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Science Steps Up to the MicView Now -
Reimagining Science 365 Days A YearPlay -
Fred Kavli (1927-2013), Giant of Science PhilanthropyPlay -
MAVEN Satellite Takes Off for MarsPlay -
Saturn As You’ve Never Seen ItPlay -
A Woman of GeniusPlay -
Music vs. Sound Effects and SilencePlay -
Beyond Cosmic MolassesPlay -
Alec Baldwin Asks What’s Your Favorite Film ScorePlay -
Why is Alan Alda Interested in Science?Play -
Steve Maguire Answers “What is Time?”Play
World Science Festival brings scientists, writers, and artists to the stage to tell stories about their personal relationship to science. View our latest collection of poignant, hilarious and unpredictable tales. Presented in collaboration with The Moth.
Revealing the wonder of science and inspiring the future.
“Science is going to be here forever. The more questions we solve, the more we find.”—Fred Kavli, Los Angeles Times, (2008)
Fred Kavli, who chartered a new course for 21st century science philanthropy, passed away on November 21, 2013. Kavil, an entrepreneur and innovator, made his fortune...
NASA’s MAVEN mission is scheduled to launch on Monday, November 18. In this WSF video, NASA scientist Michelle Thaller talks about what MAVEN could reveal about Mars’ lost atmosphere and teach us about the life cycle of planets.
For more on exploring Mars and investigating signs of life on...
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a mosaic of Saturn and its entire ring system that was stitched together from photographs taken by the spacecraft Cassini. Carolyn Porco, leader of the imaging team, explains how the portrait was crafted and earth’s cameo appearance.
The...
Marie Curie was a woman whose profound achievements changed science forever. Her remarkable story was among those featured in the WSF program Beautiful Minds: The Enigma of Genius. The program began with a theatrical piece exploring genius, and this chosen excerpt highlights Curie, the first woman...
The combination of music, sound effects and silence can create heightened emotional reactions. Alec Baldwin leads a conversation with the Coen Brothers, composer Carter Burwell and neuroscientist, Ani Patel that investigates these effects using a memorable scene from “Barton Fink.” Learn more about...
Watch an overview of the math behind the Nobel Prize-winning Higgs Boson discovery with Brian Greene.
Alec Baldwin asks filmmakers Joel & Ethan Coen, neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel, and film composer Carter Burwell, “What is one of your favorite musical score moments in a movie?” Watch this excerpt from Art of the Score: The Mind, Music, and Moving Images.
Actor, author, and director Alan Alda talks about what interests him in science, the question he would like to see answered in his lifetime, and the importance of asking impertinent questions in the pursuit of knowledge. Alan Alda hosted PBS special “Brains on Trial with Alan Alda.” a two-part...
Scientists have struggled to explain the many concepts of time since Einstein. Perhaps even more difficult is to explain time to a young person. Hundreds of scientists tried to do just that for the 2013 Flame Challenge: explain time to fifth graders. Judged by children from around the world, here...
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Music vs. Sound Effects and SilencePlay
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A Woman of GeniusPlay
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Science Gets Graphic at New York Comic ConView Now -
Beyond Cosmic MolassesPlay
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Is Time Real?Play -
Art of the Score: The Mind, Music, and Moving ImagesView Now -
Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss Discuss the HiggsPlay -
Can Math Be Beautiful?Play -
Decoding DreamsPlay -
What Is Genius?Play -
The Power of the Pentatonic ScalePlay -
Black Holes and Holographic WorldsPlay -
How Do We Smell?Play -
Surface Tension: Scenes from a Radical New Exhibit on...Play -
Is Google Making Us Smarter?Play
The combination of music, sound effects and silence can create heightened emotional reactions. Alec Baldwin leads a conversation with the Coen Brothers, composer Carter Burwell and neuroscientist, Ani Patel that investigates these effects using a memorable scene from “Barton Fink.” Learn more about...
