A Brief History of Earth Day: a View from 28,000 Miles

We're now 16 days away from the Science Festival, and my attempt at a daily countdown has gone woefully awry. Ah, well. We're excited about the countdown here in the festival office. Our program guides are starting to make the rounds, and we're working hard to get them out to you through as many different avenues as possible.

Our event highlight of the day is the Earth Day Celebration at the EcoTarium on Friday, April 19th.

A Brief History of Earth Day: a View from 28,000 Miles
by: Alex Dunn

We all know Earth Day as a day that promotes positive behavior, raises awareness for critical global issues and builds community. The first Earth Day celebrations occurred in cities and towns across the U.S. on April 22, 1970. Attributed to the support of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, those first Earth Day “protests” bottled the fire of the 1960s, bringing together students, activists, politicians and neighbors. Earth Day’s early success was so influential that it’s credited for spurring the creation of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the Endangered Species Act.

Since that April in 1970 Earth Day celebrations have continued to serve as an annual reminder of the societal effort needed to preserve what we have. But today these events occur in the face of a society saturated with dark green gloom: global climate change, massive plastic gyres in the oceans, accelerating species loss -- the news is bleak. Meanwhile, one of Earth Day’s core concepts of “consuming less” has been usurped by commercial corporations, who “green wash” their products to sell more stuff. So what message can Earth Day promote to a population at once saturated in green washing and smothered in dark green gloom? Somewhere between burn out and burn up we must find a message of focused optimism.

Whether those first Earth Day celebrations shifted the whole country’s attention to the plight of the Earth is debatable, but on December 7, 1972 a single image taken from 28,000 miles away did just that. Snapped from the window of the Apollo 17 space craft, the iconic “Blue Marble” photograph depicted an Earth with swirling cyclonic storms, vast Saharan sands, and the full round girth of our blue, green and brown planet. Though this image was not the first image of Earth taken from space it was the most vivid and put into plain reality the limitations of the marble on which we live.

The Earth seen from Apollo 17 (link)

This year the EcoTarium will celebrate our little blue rock for being just that. Beginning on Tuesday, April 16, the EcoTarium will kick off April Vacation Week with Earth Week activities (April 16-19), culminating with our annual Earth Day Celebration on Friday, April 19. This year’s vacation week theme will be space exploration. With activities ranging from driving rovers on Mars to timing a rocket launch to get to an orbiting planet, we will unfold the complexity of space exploration and the limited beauty that is our little blue marble.

For more details please visit our website at www.ecotarium.org or visit us Tuesday – Sunday at 222 Harrington St. Worcester, MA 01604


(Blog entry written by Alex Dunn, who works at the EcoTarium, but whose views do not necessarily represent the views of the EcoTarium.)

Pre-register for CSF Events!

Hi folks,

We're 21 days out!

Have you been seeing our banners going up around town?

Also, our printed programs arrived today!  

They are available at the MIT Museum (265 Massachusetts Ave.).  We would also love help distributing them into your communities!  Please contact us, and let us know how many you'd like to pick up!


21 days from the festival seems like a good time to start booking tickets and spaces for Cambridge Science Festival events.  So, instead of a highlighted event, feast your eyes on -

Events that suggest or require pre-registration, or are selling advance tickets:

• Big Ideas for Busy People: buy tickets
• Science of Nutrition and Food: Register 
• Nano-Observatory: Register
• The Science of the Brain: Register 
• Alternative Careers in Science: A Speed Networking Event: buy tickets
• Forecasting the Future: Can Ecologists Predict the Fate of Plant and Animal Populations? Register 
• The Story Collider: buy tickets 
• SPLISH: Apply  
• Science Trivia Challenge: Apply 
• Science Author Salon with Emily Anthes author of Frankenstein’s Cat: Register 
• Human DNA Strand: Register
• Draper Prize Lecture: Register 
• Gluten, Dairy, and Nuts, Oh My! Why Are Food Allergies on the Rise?: Buy tickets 
• Design Challenge: Battlebots: Register 
• Rites of Passage by Quicksilver Dance (Friday, April 19 & Saturday, April 20) reservations required to quicksilverdance@gmail.com
• Wallace Day: Buy tickets 
• Central Squared (C2) Challenge: Register 
• Simon Says – Learn to Solder: Register 
• Sparkfun: Hacking the Simon Says Kit with Arduino: Register
• Ginkgo Fest: A Celebration of Ginkgo Biloba: Buy tickets 

Pre-register for these events at the MIT Museum through their website: http://web.mit.edu/museum/programs/festival.html (pre-reg forms at the bottom of the page)

• Stop the Suffering! Keep Your Stuff Happy
• Paper Bridges
• Multimedia Chain Reaction
• Everything You Wanted to Know About Slide Rules
• Introduction to LEGO Mindstorms
• Splash @ CSF: http://web.mit.edu/museum/forms/csf13-splash.html

Rock The Planet with Yuri's Night this April!

