Summer Dome Talks Series

Dome Talks are back! During this summer series held in our iconic dome, authors, and scientists from across the region share their work, research, and ideas in an informal, engaging setting. Topics span science, history, and the world around us, offering fresh ways to think about big questions, from our place in the universe to the forces shaping life on Earth. Dome Talks will take place in the Fisk Gallery.

Dome Talks – Summer 2026 Schedule

Thursday, June 11, 2026
Riley Black
When the Earth Was Green – Tales From Prehistory’s Magnificent Plants
If you want to understand the shape of life on Earth, look to the plants. In this talk based upon her bestselling book When the Earth Was Green, science writer Riley Black will take you back hundreds of millions of years to forests, swamps, and grasslands where plants deeply influenced the evolution of life on our planet. The botanical life of the deep past gave the largest dinosaurs their shape, created parts of the fossil record through oozing resin that trapped insects, and formed dense jungles that led our own ancestors to evolve forward-facing eyes and opposable thumbs. Plants of the past represent more than just an ancient garden. They have been longstanding evolutionary partners whose stories we can still touch today. By the end of this talk, you won’t look at plants the same way again.

Riley Black is the bestselling and award-winning author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, When the Earth Was Green, and many other books about ancient life. Her reporting on the latest fossil discoveries has appeared in publications including National Geographic, Smithsonian, Science, and more, and Riley’s been a frequent guest on programs such as NOVA, Science Friday, and All Things Considered to discuss what’s new in paleontology. In 2024, Riley was awarded the Friend of Darwin Award by the National Center for Science Education for her writing and outreach.

Thursday, July 16, 2026
Rosanna Xia (Los Angeles Times)
California Against the Sea: Insights from L.A. Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia
In this Dome Talk, Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia will break down her approach to environmental journalism, with lessons learned on how to communicate issues as complex and overwhelming as climate change. Xia will also introduce her award-winning book, California Against the Sea, and share insights from her reporting on sea level rise.

Rosanna Xia is an author, documentary filmmaker and environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Xia was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her celebrated book on climate change adaptation, ”California Against the Sea,” received the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, a gold medal from the California Book Awards, and a special citation from the Library of Congress, among other honors. She has been praised for her investigative reporting and narrative storytelling, and her journalism has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. Xia’s most recent project, the feature documentary ”Out of Plain Sight,” which she directed and produced, is a cinematic expansion of one of her most haunting environmental exposés. The documentary has received numerous film festival honors, including the Audience Choice Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and the Jackson Wild Media Award for Best Investigative Film.

Thursday, August 6, 2026
Stephen Kane (UC Riverside)
Planetary habitability in the solar system and beyond.
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era. Though traditionally viewed through the lens of our home planet and its evolutionary history, data from other Solar System objects, and a plethora of planets outside of our Solar System, are shedding new light on habitability research. This presentation will discuss the factors that contribute to planetary habitability, and how these pieces fit together in an inter-disciplinary pathway that will benefit both the understanding of the evolution of Earth’s habitability and identifying possible abodes of life elsewhere throughout the universe.

Stephen Kane is a Professor of Planetary Astrophysics at the University of California, Riverside. His work covers a broad range of topics and he has discovered hundreds of planets orbiting other stars. He is a leading expert on the topic of planetary habitability, the habitable zone of planetary systems, and the study of why Venus and Earth underwent divergent evolutions. He has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers as well as several books on the topic of exoplanets and habitability.  He is also a prominent scientific leader for several NASA missions designed to search for life in the universe.

Thursday, August 27, 2026
Emily Lindsey (La Brea Tar Pits)
Fall of the Titans: What became of the world’s Ice Age giants and what does it mean for our future?
Throughout most of the 66-million-year history of the Age of Mammals, large mammals dominated Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems.  But at the end of the last Ice Age, between ~50,000 and 10,000 years ago, most of these “megafauna” suddenly disappeared.  This event constituted the largest wave of extinctions since the dinosaurs died out, and coincided with major global changes, including a rapidly warming climate, the reorganization of floral and faunal communities, and the spread of human populations around the world.  But despite decades of research, scientists are still debating the role each of these processes played in the loss of these iconic animals, largely because the timing of the extinction event is not well-resolved enough to tease apart these closely-linked phenomena.  In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in our efforts to elucidate the timing, causes, dynamics, and consequences of the Ice Age extinctions, and how these discoveries can inform our understanding of ecosystem change and biodiversity loss today.

Dr. Emily Lindsey is Associate Curator and Excavation Site Director in the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research at La Brea Tar Pits.  Dr. Lindsey studies how climate change and human actions intersect to drive extinctions, using the collapse of global ecosystems at the end of the Ice Age as a model.  She is a leading expert on Ice Age animals of the Americas and has authored more than 30 scientific papers. Dr. Lindsey holds an AB in Biology from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Fulbright scholar to Uruguay. A passionate science communicator, she lectures widely and has been featured in numerous media outlets from the New York Times and NPR to ESPN and Netflix.  She has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Antarctica, Chile, Guyana, Ecuador, and Peru, where her current research involves seeking clues to ecological tipping points preserved in the rich asphaltic fossil localities of the Neotropics. 

Thursday, September 10, 2026
Daniell Whiteson (UC Irvine)
The Unknown Universe
A journey to the edge of our knowledge about the Universe, from the mysteries of the tiniest particles, to the size and origin of the entire cosmos, to whether there are aliens out there asking the same questions, and finding the same answers.

Daniel Whiteson is a physics professor at UC Irvine and a researcher at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He’s the co-host of the podcast ‘Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe’ and co-author of ‘Do Aliens Speak Physics?’ and ‘We Have No Idea.”

Admission:
• $10 adults
• $8 military or seniors
• $7 students
• $5 children ages 6–12
• Free for children five and under
• Museum members are free.

Parking is free, and the museum is accessible to persons with disabilities.