About this Event
We're back with a new season of mind-blowing talks, awesome trivia and one of the city’s most unique 19+ nights out, where science gets social and curiosity takes the mic.
Every Nite features three 15-minute talks from scientists, experts, and curious thinkers who can explain big ideas in plain, human language. No decoder ring required. Just real knowledge, shared easily with humour and beer.
After each talk, the audience joins in a live Q&A. That’s when things heat up – questions, debates, surprising tangents and the occasional piece of scientific gear or space rock passed around the room.
April's show features two speakers from B.C.'s deep-sea tech industry and a talk on something you may never have heard of before, LIGHT dark matter. Yup, that's a real thing.
Show starts promptly at 7pm. Please arrive by 6:50pm at the latest. Doors open at 6pm. Venue has a great menu!
Deep, Dark & Dangerous: B.C.’s Deep-Sea Tech Industry
Vicki Jensen, Deep-Sea Documentarian
The ocean off the B.C. coast isn’t just cold and dark - it’s a full-blown engineering playground.
Deep-sea documentarian Vickie Jensen has spent years embedded with the people who work on the water and beneath it - hopping aboard tugs, ferries, dredges, and anything else that floats. Her work dives into the lives of the crews, explorers, and inventors who don’t just study the ocean…they build machines to survive it.
From submersibles to underwater robots, this talk explores the wild, high-stakes world of deep-sea tech, being developed right here in local waters. These aren’t just stories about going deep - they’re about solving impossible problems in a place that is actively trying to crush, freeze, and drown you. Her latest book, “Deep, Dark & Dangerous: The Story of British Columbia’s World-Class Undersea Tech Industry” is the inspiration for April’s show, where she will share incredible tales of B.C.’s trailblazers and the technology they created, including local legend, Phil Nuytten and Nuytco Research Ltd., in the heart of lower Lonsdale. Check out the February 24, 2026 North Shore News article on their outdoor tank!
If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to work in the most hostile environment on Earth - or why anyone would choose to, this is your backstage pass to BC’s deep, dark, and very dangerous underwater world.
Speaker Bio: Vickie Jensen often jests that a good day’s work for her is writing about somebody else’s job—but she’s serious about the importance of documenting and validating work, and she’s made a career out of it. To write her first book, she spent months embedded with a totem pole carving crew.
Life changed, when Vickie became editor of Westcoast Mariner magazine. It was a job that involved 4 years of traveling every month on coastal tugs, patrol boats, fireboats, ships and water taxis, in order to write about the work, thoughts and sagas of B.C. mariners. Vicki also co-authored “Build Your Own Underwater Robot And Other Wet Projects” with Harry Bohm.
Vicki has spent decades working alongside First Nations elders to help produce over 50 language and culture books with her husband, linguist Jay Powell.
When she’s not documenting life on the water or under it, Vickie is usually off chasing her own adventures - from cycling across Canada, to teaching on ships bound for places like Antarctica, Siberia, and Easter Island.
Vicki lives in Vancouver, still plays soccer twice a week, and is fairly certain she’s not done writing yet.
A Quick Dive Into The World of Atmospheric Diving Suits
Jared White, Submersible Pilot & Engineer-In-Training, Nuytco Research Ltd.
Most of the ocean is completely inaccessible to humans—not because we can’t get there, but because the pressure will crush us long before we arrive. Traditional diving methods like scuba and saturation diving push the limits of what the human body can tolerate, carrying risks such as decompression sickness (“the bends”) that require strict limits on depth and time underwater.
This talk explores how a small company from North Vancouver has helped revolutionize the atmospheric diving suit world by overcoming those limits entirely by keeping a pilot at surface pressure, even while operating hundreds of meters below sea level. We’ll look at the engineering that makes this possible, including the specialized joints that allow these metal exosuits to move and work like a human body under extreme pressure.
Dive into the latest designs of these suits, including an atmospheric diving suit that can “fly” through the water column and Nuytco’s latest walking suit, DSEND. Discover what it’s like to operate these in real-world conditions, offering a closer look at their impressive capabilities.
Along the way, we’ll zoom out to the bigger picture of Nuytco’s deep-sea technology, including submersibles and the surprising range of work they support—from filming movies and documentaries, to collaborations with organizations like NASA and Greenpeace.
Speaker Bio: Jared has an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering degree from UVIC and is now a mechanical designer and submersible pilot at Nuytco Research in North Vancouver. Nuytco Research specializes in the design and development of atmospheric diving suits, submersibles, and underwater equipment.
His work focuses on designing and testing technologies that allow pilots to operate in extreme ocean environments while remaining at surface pressure. He has experience in pressure vessel design, sealing systems, life-support systems and advanced manufacturing methods, including metal additive manufacturing.
Jared is currently involved in next-generation suit development, including the DSEND project, which aims to improve mobility, dexterity, and overall capability in deep-sea operations.
Following Muons to the Dark Side
Light Dark Matter, Khurshid Usmanov, UBC,
Dark matter remains one of the deepest mysteries in physics, invisible to us, yet essential to understanding how the universe is held together.
This talk explores how physicists use muons (heavy relatives of the electron), in the ATLAS experiment at CERN, to search for hidden particles and long-lived states connected to light dark matter in the mass range of 0.3 to 10 GeV, potentially revealing new physics beyond the Standard Model.
By tracing these rare and unusual signatures, the talk highlights how the ATLAS experiment can help illuminate the dark side of the universe. ATLAS is one of the major experiments at CERN and one of the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever constructed. It records the aftermath of particle collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre accelerator buried underground near Geneva. These collisions give scientists a powerful way to explore the fundamental building blocks of nature and search for phenomena that have never been seen before.
Speaker Bio: Khurshid Usmanov is an MSc student in Physics at the University of British Columbia and TRIUMF, where he works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. He earned his BSc in Mathematical Physics, with a minor in Pure Mathematics, from the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on searches for long-lived particles and dark sectors, with an emphasis on displaced-muon signatures and physics beyond the Standard Model.
Khurshid is passionate about science outreach and enjoys sharing the excitement of particle physics with broader audiences. Originally from Uzbekistan, he values bringing his Uzbek cultural background into global scientific communities and sharing that perspective through both research and outreach.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Jack Lonsdale's Public House, 127-1433 Lonsdale Avenue, North Vancouver, Canada
CAD 14.11