We're 23 days away from the Cambridge Science Festival, and our event highlight of the day is "Yuri's Night with Student Astronomers of Harvard-Radcliffe!"

Rock the Planet with Yuri's Night this April!
by Brice Russ, Yuri's Night Assistant Director

April 12 is more than just the first day of the Cambridge Science Festival--it's a major milestone in space exploration!
On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into space; twenty years later, on April 12, 1981, NASA began the Space Shuttle program with the launch of Columbia. Now, every April, tens of thousands of people around the world come together for Yuri's Night, a celebration of our past, present, and future in space.

Launching air-powered rockets at Yuri's Night in Inverness, Scotland

Yuri's Night parties bring people together by combining education and outreach with space-themed entertainment and partying. One Yuri's Night event may have an afternoon of scientific presentations followed by a night of dancing and stargazing; another might get together to talk space at a local restaurant before watching First Orbit or another space movie. Last year, Yuri's Night was celebrated at over 230 events in 52 countries around the globe, everywhere from museums and NASA Centers to bars and barbecues. We've even received a Yuri's Night greeting from the International Space Station!

If you're attending the Cambridge Science Festival, you can join the Student Astronomers of Harvard-Radcliffe for food, stellar observations, and trivia at Yuri's Night this Friday, April 12. Read more about the "STAHR Party" and RSVP on their Facebook event. If you won't be able to make it, it's not too late to start your own Yuri's Night party--registration on the Yuri's Night website is quick and free.

Yuri's Night Bay Area at NASA Ames 2007

Come on and Rock The Planet!

To Do Science Is Human

25 Days to #cambscifest 2013!  Today's featured event by Arend Sluis of the Friends of the Cambridge Public Library!

To Do Science is Human 
By Arend Sluis, Friends of the Cambridge Public Library

It's easy to forget that science is fundamentally a human activity. It's part of who we are to explore and discover, but journal articles, as a rule, often leave out the human experience of being a scientist. An article will, for example, not mention the freezing temperatures on the mountaintop while observing a galaxy 30 million light-years away nor the realization half-way through the night that it was the wrong galaxy! A reader will get just the facts (mostly). But there's so much more to the act of science: the tedium, the frustrations, and the sheer joy of doing science.

Carefully scrubbing away the human element often divides the "arts and humanities" from "science", but in recent decades there have been plenty of attempts to jump the divide from both sides: T-shirts with nerdy facts, riffs on (misunderstood) concepts, and even a journal abstract in rhymed couplets.

If you want to do some divide-jumping yourself, come to one of our two events at the Cambridge Science Festival: Science & Poetry on Tuesday April 16th, or Science & Comics on Saturday April 20th, all at the Cambridge Public Library.

Sapphire from Crystallography by Christian Bök

Our host for the Science & Poetry event is Nick Montfort, poet, co-author of "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10", and associate professor of digital media at MIT. He will lead a discussion about the intersections and common grounds of poetry and science.

Sandwalk Adventures by Jay Hosler

For the Science & Comics event we have a great line-up: biology professor and comic-book author Jay Hosler, author of "Clan Apis" and "Sandwalk Adventures", local artist E.J. Barnes, author of "Caroline's Catalog", and Rosemary Mosco, field naturalist and cartoonist. Join us for a fun and interactive exploration of how comics and science work together.

Hope to see you at the Library!

Arend Sluis
President, Friends of the Cambridge Public Library

29 Days til #cambscifest 2013

Did you know that today is Pi Day?  3/14!

So, what exactly is π? Well, it's not this:

Though it does look darn tasty.

π is a mathematical constant of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

So, happy Pi Day!

With just a few weeks before the 2013 Festival, it's time to start our #eventcountdown.

The event of the day...

A Creative Collective: The Computer Clubhouse as Design Studio
The Computer Clubhouse at the Museum of Science, Boston
Saturday, April 13th 1-4pm
Recommended for ages 10-18

The Computer Clubhouse provides a creative and safe out-of-school learning environment where young people work with adult mentors to explore their ideas, develop new skills, and build confidence in themselves through the use of technology. With high-tech tools at their fingertips, youth can do almost anything they imagine: write and record music, make movies, build robots, produce digital artwork, design websites, and more! Together with Clubhouse Mentors, who serve as role models to help foster a creative atmosphere of mutual respect and trust, youth can spend days, weeks or months on projects that inspire them. Now in its 20th year of changing lives, this Flagship Computer Clubhouse has inspired an international network of Clubhouses with 100 locations in 20 countries worldwide. The Clubhouse is open after school on weekdays and Saturdays, and is free of charge to young people (ages 10-18) from Boston and surrounding areas. We’re excited to invite Cambridge Science Festival attendees to drop by the Clubhouse to join in the fun, and perhaps walk away with a special project they’ve created!

http://www.computerclubhouse.org/

Cambridge Science Festival 2013!