Marie Curie was a woman whose profound achievements changed science forever. Her remarkable story was among those featured in the WSF program Beautiful Minds: The Enigma of Genius. The program began with a theatrical piece exploring genius, and this chosen excerpt highlights Curie, the first woman...
This year at NYCC, we brought together a group of authors and scientists for a conversation about how the art, science and storytelling of comic books and graphic novels can be a launch pad into worlds of scientific exploration and discovery.
Brian Greene introduces "When Science Gets Graphic" at New York Comic Con.
Jonathan Coulton offers up an astonishing one hundred bucks for the purchase of a quantum computer.
Comic book author Jim Ottaviani says while science is all about repeatability, precision and accuracy, storytelling about science isn't served well by devotion to including every detail.
Charles Soule explains the inspiration for his imaginative mathematical graphic novel "Strange Attractors."
The "When Science Gets Graphic" audience smiles at Jonathan Coulton's comment about the hazards of scientific inaccuracies in his song writing. And how willing people are to point them out.
"When Science Gets Graphic" audience member asks how we get diverse scientific disciplines like biology more involved in comic books.
Author of "Professor Astro Cat's Frontiers in Space" Dominic Walliman sees a parade of cosplay characters at New York Comic Con.
Watch an overview of the math behind the Nobel Prize-winning Higgs Boson discovery with Brian Greene.
The flow of time is central to human experience. The past drifts away and the future relentlessly approaches. But does time really flow? Or, as Einstein suggested, might the distinction between past, present and future be an illusion?
Alec Baldwin, Aniruddh D. Patel, Carter Burwell, and Ethan and Joel Coen discuss the uniquely powerful role of music in shaping the narrative flow and the emotional impact of film.
On stage at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York City.
Host Alec Baldwin and neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel.
Composer Carter Burwell and Filmmaker Ethan Coen.
Filmmaker Joel Coen discussing the role of music in film with Carter Burwell and Ethan Coen.
World Science Festival co-founder Brian Greene met with theoretical physicist and WSF alum Lawrence Krauss in order to field some questions sent in about the Higgs Boson and the future of physics as we know it.
What is it about Euclid’s infinite primes that rocks Simon Singh’s world? What makes math different from the rest of the sciences? Listen as he and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy explain why, to them, math is a language of beauty, creativity, and immortality—for its unshakable proofs allow you to...
Being able to visualize another person’s imagination for all to see is a staple of science fiction stories. According to Frank Tong, a neuroscientist and psychology professor, we may be closer than you think to achieving this. Here he explains a colleague’s findings at the 2009 Festival event,...
How to define genius? Dean Keith Simonton takes us on a historical tour of its ever-changing meaning. From its humble beginnings as a measure of potential we all have within us, to a solely artistic gift—as described by Immanuel Kant—to a testable measure of intelligence governed by an IQ...
We don’t know much about the human brain on music. Do people instinctively know the sound patterns of the pentatonic scale? Is there a base level of musical knowledge in all of us, just waiting to be tapped? Or is the pentatonic scale simply so common in Western music that it has become ingrained...
Black holes are gravitational behemoths that dramatically twist space and time. Recently, they’ve also pointed researchers to a remarkable proposal—that everything we see may be akin to a hologram. Alan Alda joins Kip Thorne, Robbert Dijkgraaf and other renowned researchers on an odyssey...
Take a deep breath. What do you smell? At that moment, millions of molecules are rushing into your nose and caressing the nerve endings of your brain’s olfactory bulb. But how does your brain know what smell to assign each molecule? How many smells can the brain handle? Smell researcher and...
Rethink the most fundamental resource on Earth—water—through the lens of art, design and science at the U.S. premiere of Surface Tension: The Future of Water. This striking interactive exhibit, created by Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, explores water through the exceptional and...
Is our increasing reliance on Google rotting our brains and turning us in to lazy halfwits? Or could search engine technology actually be exercising our brains in ways don’t fully understand yet? Neuroscientist Gary Small explains how the brain treats Google like any other repeatedly used tool—it...
