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.

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:

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!

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.

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

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:

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...