Topic: Guest Blogger
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Hallucinations and the Cheating Brain
There is disappointment in the air. I am asked “what goes on in the brain when you hallucinate?” And my reply, however enthusiastically delivered, invariably falls short of expectations. -
Purple Octopuses on Parade
In my experience, Oliver Sacks always brings a story, and this time it was early in our conversation for the World Science Festival that he showed once again he has so many stories to tell. -
A Flash of Hallucination
As a medical student 30 years ago, I met a physician with a tumor deep in his right frontal lobe that caused seizures. During his seizures, his left arm became stiff, but this was preceded by "the feeling of extreme embarrassment, as though I had made a very foolish remark." -
When Abnormal is Normal
As the girl who cried and thrashed through her first tattoo- of a bleeding heart flower—I always have been a very sensitive person. Besides being quite emotive, I possess a very responsive nervous system, and all my life have depended heavily upon my visual and tactile senses... -
What is Migraine Aura?
Migraine aura is the collective name given to the many types of neurological symptoms that may occur just before or during a migraine headache. Said to be experienced by 1 in 5 migraineurs—20 to 30% of people—aura is a fully reversible neurological syndrome, which can... -
Going Up with Oliver Sacks
My mind keeps returning to the night of Dr. Oliver Sacks and John Hockenberry’s discussion but especially to a scene soon after the talk. My mother and I found ourselves stuffed inside the Cooper Union elevator with Dr. Sacks himself and the equally esteemed astronomer Dr.... -
Uncharted Territory
Just around the corner from the head shops that line St. Marks Place, the Cooper Union still houses the very stage where the likes of Lincoln, Mark Twain, the leader of the Lakota Sioux, and Susan B. Anthony spoke to presumably packed houses about the most vital issues of their... -
Ocean’s Five: Elite Science Expedition Investigates Glowing Sea Life
Last week, a five-member team of scientists traveled to the Solomon Islands to investigate one of nature's shining achievements: luminescent and fluorescent coral. The Solomon Islands are located east of Papua New Guinea and are part of the Coral Triangle, an ecologically... -
James Fallon: Taming the Psychopath Within
I'm a serotonin train wreck, and I love it. I don't feel as if I suffer from a mental disorder, but am rather blessed by it. While this may appear to be a bit of denial, a bit of eccentric goofiness, which all may be true too, the crazy quilt of genetic gifts I received from my... -
Mario Livio: Wallpaper Patterns, Music, and the Laws of Physics
When mathematicians talk about symmetry, they mean immunity to possible change. In the words of the great mathematician Hermann Weyl: “A thing is symmetrical if there is something you can do to it so that after you have finished doing it, it looks the same as before.” For... -
Alex Wright: Premonitions of the Internet
The conventional history of the Internet usually emphasizes its roots in computer science: from networking pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn to hypertext visionaries like Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee. While these inventors certainly deserve their due for developing... -
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... -
Mario Livio: Plato’s Universe and Saraceno’s Cloud City
If you haven’t yet seen Tomás Saraceno’s “Cloud City” (Figure 1) on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you should. It is a fantastic sculpture allowing for a unique visitor experience. The sculpture is composed of units, many of which are in the... -
Mystery Story: Why Do We Love Fiction?
By the time we die, we will spend more time in imaginary worlds (novels, TV shows, dreams, fantasies, make-believe) than anywhere else. The human addiction to story is one of the great unsolved mysteries of evolutionary biology. But recent research points the way to a solution.... -
Carl Zimmer: Curing our Influenza Amnesia
For many diseases, our immunological memories can endure like etchings in stone. Once children get shots for polio, they're usually protected for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the flu virus. When it comes to influenza, it's as if we have... -
Mario Livio: Art, Science, and Inspiration
When we think about an artist as an innovator, clearly the first name that comes to mind is that of Leonardo da Vinci, the quintessential Renaissance man. Indeed to Leonardo himself, his scientific studies were as important as his art. -
Lawrence M. Krauss: Did the Universe Arise from Nothing?
