NerdNite[30]: Science truth is stranger than science fiction
Come on down to Nerd Nite and throw back a couple of LUCID’s finest cocktails while enjoying the nerdisms of our fabulous speakers and your new nerdy friends. Be there and be square!
Nerd Nite Seattle
LUCID
7:30 (Doors open at 6:30)
Admission: $5
“Backyard Xenolinguistics” | Rachael Tatman
Science fiction is full of alien languages, from Klingon to Na’Vi to Huttese. But even the “weirdest” scifi languages tend to sound (and look) pretty human. What would a truly alien language be like? Our search for answers might start in an unexpected place: the signed languages of Earth.
Rachael Tatman is a second-year graduate student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Washington. She studies phonetics, phonology and sign linguistics. In her spare time, she blogs sporadically about language and linguistics at Making Noise and Hearing Things and tanks for her MMO guild.
“Your mother did what to your genes?” | Chrysalis Sabatinos and Virginia Morris
Epigenetics: the study of things that change gene expression independently of the genetic code.
We were taught that DNA was pretty much encoded they way it was written, boy were we told wrong. Looks like the way the our genetic story is read has more to do with who’s doing the reading and how they are reading the code then we originally thought. So, who is doing the reading? What affects the way DNA is read? Come, listen, and find out how important it is when the word is the same but it is pronounced differently. (And yes, we are hearing the UK and US pronounciations of aluminum in our heads right now.)
Dr. Chrysalis Sabatinos and Dr. Virginia Morris are Naturopathic doctors in Seattle. Both graduated from Bastyr University in Kenmore. Presently they are working on making medicine more fun, aka running a clinic in South Lake Union.
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