The fourth day of the 2014 World Science Festival brought hackers, chemists, pastry chefs, authors, astronauts, and tons of other experts together to teach, entertain, and amaze visitors. Saturday saw a triple-header of delicious food events: physicist Naveen Sinha and the chocolatiers at The Mast Brothers investigated the science of chocolate, while pastry chef Michael Laiskonis and NYU scientists David Grier and Kent Kirshenbaum treated attendees to an immersive course in the chemistry of butter. And the scientists behind artisanal bitters company Shoots and Roots took visitors on a botanical tour of biodiversity hotspots with their handcrafted bitters, some of which were incorporated into the artful cocktails of wd~50 and Alder mixologist Kevin Denton. A small group of attendees spent most of Saturday soaking up a curated science curriculum from a dream team of professors at “World Science U For A Day.” Among the offerings was a lecture on quantum mechanics from Festival co-founder Brian Greene; an examination of the Higgs boson from Caltech scientist Maria Spiropulu, and more. (If you didn’t get to enroll in this program, there’s a hoard of other engaging lectures over at World Science U). Over in Brooklyn, inventive citizens flocked to Science Hack Day, a two-day …

Mapping brain regions is starting to allow us to restore lost movement to the paralyzed and grant limited amounts of sight to the blind (lab mice, that is). But will scientists be able to go even further in coming decades, allowing us to upgrade, copy, or even move our brains around to other substrates besides a meat puppet with a shelf life of about 100 years, at best? These and other far-off future concepts took center stage in the program Cells To Silicon: Your Brain in 2050, part of the Big Ideas Series at the 2014 World Science Festival. “Tonight we can dream a little bit,” moderator and NPR journalist Robert Krulwich said in his introduction. “Science invites crazy dreams.” Welding a brain to a machine is what allowed Cathy Hutchinson—who was left completely paralyzed by a brain stem stroke—to take her first drink of coffee under her own power in more than a decade. Hutchinson raised the water bottle full of java to her own lips with a brain-linked robotic arm developed by Cells to Silicon panelist and Brown University researcher John Donoghue: The arm is linked via wires to a hairbrush-shaped brain implant about the size of an …

Seven days; lots of science in the news. Here’s our roundup of this week’s most notable and quotable items!

Scientists who developed the theory of cosmic inflation, pushed the limits of microscopy, and discovered brain networks devoted to memory and cognition received top honors at this year’s Kavli Prizes. Awarded once every two years, the Kavli Prizes offer $1 million, a gold medal, and a scroll to exceptional researchers in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience—those who work to unravel the natures of big, small, and complex forces around us. This year’s winners were announced on Thursday, May 29 in Oslo, Norway and simulcasted at the 2014 World Science Festival. Alan Guth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Andrei Linde (Stanford University) and Alexei Starobinsky (Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics) won the 2014 Kavli Prize in astrophysics for their work in formulating the theory that the universe exponentially expanded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. “When I first came up with the idea, I was extremely nervous that it would be wrong in some obvious way,” Guth, who was in attendance at the Festival’s Kavli Breakfast, said. “Fortunately, it didn’t fall apart.” The 2014 Kavli Breakfast Linde, whose work has focused on the possibility of multiple Big Bangs occurring, giving rise to a many-faceted multiverse, told the Kavli …

In Audrey Niffenegger’s novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Henry DeTamble is a man with a rare disorder that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. His wife Clare experiences life linearly, but never knows when or where she will see her husband next. “Each moment that I wait feels like a year,” Clare says. “Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting.” You don’t need a time-traveling husband to have a warped experience of time like Clare’s—think of how long a Monday back at work seems to stretch out, and how quickly the weekend flashes by. Time should march steadily, but that doesn’t always match our perception. Neuroscientists and psychologists are searching for answers to this conundrum, using psychophysical experiments and brain scanning technology to unlock just how human brains track the passage of time. Researchers are gaining insights, and some of these findings could help us to better understand, among other things, disorders like schizophrenia and Parkinson’s where sufferers have trouble perceiving time.