sleep. UCSF's Dr. Aric Prather has just written The Sleep Prescription: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest. Both in person and online, Dr. Prather will share many of his book's insights with the Commonwealth Club and Wonderfest.

Dr. Aric Prather is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He directs UCSF's Behavioral Sleep Medicine Research Program.

This event is produced by the Commonwealth Club in collaboration with Wonderfest. We can enjoy it in either of two ways: in person or online. Access to the two different ticket types is described in the HOW space, below. Each type is discounted by $10 (rendering the online ticket FREE) for Wondernauts who use the discount code WonderfestPromo.

Sometimes, bigger is better. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will collect 9 times more light than the largest currently existing telescope and, with adaptive optics, make images 9 times sharper. Overall, that’s 81 times better! The TMT International Observatory (with members from the US, Japan, China, India, & Canada), together with its partner in the southern hemisphere, the Giant Magellan Telescope, will give humanity a powerful new system to probe the full sweep of the cosmos — from the nearest stars and their planets, to black holes in our Galaxy, and on out to the edge of the visible universe where we see the very first stars and galaxies beginning to form.

Our speaker is astronomer Dr. Robert Kirshner, Executive Director of the TMT International Observatory and Clowes Professor of Science, emeritus, at Harvard University. Formerly, Dr. Kirshner was head of the science program at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

President Biden recently stated that the Pandemic is over. The resumption of travel and in-person activities seems to corroborate this view. Meanwhile, the current COVID death rate in the US puts us on track for nearly 150,000 excess deaths (per year) and a marked lowering of overall life expectancy. This presentation, with a healthy amount of audience Q&A, will explore the relationship between science and narrative in confronting SARS-Cov2.

Our speaker, Dr. Robert Siegel, is Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. He is also a member of Wonderfest's formal Board of Advisors.