From Tuesday, August 17 through Wednesday, November 3, 2010, the Burke Museum will present a new series of adult classes giving naturalists and art lovers the opportunity to gain new skills and knowledge in a variety of subjects. Classes are taught by experts in their field and are affordably priced. Class subjects include: plant reproduction, Northwest Native art, urban geology, and nature illustration. For more information, see http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/event/adultclasses/.

“Summer Sounds at the Henry” continues this week with a free public concert on Thursday, August 5, from 12-1 pm in the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Sculpture Court next to the Henry Art Gallery. Now in its third year, this casual concert series is co-presented by the Henry and the University of Washington School of Music on every first Thursday during the summer months.

This week’s performance will feature music students Ivan Arteaga on saxaphone and Jared Borkowski on guitar. If you can’t make August 5, be sure to catch the final concert for this season on September 2.

(The Henry Art Gallery is located near the 15th Avenue NE overpass at 41st Street.)

A free lecture for the general public about cutting edge advances in genome sciences will being held at 7 pm tomorrow evening, July 28, at the William H. Foege Building Auditorium (S-060), located on 15^th Ave. NE south of Pacific Ave. The lecture will be followed by refreshments at 8 pm.

Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam: who do your genes come from? will be presented by Joe Felsenstein, professor of genome sciences and biology. It is the final in a series of public lectures on genome science designed for an audience with “no background knowledge in genetics or other biological subjects”.  The lecture will be followed by an open discussion with the presenter.

The UW Department of Genome Sciences played an important role in determining the sequence of the 3 billion letters of DNA specifying all of our hereditary information and is now one of the leading centers where the human genome is being interpreted and where new technologies for this analysis are being developed.