In 1965, in New Jersey of all places, two young scientists who had no idea what they were looking for, observed some unexpected noise in an antenna at the then Bell Laboratories. The noise turned out to be the afterglow of the Big Bang itself. -
Genius Across Cultures and the “Google Brain”
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with other scientists—along with famed director Julie Taymor and legendary composer Philip Glass—to wrestle with the riddle of genius. I found that Taymor made about cultural and environmental influences on cognitive traits very... -
Searching for Genius in the Brain
Genius is a big concept to get one’s head around. I was surprised to find that no studies of this topic have ever been reported in the scientific literature. There exist numerous studies of intelligence, creativity, personality—some of the key ingredients—but none... -
On Seeing Further
The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while Ancient astronomers, who relied only on their naked eyes to perceive the... -
Basic Instincts Unleashed in Sleep
Parasomnias are abnormal states of behavior and experience in which basic instincts are inappropriately unleashed during sleep. These instinctual behaviors can be appetitive, such as feeding (sleep related eating disorder), and sex (sexsomnia, sleepsex), and can also involve... -
Why I Became a Mathematician
Beauty is one of the last things most calculus students associate with the subject. That’s hardly surprising. It is generally presented as a utility—a collection of techniques for solving problems to do with continuous change (in the case of differential calculus) or the... -
Science’s Most Elusive Women: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin & the Women of Harvard Observatory
The final installment of this series on science's elusive women will focus on English-American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the women of Harvard Observatory. Payne-Gaposchkin was the first scientist to assert, against conventional wisdom at the time, that stars are... -
The Curious Symmetry of Sleep
Not long ago, I woke up in a hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waking up for me is a slow climb, and so I was still a bit bleary by the time I reached the front desk. I was checking my bags for the day, which I would be spending at a conference nearby, when I noticed a... -
A Twist on Climate Change, Risk, and Uncertainty
The air grows thick. Dark clouds churn like a pot of boiling water overhead. The colors of reality become oversaturated—greens too green, yellow a sickly gold. This is what tornado weather looks like, and the United States has been hit with a lot of it lately. Make no... -
Scientific Fluency, the Universe, and a Balloon
Science communication is difficult. It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in jargon, too dense for its readership, or, conversely, too simplistic to satisfy its critics in the scientific community. It can lack warmth, or be too... -
The Other Brain of Genius
Cerebral glial cells span the brain. Are they the key to understanding genius ability? Genius—is it the seed or the soil? Beethoven and Einstein are examples of extraordinarily creative geniuses. Was their vastly superior brain the chance outcome of a genetic dice roll, or... -
Science’s Most Elusive Women: Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn. She the physicist and he the chemist; her creative, theoretical models and analyses based on his exacting chemical evidence; a perfect pair of scientific thinkers. Meitner’s reputation soared with the couple's co-discovery of an isotope of... -
Science’s Most Elusive Women: Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace
Where in New York City can you review the astonishing archives of a leading pioneer in computer language? On a velvet pillow, overlooked by a bust of a Romantic-era icon, locked in the peaceful and mysterious Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the 42nd Street... -
Science’s Most Elusive Women: Rosalind Franklin
The mysterious story of molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin will be explored next week at the World Science Festival’s The Secret Behind the Secret of Life: Facts and Fictions with The Ensemble Studio Theatre Production of Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51. The photo itself... -
A Memory for Pain, Stored in the Spine
You slam your hand in a door, and the experience becomes etched into your brain. You carry a memory of the swinging panel, the sound as it crushes your flesh and the shooting pain as your skin gives way. Your body remembers it too. For days afterwards, the neurons in your spine... -
The Great Escape: Science’s Oldest Dream
When you hang around with great biologists, you hear conversations that change your sense of what it means to be alive. In the 1990s I happened to be present at a lab in California when a legendary molecular biologist began musing about a new interest: the possibility of a cure... -
Creation on Command
Al Kooper didn’t know what to play. He’d told some half-truths to get into Bob Dylan’s recording session — the musicians were working on some song tentatively titled “Like A Rolling Stone” — and Kooper had been assigned the Hammond organ. There was only one... -
A Curious Case of Sleep Violence
On September 11, 1982 I started my career in sleep medicine at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. I had three new patients on my schedule for that day. The second patient was a 67-year-old gentleman from Golden Valley, Minnesota named Donald Dorff who... -
So You Want to Live Forever?
Most people look for the key to postponing old age in mega-antioxidant-loaded juices, extreme exercise regimens, or expensive skin creams. Not Michael Rose. Rose, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine and one of the panelists for... -
Memories Are Made of This
U.S. Patent 7,928,070 issued in April of this year for what was simply labeled as a “memory-enhancing protein.” Todd Sacktor, a professor at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, and a panelist at the 2011 World Science Festival’s The Unbearable Lightness of Memory, received the... -
Information Is Everywhere, How Can Science Protect It?
Underscoring the importance of encryption in our increasingly data-driven digital lives, this year's World Science Festival features its first-ever session on cryptography, entitled "Keeping Secrets: Cryptography in a Connected World." During this discussion expect a... -
Space Is an Elaborate Illusion
My dad took a peculiar pleasure in fitting the maximum amount of stuff into the smallest possible space. Whenever we went on a family trip, he packed our suitcases like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, ensuring there wasn't a single wasted inch—a laudable skill as far as I was concerned,... -
The Biological Mechanism That Gives Life Meaning
As the title of our program The Unbearable Lightness of Memory suggests, memory is much more than the process by which we recall errands or birthdays. Memory—how information obtained from experience is stored in the brain—is also the mechanism that molds our sense of the... -
A New Piece to the Dark Matter Puzzle
For twenty five years I’ve been working on the "dark matter problem"—the question of what makes up roughly 90% of the mass of our Milky Way galaxy as well as every other galaxy. This past week saw intriguing new experimental results that may be telling us something profound...
