Boston Flora

Tag: Explorers Club

  • Monday, May 10, 7:00 pm – Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life, Online

    Join Porter Square Books in welcoming volcanologist, extreme explorer and field scientist Jess Phoenix on May 10 at 7 pm for a free virtual talk about her new memoir, Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life! This event is free and open to all, hosted on Crowdcast.

    As a volcanologist, natural hazards expert, and founder of Blueprint Earth, Jess Phoenix has dedicated her life to scientific exploration. Her career path—hard earned in the male-dominated world of science—has led her into still-flowing Hawaiian lava fields, congressional races, glittering cocktail parties at Manhattan’s elite Explorers Club, and numerous pairs of Caterpillar work boots. It has also inspired her to devote her life to making science more inclusive and accessible.
     
    Ms. Adventure skillfully blends personal memoir, daring adventure, and scientific exploration, following Phoenix’s journey from reality television sites deep in Ecuadorian jungles to Andean glaciers, university classrooms to Death Valley in summer. She has even chased down members of a Mexican cartel to retrieve a stolen favorite rock hammer. Readers will delight in her unbelievable adventures, all embarked on for the love of science.

    Jess Phoenix is executive director and co-founder of the environmental scientific research organization Blueprint Earth. Since 2008, she has been a volcanologist, an extreme explorer, and a professional field scientist. She works with universities and major research institutions to study lava flows and natural hazards, perform climate research on glaciers, and more. Jess is a fellow in the Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society; a featured scientist on the Discovery and Science channels; and her writing has appeared on websites such as BBC Online, DailyKos, and Medium, as well as in Face the Current magazine and local print publications. Register for the event on Crowdcast here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/MsAdventure

  • Wednesday, December 9, 7:00 pm – The Octopus Scientists

    At Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge on Wednesday, December 9 at 7 pm, science writer Sy Montgomery and wildlife photographer Keith Ellenbogen discuss their latest adventure, in the intriguing world of the octopus.

    With three hearts and blue blood, its gelatinous body unconstrained by jointed limbs or gravity, the octopus seems to be an alien, an inhabitant of another world. It’s baggy, boneless body sprouts eight arms covered with thousands of suckers suckers that can taste as well as feel. The octopus also has the powers of a superhero: it can shape-shift, change color, squirt ink, pour itself through the tiniest of openings, or jet away through the sea faster than a swimmer can follow.

    But most intriguing of all, octopuses classed as mollusks, like clams, are remarkably intelligent with quirky personalities. Their book The Octopus Scientists, an inquiry into the mind of an intelligent invertebrate, is also a foray into our own unexplored planet. These thinking, feeling creatures can help readers experience and understand our world (and perhaps even life itself) in a new way.

    “Part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson,” as the Boston Globe describes her, Sy Montgomery is an author, naturalist, documentary scriptwriter, and radio commentator who has traveled to some of the world’s most remote wildernesses for her work. She has worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba, been hunted by a tiger in India, swum with pink dolphins in the Amazon, and been undressed by an orangutan in Borneo. She is the author of 13 award-winning books, including her national best-selling memoir, The Good Good Pig. Montgomery lives in Hancock, New Hampshire.

    Keith Ellenbogen is an award-winning underwater photographer with an emphasis on environmental conservation. His images have been published worldwide in newspapers, magazines, and books as well as on TV. He is a Senior Fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), a Fellow with the Explorers Club, and an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY.