Rise from your Thanksgiving food coma with three nerdy lectures (and light-producing chemistry demonstrations) in a bar. Be there and be square!

With DJ Ion the Prize and hosts Ian Davis and Rick Karnesky, who know now that AT-ATs aren’t tanks. The fiveten burger truck will have food for sale outside.

Tuesday 11/27
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph
(less than half-a-mile from the 19th St BART)
$8
21+
FB event
g+ event

FRUITVALE FOLLIES: 6 GENERATIONS OF TINKERING AND FAILED EXPERIMENTS IN OAKLAND by Emma Bassein

The anecdotal and biased story of technology in Oakland told through the first hand accounts of 6 generations of one family living in the east bay. From exploding radio vacuum tubes to shop fires, the dependents of the Cohen-Bray family have managed to injure themselves, but preserve their historic house in the Fruitvale neighborhood and are here to tell the tale.

Emma has absolutely no qualifications as a historian, except that her family has lived in the East Bay for 6 generations. As the child of two aged hippies, she spent her youth roaming the bay area protesting everything in existence, and then went off to MIT and Princeton to study Environmental Engineering. She now works as an engineer for an energy efficiency company in San Francisco.

A PHYSICIST GOES LOOKING FOR A TUMOR CELL by Lydia Sohn

It is a strange and circuitous route from studying superconductivity to searching for Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs). CTCs are cancer cells that have “blebbed” off a primary tumor and travel through the blood stream. They are thought to cause metastases in the body, and their numbers (anywhere from 1-10 cells in 10 mL of patient blood) indicates prognosis and how well a patient is responding to treatment. Currently, there are no true methods to isolate and enumerate CTCs in blood. Biology meets solid-state electronics to help find a solution.

Lydia Sohn, a low-temperature physicist, is now a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. When not searching out tumor cells, she combs the academic lite rature, looking for duplicated plots.

LET’S MAKE LIGHT OF THE SITUATION by Mitch Anstey

LEDs, glow-in-the-dark t-shirts, and detergents that “make your whites whiter” are all possible thanks to a property called luminescence. It comes in many shapes and sizes, but it’s all the same general principle: turn energy into light! Humanity has quickly taken this property, carved it up, marketed it, and given it cool names like triboluminescence, cathodoluminescence, and sonoluminescence. Now it’s time to take luminescence back to the streets! The streets of Oakland! Come see some examples of this incredible property, and learn all you ever wanted to know about making light!

Mitch Anstey is a chemist by day and a sleeping chemist by night. He made esoteric metal chemistry his specialty at UC Berkeley. Thankfully, someone found that useful in the job market, and he now makes metals emit light for the good of the nation at Sandia National Labs. You’ll find him loving on the Easy Bay just about any day of the week, and he’s glad Nerd Nite has jumped over to the Sunny Side of the Bay.