Topic: Festival Events
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Oliver Sacks—The Justin Bieber of Neurologists
“The Justin Bieber of Neurologists”—that’s how NPR’s John Hockenberry, noting that the World Science Festival program, “Hallucinations with Oliver Sacks,” had sold out in a matter of hours, described the celebrated doctor and best-selling author. -
Overcoming the “Curse of Knowledge” to Answer the Burning Question
Congratulations to Ben Ames, winner of Alan Alda's Flame Challenge! Ames, 31, combined his musical talents with his scientific expertise (he's working on his PhD in quantum optics) to create this awesome music video that explains with toe-tapping clarity exactly how a flame... -
Elaine Fuchs: “There’s no comfortable route for a scientist”
Last Friday, I heard renowned stem-cell biologist Elaine Fuchs speak at the Pioneers in Science program hosted by the World Science Festival. Fuchs, who probably knows more about the genetic underpinnings of skin disorders than any other person on the planet, led an... -
Imagining a World Without Flu
If ever there was motivation to quarantine yourself during flu season, it's Steven Soderbergh’s sci-fi thriller, Contagion. The movie, screened at the New York Historical Society on Saturday afternoon as a setup to the World Science Festival program, Pandemic Fix: Seeking... -
Upside Down at the Met: An Afternoon with the Artist
It took the World Science Festival to get me back into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many of us who live in the general vicinity of New York City are subject to strange laws of venerability and familiarity when it comes to Manhattan’s two world-classiest museums. -
Supernovas: We Wish They Phoned More Often
Francis Halzen, an experimental physicist from Belgium, imagines a day when he receives a phone call from a supernova. How is it possible to receive a call from an exploding star? -
Babies are 75 Percent Water: A Report from the Opening-Night Reception of Surface Tension
It's not often that I get to go to an art opening, and it's even less often that I get to go to an opening of a show that mixes art and science. So I was excited to attend the Friday-night opening of Surface Tension, an exhibition created by the Dublin-based Science Gallery, at... -
A Dispatch from Alan Alda’s Flame Challenge
Since he was 11 years old, Alan Alda has asked questions about flames. But for a long time, the answers eluded him. As he learned at a young age, procuring information from the notoriously insular scientific community is often difficult. Generally, they're not the best... -
Can Machines be Programmed to Feel?
Despite the clean logic of his thinking machines, Turing’s life, especially at the end, was very tumultuous. In The Creator, we watch Turing mourn the death of a friend, spiral into a psychological breakdown, and discuss his poison apple fetish. Yet, it wasn’t just that he... -
Science, the Next Generation: An Interview with LeVar Burton
On Wednesday night, an audience of over three thousand was transported to the edge of a black hole during the multimedia piece, Icarus at the Edge of Time, an adaptation of Brian Greene's children's book. What better person to have at the helm than Star Trek and Reading Rainbow... -
The Lumpy Universe and Other Cosmic Mysteries
Why do we believe in a theory as fantastical as the Big Bang, whereby the universe began in a space no bigger than a pin prick and expanded outward in a cataclysmic explosion that beget everything we see (and can't see) today? -
Crowdsourced Science, and Other Reasons to Thank the Internet
The Internet has forever changed how we interact with one another. It has placed an endless source of knowledge at our fingertips, changed the way we do business, and even helped topple a few dictators. However, there’s another arena that the internet is starting to turn on... -
Really, Really Old Beer: They Excavated It, We Drank It
I’m all abuzz, from not only the six healthy pours of the most unique and storied beers I’ve ever tasted, but from the archaeological quests that sparked them. In two spirited sessions in the Eataly cooking classroom and rooftop birreria (Cheers to Science!), about sixty of... -
Photo Highlights from The Moth
Thursday, May 31, 2012: Violinist Mazz Swift joins scientists, writers, and artists for an incredible evening at The Moth, New York's most innovative storytelling collective. -
Icarus on the Airwaves: A Scopes Monkey Choir Podcast
Mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn and composer/songwriter Matthew Schickele of the highly entertaining podcast, Scopes Monkey Choir, chat with actor LeVar Burton (“good old Geordie” from Star Trek: The Next Generation), conductor Brad Lubman and an army of brainy kids about the... -
The Frugal Intern’s Guide to the World Science Festival
As a stereotypically poor graduate student living off a modest intern salary, I don't mind admitting that my ears perked up a bit when I heard about all the free events happening this week at the World Science Festival. Never mind the old maxim, 'you get what you pay for': These... -
Angela Belcher’s Virus-Powered Batteries
Imagine a world where high tech generators do not contain toxic chemicals, solar cells are efficient and cheap, your electric car works extremely well, and typing on your computer helps recharge its battery. All this would be powered by— viruses! -
E.O. Wilson’s Controversial Rethink of Altruism
I have decided to focus my "homework" leading up to the 2012 World Science Festival in New York City on two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson and his recent rethinking of a long-held tenet of evolutionary biology known as inclusive fitness. The theory of... -
Can Fiction Transform Reality?
