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For 150 million years, all over planet Earth, mammals were successful ... but tiny. The death of the dinosaurs signaled a major change as mammals shot up to the size of dogs ... and elephants ... and beyond. How did we get so big? And how did such changes usher in the Age of Mammals? More recently, as human populations have been spreading during the past 50 thousand years, over half of those large animals have become extinct, and at an accelerating rate. What's happening? And what does it mean for saving the last big animals left today?

Speaker Ashley Poust is a UC Berkeley paleobiologist studying the links between major events in evolution and animal life history. Speaker Nicholas Spano is a UC Berkeley paleoecologist studying large-scale consequences (and modern-day implications) of ice-age extinctions.

Drought, wind, rain. Wildfire, flooding, crop failure, species extinction. Changes in the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events are likely the most serious consequence of human-induced global warming. Understanding what the future portends is vital if society hopes to adapt to a very different world.

Or speaker, Dr. Michael Wehner, is senior staff scientist in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic worldwide increase in scientific research toward — as well as financial investment in — the development of a quantum computer: a computational machine whose inner workings are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. These tremendous efforts are motivated, in part, by the promise that quantum computers can perform tasks unthinkable for a classical computer. For example, to factor a 300 digit number on a 1-THz quantum computer would take approximately 1 second. The same task on a 1-THz classical computer would take nearly 150,000 years!

UC Berkeley physicist Norman Yao will present a broad overview of current efforts toward building a quantum computer. Then, he will give a vision for the first types of algorithms and simulations that might naturally be performed on a near-term quantum computer.

The Declaration of Independence proclaims our right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but not to the pursuit of pleasure. What is the neurological difference between these two positive emotions of happiness and pleasure? Has society's exploitation of pleasure systematically weakened our grasp on happiness? What has caused the twin epidemics of these emotions' negative extremes: addiction (from too much pleasure) and depression (from too little happiness)?

Our speaker, Dr. Robert Lustig, is professor of pediatric endocrinology at UC San Francisco. His new book, The Hacking of the American Mind, explores the scientific, cultural, historic, economic, and social causes of our modern problem with pleasure.

• Dr. Luigi Anzivino, neuroscientist
• Marc "Zeke" Kossover, physicist
• Robert Strong, master magician

Entanglement phenomena are the closest thing we have to reproducible magic, and even physicists can't agree as to what’s really going on. Is it spooky action at a distance, or retrocausality, or super-determinism of our choices? And what is a good skeptic to do when every explanatory option seems unacceptable — when nature forces us to train skepticism inward, towards our strongest intuitions? (General audiences welcome!)

Speaker Ken Wharton is Professor of Physics at San José State University. Dr. Wharton works to reconcile the two grandest physics theories (quantum mechanics and general relativity), and he is the author of popular, scientifically-accurate fiction.

Sooner or later, humans will walk on the Red Planet. NASA scientist Pascal Lee and The Martian author Andy Weir want it to be “sooner,” and they have deep insights—both technical and psychological—about how to make it happen. Join Lee and Weir in conversation with science writer Mary Roach (Packing for Mars) for a spirited conversation on the promise and peril of humanity’s first in-person exploration of an alien planet.

Dr. Pascal Lee is the author of Mission: Mars. He is also co-founder of the Mars Institute, planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, and principal investigator for NASA's Haughton-Mars Project. Andy Weir is the author of The Martian. He is working on a new "hard sci-fi" novel (where everything is accurate to real-world physics) set in a city on the Moon. It's about a woman who, as a low-level criminal, gets in way over her head (... and high above ours).