Vancouver’s next Café Scientifique is being held in the back room of the The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.], Vancouver, Canada), on Jan. 27,  2015*. Here’s the meeting description (from the Jan. 19, 2015 announcement),

Happy New Year!  We hope you all had an enjoyable and relaxing holiday season.  We’d like to send out a big thank you for your generosity in our crowdfunding campaign and your help in its promotion.  Your donations and support will help to keep us running for another year and more!

Speaking of which, our next café will happen on Tuesday, January 27th, at 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Chris Muir, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia.  The title of his talk is:

More than salad: the inner lives of leaves

To most of us, leaves are the green things in a salad or the emblem on our flag. To a biologist, leaves are the critical interface between a plant and its environment. I will talk about some of the remarkable ways that leaves adapt plants to their environment. First, I will cover some basic functions that leaves perform for a plant: How do plants eat? How do plants avoid being eaten? What goes on inside a leaf? Next, I will talk about some of the unorthodox ways that leaves help plants make a living: How do plants without roots get water? Why do leaves track the sun? How did the Swiss Cheese Plant get its holes? The close connection between a leaf’s form and its function to the plant attests to the relentless action of natural selection in adapting organisms to their environment.

Muir has an eponymous website where you can find out more about his work and about him.

* Jan. 27, 2014 corrected to Jan. 27, 2015 on Feb. 12, 2015.