In an opinion piece published in Sunday's Dallas Morning News, author Jonathan Gottschall responds to that question with a resounding "yes." Gottschall, who is scheduled to speak at the sold-out event, Why We Tell Stories: The Science of Narrative, on Saturday, June 2, tackled... -
See Icarus at the Edge of Time performed at the historic United Palace Theatre
Katy Clark, president and executive director of Orchestra of St Luke’s, recalls the evening in 2010 when St Luke's performed the premiere of Icarus at the Edge of Time, a multimedia adaptation of Brian Greene's children's book about a young boy who dares to challenge the... -
Coral as Never Seen Before
We are proud to host the world premiere of Coral: ReKindling Venus, a stunning cinematic experience that awakens viewers to vital questions at the forefront of marine ecology through breathtaking underwater footage. -
BIORHYTHM: A Continuous Sonic Experience
On June 2nd, during the 2011 Festival, New York saw the debut of BIORHYTHM: Music and the Body, a multimedia exhibition presented by Dublin, Ireland's Science Gallery in collaboration with Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. -
Illusion of Certainty: Broadcast Transcript
Thank you everybody who joined us for the World Science Festival's first interactive broadcast. We hope it was an enriching experience and hope you will join us again for future events. Special thanks also to Amir Aczel and BoingBoing.net's Maggie Koerth-Baker, who joined the... -
Can You Smell That?
BOOM. The smell hit me like a punch in the teeth. Staggering, I tried to make sense of the pungent, salty, almost sweet odor. It was certainly offensive, but also curiously intriguing. What was this? -
Audience as Instrument
TED kicked off its annual conference yesterday in Long Beach, CA, with the mission of "rediscovering wonder." Word from the scene is that Bobby McFerrin was blowing minds by "using the audience as an instrument," and in effect demonstrating the innate power of the pentatonic... -
The Story of the Living, Breathing Mirror
Living with the curious perceptual disorder known as prosopagnosia—the inability to recognize even the faces of people you know—can be difficult. But it can also be awkwardly funny, as the legendary author and neurologist Oliver Sacks recounts from his life experiences of... -
The Illusion of Speech
Your brain is an extremely complex pattern-recognition machine. When it comes to interpreting human speech, the brain pieces together familiar sounds to create the "illusion of speech." Here, cognitive neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha, who studies the perception of music,... -
All the World’s Secret Numbers
Humans invented cryptography before they invented the alphabet. Over 4,000 years hieroglyphics turned to letters and letters to numbers. Early encryption algorithms based on simple permutations of the alphabet were replaced by locally varying (letter by letter) substitution... -
Death and the Powers is here
The innovative new opera by Tod Machover, Death and the Powers, opens this Friday for its world premiere in Monte Carlo at Opéra Garnier de Monte-Carlo. Machover gave Festival-goers a sneak peak of this hugely ambitious work earlier this summer at the 2010 World Science... -
Why Faith and Science?
