Media Advisory: Jan. 23 science & engineering festival at UC Berkeley

ATTENTION: Science, engineering and health reporters, editors and producers

WHAT

The Cal Science & Engineering Festival at the University of California, Berkeley, a free event for the whole family featuring hands-on activities, science talks and demonstrations. Among the highlights are Berkeley’s champion unicycle basketball team, a chemistry magic show, the Banana Slug String Band and an inflatable planetarium.

More than 20 groups from UC Berkeley, plus KQED Quest and the Lawrence Hall of Science, will participate.

WHEN

11 a.m. – 3 p.m. this Sunday, Jan. 23

WHERE

UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Dai Hall, located on the north edge of campus near the intersection of Hearst and LeRoy avenues. A map is available online.

DETAILS

The Cal Science & Engineering Festival will feature:

• The Berkeley Revolution, the 2010 New York and North American unicycle basketball champions, showing off their “physics” skills (weather permitting)
• Talks by neuroscientist Michael Silver on “How Attention Affects What You See” and by astronomer Steven Stahler on “How Stars Are Made”
• The Tech Museum in the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), which gives a peek into the future of emerging technologies and scientific developments

Solar telescopes, earthquake demonstrations, plant and fossil displays, and a challenge for kids to power appliances with solar energy are among the many activities planned.

The festival was originally planned for Oct. 23, 2010, to coincide with hundreds of hands-on events nationwide and 10 in California linked to the two-week USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. UC Berkeley’s activities were rained out, however. Sunday’s festival is indoors.

The USA Science & Engineering Festival is an annual event designed to “re-invigorate the interest of our nation’s youth in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).”

The UC Berkeley event is made possible by donations from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley, Berkeley Nanosciences and Nanoengineering Institute, Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), Center for Science Education at the Space Sciences Laboratory, Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS), Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) at UC Berkeley; The Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS).

For details on Sunday’s events, link to http://scienceatcal.berkeley.edu/festival.