By Raphael Rosen

Imagine driving across the United States without a map or GPS. How would you do it? How would you know where you are and how far you had to go? As impossible as this feat seems, millions of birds perform it every year. Traversing thousands of miles on annual migrations, Arctic terns, bar-tailed godwits, and ruby-throated hummingbirds seem to know exactly where they are going, yet for years scientists had no idea how they did it. One physicist, Klaus Schulten, thought one explanation might be that the birds could sense the Earth's magnetic fields, perhaps using magnetite molecules in their eyes. But no one knew how that was possible. Read on...

By Mario Livio

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 shape of a dodecahedron—a solid with twelve pentagonal faces.
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By Raphael Rosen

Your laptop, your desktop, your phone, your GPS—every computer in your life can be traced to one man: Alan Turing. Born in Britain in 1912, Turing helped break the Nazi Enigma code, pioneered thinking about artificial intelligence, and in general helped usher in the Information Age. And 2012 is the 100th anniversary of his birth. Read on...

By Ruth Reader

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 might of a black hole. Read on...

By Jonathan Gottschall

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. Read on...

By Carl Zimmer

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 short-term amnesia. Read on...

By Mario Livio

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. Read on...

By Lawrence M. Krauss

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. Read on...

Is 2012 the year we finally pin down the elusive Higgs boson, the missing link in the Standard Model of Physics? As physicists get tantalizingly close to confirming the discovery of the long-sought “God particle,” questions now turn to what happens if we do, or don’t, as the case may be. Read on...

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. Read on...

Each year, The John Templeton Foundation, one of our founding benefactors and sponsor of the festival's Big Ideas series, honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. Yesterday, the Templeton Foundation named the Dalai Lama winner of the 2012 Templeton Prize for his work at the intersection of science and religion. Read on...

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa has long been a tempting fruit for astrobiologists looking for life beyond Earth. Planetary scientist and WSF alum Steven Squyres calls it “the most fascinating place in the solar system.” Read on...