In the run-up to this year's Faith and Science panel at the 2010 World Science Festival, there was some concern expressed (here and here) about our sponsors' influence on programming. In light of such criticism, we thought it would be a good time to reiterate the Festival's... -
"One person’s space can be another person’s time"
The full replay of Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace, featuring Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, Shamit Kachru, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, is now available for streaming for a limited time. -
Listen to "Strangers in the Mirror" on RadioLab!
The fine folks at NPR's RadioLab have produced a new episode based on Strangers in the Mirror, which features Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close (and was moderated by RadioLab's own Robert Krulwich). Have a listen over at their site. Or add to your cue wherever podcasts are sold for... -
Tell Us a Story
Have a story to tell from the 2010 World Science Festival? Maybe it was something you learned? (Like, for instance, if the Earth were to be a black hole it would have to collapse to the size of a grain of sand.) Perhaps it was a serendipitous chat you had when bumping into your... -
The bacteria of our labor: painting with E. coli
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That’s a Wrap (Or Is It?) THANK YOU!
Well, another World Science Festival is in the books. And what a trip it’s been. One attendee at this year’s festival suggested that, as if conjuring the gravity of a supermassive black hole, we must have slowed down the passing of time in order “to do so much in 5 days.”... -
All Creatures Great and Smart LIVE at 3:00pm
We'll be streaming the animal cognition program live from the Skirball Center in NYC, featuring Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods, Jeremy Niven, Patrick Hof, and Klaus Zuberbühler. And moderated by RadioLab's Jad Abumrad. -
Painting with E. coli
This morning, I caught up with Amy Chase Gulden, the Growing Impressions artist who is half of the team that is leading BioArt this Thursday at the Museum of Arts and Design. We were headed to a biology lab at The New School. Our mission? To cover 75 pre-poured agar plates... -
What if Science Were Like Sports?
Christina Agapakis joins us from the ever-inspired Oscillator, her synthetic biology blog at ScienceBlogs. When she’s not reshuffling DNA sequences in her lab at Harvard, she’s usually there making Lady Gaga video spoofs, or something obvious like that. I'm almost embarrassed... -
Authors Anonymous
Shhhh...I have a secret. When we send out information about the World Science Festival, the producers commonly use the phrase, "a Festival meant to engage and inspire the public about science." For me, there's no better way to inspire than to offer the public a chance to... -
Evolutionary Bridges
Sam McDougle joins us from re:COGNITION at The Beautiful Brain. Sam splits this time between behavioral neuroscience research at the University of Pennsylvania, playing fiddle in an Appalachian string-band, and drumming in an indie rock trio. -
Migrations Between Science and Art
Jennifer Jacquet joins us from Guilty Planet. Jennifer is a postdoctoral research fellow working with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. It is nice to see science and art getting along. The World Science Festival's event Eye Candy demonstrates how science... -
Animals Like Us
What is it that makes us humans unique? Is it our capacity to learn language? To cooperate on a vast scale and build civilizations? To make fun of celebrities? To answer all those questions (except maybe the last one), scientists don't limit their research to our own species. We... -
Tune into the World
If you’re like me, you probably pay much more attention to what you see around you than to what you hear. Maybe you even “tune out” much of the time. But actually sound is just as important as sight to our existence – maybe even more so. We hear before we see in the womb. The... -
How We Face the World
Imagine a chair. It has physical attributes: four legs, a seat, some sort of a back. Now imagine a human face. It also has physical attributes: eyes, a nose, a mouth. But, remarkably, the ways we process these features in our brains—and more crucially how we remember them—are... -
Food 2.0: Feeding a Hungry World
At first glance, it's a title that could seem boring. "Feeding a hungry world." Maybe even trite. One can only assume it's yet another infomercial asking for us to help starving children. And we've been hearing about that for years. What's new? What's fresh? What's surprising?... -
Chasing Squirrels in Hyperspace
Joining us from Uncertain Principles is Chad Orzel, physicist and author of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. When not unraveling the secrets of quantum physics with his dog, Emmy, Chad conducts research and teaches at Union College, where he is an associate professor in the... -
Hello, World Science Festival 2010
You may have noticed things look a little different around here.