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The Big, the Small and the ComplexView Now -
Science Steps Up to the MicView Now
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Cool Jobs: The Alien HunterPlay -
Spotlight: Do Not Touch the FrogPlay -
Science Unplugged: What Are Black Holes?Play -
Cool Jobs: Ecological AdventurerPlay -
Science Unplugged: What Is String Theory?Play -
Cool Jobs: High-Flying EngineerPlay -
The Big Ideas Series: The Heart of Something...Play -
To Remember Better, Build a Mansion in Your MindPlay -
Cool Jobs: The NeuroscientistPlay -
How Good Is Your Memory?Play -
Spotlight: Things That Are Really TherePlay -
Cool Jobs: Robot Talent AgentPlay -
Spotlight: The Dao of ZibPlay
The Big, the Small, and the Complex is a series exploring the latest developments in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience—fields recognized by The Kavli Prize. This series is made possible with help from The Kavli Foundation, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Royal...
Cool Jobs: Meet the people with the coolest jobs in the world. Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute, explains how she searches for intelligent life on other planets, what exactly her 42 radio telescopes pick up, and why she needs your eyes and ears to perpetuate her search.
See more Cool...
Strip away the trimmings of a traditional science presentation, add cocktails, and you have WSF Spotlight. Here, ecologist and National Geographic photographer Mark Moffett recounts his unexpectedly hilarious expedition to a remote valley in Colombia to document an elusive and highly poisonous...
And what makes them black? Brian Greene demystifies the legendary might of these cosmological powerhouses.
Ecologist and explorer Mark Moffett has trekked across the globe to find his stories and capture them on film. Just like the creatures he photographs, Mark can be found crawling in the dirt or clinging to the tops of trees to get that perfect shot. Joined by a scaly friend, he shares his...
What is the smallest thing in the universe? For a long time, it was the atom. Then scientists discovered subatomic particles like quarks. Is there anything smaller? Physicist Brian Greene explains String Theory, which looks to find out what the very fabric of the cosmos is made out of.
Cool Jobs: Meet the people with the coolest jobs in the world. Nate Ball has always had an appetite for excitement. Growing up, he learned how to build everything from hovercrafts to potato guns to tesla coils. It’s no wonder he went on to become an award-winning mechanical engineer. Here he...
Normally, when you think about math, the word “creativity” doesn’t readily come to mind. Playing his best devil’s advocate, Robert Krulwich challenges the panel to explain the “beauty” of a formula or the “elegance” of a proof. Is math a kind of art? Can a great mathematical idea be compared to a...
Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, walks us through the process of constructing “memory palaces”—an age-old memorization technique currently exploited by the world’s leading memory champs and mental athletes. Psychologist and memory...
Cool Jobs: Meet the people with the coolest jobs in the world. Watch as neuroscientist André Fenton describes the life of a modern brain scientist, leads a group of students through interactive games, and scans a person’s brain live while explaining what we can learn from its electrical waves.
See...
One of the fascinating things about people who have had a misattribution memory is the confidence in which they will defend their recollection. Building upon his anecdote about memory researcher Donald Thompson, who was wrongfully accused of a brutal rape due to a misattribution, Daniel Schacter...
Strip away the trimmings of a traditional science presentation, add cocktails, and you have WSF Spotlight. Here, astrophysicist Mario Livio, from the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, takes us on a tour of the cosmos in all its dramatic beauty and violence. The slow death of stars,...
What’s it like to build a giant Rube Goldberg machine? How do you book comedy gigs when your only client is a robot? Working in the areas between art and science, social roboticist Heather Knight builds interactive robotic experiences. Whether they’re flowers that watch and react to passer-bys, or...
Strip away the trimmings of a traditional science presentation, add cocktails, and you have WSF Spotlight. This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ____. What? With this simple test and and an adorable imaginary animal, Jean Berko Gleason opened up a new...
