Tuesday October 29th
DOORS at 7pm, TALKS at 7:30pm
The Tabard Theatre
29 N. San Pedro St, San Jose
(Free validated parking across the street)
FREE

Nerd Nite is a boozy, playful, and educational lecture series found in cities all around the world. Enjoy 30 minute talks from scientists, historians, game designers, and other nerds over drinks.

Topics for Nerd Nite Silicon Valley #9

Grab a drink and see science fiction turned into science fact! Learn how the ancient Greeks envisioned the fantastic technologies of the future, and how dreams of building a tricorder led a modern-day engineer to create incredible sensors for biotech. Be there and be square!

Killer Automatons and Evil Fembots of Ancient Greece
Driverless cars, ships powered by thought, killer robots and replicants, sexbots, fire-breathing bronze bulls, eagle drones, giant animatronic mollusks! Modern Sci-Fi? Nope. All these techno-marvels and more were dreamed up 2,500 years ago in ancient Greek mythology.

Adrienne Mayor, research scholar in Classics and History of Science at Stanford, is the author of “Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology,” exploring how automata, self-moving devices, human enhancements, and Artificial Intelligence were imagined in antiquity.

Giant Mag-neato-resistance
A (hopefully) humorous talk about an incredible technology that enables both the reading of memory in computers and the detection of biomarkers in blood. From a Nobel Prize in 2007 to plasma patient samples in 2019, this talk will cover how these ingenious sensors came about and my vision for their impact on the future of biotechnology.

Dana Kralicek is a high-spirited and gregarious engineer, who loves coffee, ska punk, Star Trek, and scientific outreach. Motivated by her dream of developing a tricorder, she earned a BS in Optical Science and Engineering from the University of Arizona, and now she creates biological tests for point-of-care settings, like roadside DUI stops, home testing, and remote clinics. By picking up on incredibly small changes in magnetic fields from magnetic nanoparticles, she uses magnetically-sensitive sensors to quickly detect DNA mutations as well as small molecules (like drugs, steroids, and hormones) in non-invasive biological fluids (like saliva, urine and blood). She is currently a PhD Candidate in Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

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About our hosts
Founded in 2001, The Tabard Theatre Company is committed to making a difference in the community through the arts by presenting professional-quality shows. They are making theatre affordable and accessible for all, a goal they meet through their various outreach programs.