Science
Hundreds of after-school program coordinators and instructors from seven Bay Area counties gathered Friday and Saturday at Oakland Technical High School for a conference focused on improving the quality and range of regional after-school programs.
Circled by three freeways, scattered with industrial factories and a stone’s throw from one of the largest ports in the United States, West Oakland has a high pollution rate. That’s why this neighborhood has become the centerpiece of a new partnership between a local environmental justice group and a high-tech research company to develop a cell phone that can measure pollution.
Despite the gloomy weather, Bay Area skywatchers will be eagerly awaiting tonight’s total lunar eclipse, which falls on the northern winter solstice—the moment at which the Earth’s axis is tilted farthest from the sun, giving us our shortest day and longest night of the year, and heralding the first day of winter. According to NASA Science News, there’s only been one other lunar eclipse on the northern winter solstice in the last 2,000 years … and that one was back in 1638.
“You want to opt-out?” the TSA officer asked incredulously. I was standing in a newly implemented Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) machine at the Oakland airport. Passengers are randomly selected as they pass through security to enter the AIT machine, which looks like an oversized metal detector and projects an image of a person’s unclothed body on a screen for TSA officials to review. Those selected have the choice to opt-out of the full-body scan, but must then submit to a thorough pat-down, a procedure that some have called a violation of privacy.
About 200 people attended the long delayed launch celebration for the Africa Channel-a digital station that focuses entirely on Africa programming- Tuesday night at Oakland’s Chabot Space Center. At the event, an Africa Channel executive announced the results of DNA tests revealing the ancestries of three African-American attendees.
The Chabot Space and Science Center will take on climate change in a big way this month when it opens a new exhibit with the help of a little scientific star power. Science educator Bill Nye, popularly known as “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” came to Chabot on Friday to introduce the new “Bill Nye’s Climate Lab,” which opens to the public on November 20.
Computer animation sprang into public consciousness in 1995 with Pixar’s film, Toy Story. Fifteen years later, the studio has turned out nearly a dozen feature length films from its East Bay headquarters, and now kids at an Oakland middle school are getting a chance to get in on act of animating. Listen to the full story on Oakland North Radio.
There’s nothing finer on a Saturday afternoon then a garden full of toilets.
A simulated walk through the solar system takes hikers through a roughly four-mile loop in the East Bay Regional Parks, starting at the Chabot Space and Science Center and ending in the dark.