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Icarus at the Edge of Time Educator ResourcesView Now -
Quantum Mechanics Educator ResourcesView Now -
Baba Brinkman’s Rap Video on Artificial Selection...View Now -
Meet Pioneer in Science, Dr. Nora VolkowPlay -
The Scientist’s Apprentice program gives students the...View Now -
2012 Cool Jobs Opening AnimationPlay -
Meet Wendy SuzukiPlay
Download this comprehensive guide to teaching black holes in the classroom. How does gravity work across space? How do black holes form? What is time dilation? Includes stunning images of black holes, a glossary, and classroom activities.
Quantum mechanics is one of the most amazing and surprising discoveries, ever. While nobody expected it, the microscopic world of atoms and molecules behave in vastly different ways from the objects around us. During the 2013 World Science Festival, the event Spooky Action: The Drama of Quantum...
How do you turn Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection into a story, especially a story that relates to rap?
Meet Pioneer in Science, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She’s not your average general in the war on drugs. The troops commands are kids; the ammunition: science. It was Volkow’s curiosity as a young adult that ultimately led her to this battlefield.
Dr....
Youth joined food scientist, Julie Goddard, from the University of Massachusetts, to see what’s cooking in a food lab and just how much science you need to know in this yummy apprentice program.
Taught by after school program, Engineering for Kids, apprentices designed, built, and tested their own balsawood bridges and other types of bridges to study structural loads.
Budding food scientists at work.
What one apprentice learned about life underwater.
Students worked with Roboticist Edwin Olson to program and drive a robot through obstacles and mazes.
A young scientist's first encounter with a real brain.
A student eagerly awaits his turn to ask a question.
Upon completion of the workshop, each apprentice received a “Scientist's Apprentice Certificate."
Students also received a World Science Festival backpack.
Carmela & Yonathai, high school students at The NOW Academy, Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles worked to create this intro for the World Science Festival Cool Jobs event. They together developed the script, characters, and produced all the drawings for this fresh animated short....
Wendy Suzuki is a neuroscientist who studies a special area of the brain called the hippocampus. It’s small compared to other brain regions, but it plays a pivotal role in memory and spatial navigation. Suzuki specifically studies how exercise has been shown to promote brain growth in this area....
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Baba Brinkman’s Rap Video on Artificial Selection...View Now
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Cool Jobs: A Mind for NeurosciencePlay -
Don’t Feed The Machines: Take a Tour of a Robot...View Now -
Cool Jobs: Friendly Neighborhood ZoologistPlay -
Quick: Multiply by 11Play -
Cool Jobs HighlightsPlay -
How Many Stars Are There in the Sky?Play -
Cool Jobs: The NeuroscientistPlay
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The Best Tickers are AtomsPlay -
Young Storytellers: Haunted Babysitters, Odd...Play
How do you turn Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection into a story, especially a story that relates to rap?
What do aerobic exercise and memory have in common? According to neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki, more than you think. Her passion for the human brain, memory, and a workout routine called intenSati led her to get people out of their seats and work out for better brain health.
See more Cool Jobs here
Festo's autonomous bionic bird soared above the World Science Festival's tech fest, Innovation Square, on June 2, 2012.
Another amazing Festo creation is the AquaJelly, an autonomous robotic jellyfish with eight mechanical tentacles to propel itself underwater just like the real deal.
A robotic snake that can slither up poles (and people) slithered through the crowds at Innovation Square
Come see why Dennis Hong's humanoid was named Time magazine's 2011 Best Invention of the Year.
SmartBird, a massive, autonomous flying contraption straight out of a sci-fi fever dream, buzzed the square every hour.
Mechanical engineer Maurizio Porfiri's robotic fish are convincing enough to swim with real schools of fish.
Jarod Miller is no stranger to animals. As a zoologist, he has traveled the world and met countless members of the animal kingdom. But that’s not enough for him, he wants children to meet them too. With the help of an assistant, Jarod is joined on stage by three of his furry friends, giving the...