Can you believe we're a month out from the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival?

Woohoo!

  Now, take a deep breath here before reading on.  I'm about to drop a lot of information in your laps.  Don't run away and don't get overwhelmed.  (It's worth it, I promise!)

We get a lot of questions at the festival like, "My kids are 5 and 8.  What events are good for them?" or "What should I send our 15 year old daughter to?" or "I'm an adult that never went to science fairs even as a kid. What should I look at?"

So, I've gone through our Event Index, and selected some particularly interesting events for groups: Families+ (which means events appropriate for small children accompanied by their parents up through teens and adults), Teens+ (appropriate for teens and adults), and Adults (um... yea).

Note: our lovely K-12 Coordinator, Peg LeGendre, put together a larger listing of festival events for families, students, and teachers. Available here as pdf.

So here we go:


Families+ (AKA events for everyone)
 Science Carnival and ROBOT ZOO
Artisan’s Asylum and DIY Festival
Visual-Eyes Art: The Visual Ecology Exhibit
NuVu Open Studio & Exhibit
City Smart:How Do You Get Around Town?
Play Day at the MIT Museum
Human DNA Strand
Northeastern University STEM Exploration
Science of Food
National Astronomy Day
Discovering Physics!
Party for the Planet at Franklin Park Zoo
Battlebots Competition

Teens+
Yuri’s Night with Student Astronomers of Harvard-Radcliffe!
A Creative Collective: The Computer Clubhouse as Design Studio
Wish Upon a Stellated Dodecahedron
Boston-Cambridge Bridge Tours
Science and Poetry
Science of the Brain
MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team – Racing Solar Cars!
Medical Simulation @ MGH
Science Trivia Challenge
Sudden Death: A Tale of Cell Suicide
Trimpin: The Sound of Invention Film Screening and Q&A
Science and Comics
Walk on the Wild Side
Living in the Future: Pop Culture Meets Today’s Technology
Splash@CSF
Operation Epsilon

Adults
Big Ideas for Busy People
Science and Islam
Broader Impacts: How to Talk About Your Work with the Media
Science of Nutrition and Food
Climate Science: The Conversation
Alternative Careers in Science: A Speed Networking Event
Genetic Genealogy: How Much Can Your DNA Tell You?
You’re the Expert
Story Collider
Science Author Salon: Emily Anthes Author of Frankenstein’s Cat
What High School Science Should Have Been
Carbonic Maceration Wine Bar (and Demo)
Science Crawl
Perfect Model: The Past, Present, and Future of Prediction
Soapbox: The Political Life of Cheese
Gluten,Dairy, and Nuts, Oh My! Why Are Food Allergies on the Rise?
Passion of the Cosmos: Scientists on Evolution, Cosmology, and Religion: Open Forum

Also, shout out to college students (and those who know or work with college students): 48-Hour Design and Build Challenge: Battlebots (note: costs to change)

The sheer number and variety of events may give you an idea of what we're looking at for this year's festival.

Help Us Spread the Word! And an Update

At our last count, we were at 139 different events in the 2013 festival program!  We're working hard to make sure these events are accessible, interactive, and fun for everyone.  But we're looking for your help to make sure everyone knows about it!

We've printed up some beautiful Save the Date postcards.  Can you put some out in your community (schools, libraries, churches, coffeeshops, etc.)?  Contact Us and let us know how many you can use!

Or, send out the electronic version to your networks!

Thank you for your help!



An update!
Here we are in March, and we're steaming along on festival planning.

Want to see what we've been working on?  Check out the current Schedule of Events online for the 2013 Festival!  Hope you've marked your calendars for Friday, April 12 - Sunday, April 21.

Some quick highlights...


Friday, April 12: Big Ideas for Busy People at the First Parish in Cambridge (Harvard Square)
Saturday, April 13: Science Carnival and ROBOT Zoo! at the Cambridge Public Library 12-4pm
Sunday, April 14: Artisan's Asylum Open House & DIY Festival, Islam & Science
Monday, April 15: Boston-Cambridge Bridge Tours
Tuesday, April 16: You're the Expert 
Wednesday, April 17: Play Day at the MIT Museum
Thursday, April 18: Science Crawl
Friday, April 19: Science of Food, Gluten, Dairy, and Nuts, Oh My!
Saturday, April 20: Space & Rockets Day, Wallace Day
Sunday, April 21: Party for the Planet at the Franklin Park Zoo, Battlebots Competition

Excited yet?

Be sure to check out the rest of the program here.