Grab a drink and join us for a journey from the very small and close to the very far and vast. Jessica Richman shares a bit about the microbial cells found in you that out number your own cells 10-to-1 (and may have genes that out number your own genes 100-to-1). Next, Will Fischer talks to us about modern manufacturing. Finally, we go to Mars with Guy Pyrzak. How do we drive something that might be 249 million miles away? S-L-O-W-L-Y.
Be there and be square with DJ Ion the Prize and your maniacal managers Rebecca Cohen and Rick Karnesky!
Monday 2/25 Doors at 7 pm, show at 8 The New Parkway, 474 24th St, Oakland (less than half-a-mile from the 19th St BART) $8 All Ages Tickets FB event g+ event
THERE ARE 100 TRILLION CELLS IN EACH OF OUR BODIES, BUT ONLY 10% OF THEM ARE HUMAN! by Jessica Richman
Who are the 90 percent? What are they doing there? And how do they affect our health? We’ll cover the latest scientific research on how our microbes correlate with obesity, anxiety, heart disease, tooth decay, and sinusitis, or can contribute to our health.
uBiome is a San Francisco-based citizen science project that offers personal microbiome genomics. Jessica Richman is finishing a PhD at Oxford in mathematical sociology and is working with Will Ludington and Zac Apte, two scientists at UCSF.
TAKE YOUR BITS FOR A SPIN: A LOOK AT CONVENTIONAL MACHINING, HOW STUFF IS MADE, AND THE FUTURE OF FABRICATION by Will Fischer
Conventional machining is the basis for all modern fabrication and it’s also really frickin’ cool. Come on an epic trek to take a look at a bit of its history, the physics at work, modern advances, and some advantages over other types of fabrication. We’ll cover milling, turning (lathing), threads, 3D printing, laser cutting, and more! I’d tap that!
Will Fischer started learning about fabrication at an early age by building magnificent Lego contraptions to be painfully stepped on by family members. As a cocksure adolescent, he taught himself to weld, worked summers as a professional Lego roboticist, and rebuilt a 1970 Chevelle. College was a blur of mechanical engineering, breaking and entering, Dungeons and Dragons, and a lot of welding and machining. After completing his Masters in Mechanical Engineering, Will moved from Texas to the Bay Area to take a job as the first employee of a local medical device startup. The daily rigors of being the only mechanical engineer had him regularly cursing, prototyping, and machining components, but after a few years of being the company’s only machinist, he can mill with the finest.
HOW TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO ROVER HAS GONE BEFORE by Guy Pyrzak
Operating a one-ton rover on the surface of Mars requires more than just a joystick and an experiment. With 10 science instruments, 17 cameras, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator and lasers, Curiosity is the largest and most complex rover NASA has sent to Mars. Combined with a 1 way light time of 4 to 20 minutes and a distributed international science and engineering team, it takes a lot of work to operate this mega-rover. The Mars Science Lab’s operations team has developed an organization and process that maximizes science return and safety of the spacecraft. These are the voyages of the rover Curiosity, its 2 year mission, to determine the habitability of Gale Crater, to understand the role of water, to study the climate and geology of Mars.
Guy is a Science Planner for the Curiosity Rover. When he isn’t exploring another planet, Guy is the lead designer for the ground software used to command the rover. In the past Guy has worked on software for the International Space Station, the Phoenix Polar Lander and the Mars Exploration Rovers. In his free time he watches Star Trek, BSG, Firefly and other sci-fi space TV shows on Netflix, you know, research.