The Mathemagician reveals the surprisingly easy trick behind instantly multiplying any two-digit number by 11. It’s really as simple as 2 + 2.
Cool Jobs is an annual jaw-dropping program that occurs both during the week of the Festival and year-round. Cool Jobs brings children face-to-face with world-renowned scientists and their amazing jobs. It inspires young audiences to learn about science, be excited by science and maybe even grow up...
Travel back in time as Galileo Galilei (played by Mike Francis) relates the story of when he first turned his telescope to the sky in order to count the stars—and finds the task more daunting than he expected.
Cool Jobs: Meet the people with the coolest jobs in the world. Watch as neuroscientist André Fenton describes the life of a modern brain scientist, leads a group of students through interactive games, and scans a person’s brain live while explaining what we can learn from its electrical waves.
See...
When you need a clock of utmost accuracy, you need an atomic clock. Nobel Prize winner William Phillips explains how scientists use atomic clocks to get the most accurate bang for their buck.
A babysitter’s harrowing evening locked in a closet; the secret to saving enchanted fairies; a boy’s globe-trotting search for a missing pearl; princesses who live for ice cream and cake; a chickpea-size kitten named Chickpea learns to fish; and other tales by kids, courtesy of our friends at...
The lovely Escher String Quartet enhanced the World Science Festival program Hidden Dimensions with a rendition of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (“Great Fugue”). Appropriately, this fugue is distinctively four-dimensional in its arrangement, instead of consisting primarily of melody and harmony. Listen...
NASA’s MAVEN mission is scheduled to launch on Monday, November 18. In this WSF video, NASA scientist Michelle Thaller talks about what MAVEN could reveal about Mars’ lost atmosphere and teach us about the life cycle of planets.
For more on exploring Mars and investigating signs of life on...
Is prosopagnosia, commonly called face blindness, a communicable disease? Can you get it from a genetic mutation or just from environmental considerations? Is it a consequence of the natural process of aging—or of the progression of Alzheimer’s? Neurologist Oliver Sacks, who himself is face...
Not long ago, the idea of a computer beating a human at chess was the stuff of science fiction. But some of the most creative programmers of the 1980s and 90s were determined to make it a reality. And they did. In two matches that riveted the world, Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer, took on the...
Animals utilize their sense of smell to explore their surroundings. But what about plants? When you smell a flower, is it smelling you back? Is it trying to figure out if your nose would make a good pollinator? Chemical ecologist Consuelo De Moraes shows us a parasitic vine that uses smell to find...
.@WorldSciFest and @TheMoth prove that we all have science stories to tell, whether we're scientists or not: worldsciencefestival.com/series/the_moth
04 Dec.@TheMoth @ WSF: From outer space dreams to embracing depression, scientists step up to the mic & share their stories bit.ly/18yPY0D
04 DecLife on Europa? Jupiter's icy moon may be able to sustain it: bit.ly/1bgTw69 via @UPI. @NASA investigates: bit.ly/Isw1fK
04 DecForget diamonds, the amplituhedron is the jewel-like object at the heart of quantum physics. @QuantaMagazine bit.ly/1dPWqlI
04 DecLife on Earth threw author/physicist @JannaLevin for a loop: bit.ly/18lZfmJ From @WorldSciFest & @TheMoth
04 Dec@TheMoth @ WSF: From outer space dreams to embracing depression, scientists step up to the mic to share their stories bit.ly/18yPY0D
04 DecIs storytelling innate? bit.ly/1gChIRv
03 DecBeautiful bugs: would you squish them? nyti.ms/1k7rivE via @nytimes
03 DecHow astronauts saved Hubble, 20 years ago: bit.ly/IKlnBx via @SPACEdotcom
03 DecHow a man is making his own DIY spacesuit, for $2,000 bit.ly/1jhJ4Pa What's in store for spacesuits? bit.ly/1cjLHNh
03 Dec
