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  • A Bona Fide New You

    Will the future of age reversal lie in our ability to revitalize—or even replace—our ailing parts? Making an analogy to those who fix up classic cars, Aubrey de Grey and...

  • The New Science of Aging

    According to evolutionary biologist Michael Rose, the conventional 20th century science of aging is dead. The way he sees it, we’re on the cusp of a new scientific era—similar...

  • The Promise of Regenerative Medicine

    Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey has famously predicted that the first person to live to a thousand has already been born. He explains that the key may be in regenerative...

  • The Flourishing Affliction of Old Age

    The relationship between cancer and aging is puzzling. It is well-understood that as we all get older, the chances of getting cancer increase. But cancer’s destructive effects...

  • Steven Weinberg: A Collider of Possibilities

    Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote...

  • Steven Weinberg: The Real Needs of Society

    Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote...

  • Steven Weinberg: Congress Versus the Collider

    Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote...

  • Steven Weinberg: In Defense of Pure Science

    Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote...

  • Steven Weinberg: The Priorities of Practical

    Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote...

  • Mysteries of the Mathematical Universe

    Full 90 Minute Program:Mathematical mysteries have challenged humanity’s most powerful thinkers and inspired passionate, lifelong obsessions in search of answers. From the...

  • Looking Through the Eyes of Mathematics

    Is it possible to deduce the shape of the universe without stepping outside of it? Henri Poincaré thought so. Similar to how the Greeks were able to discern the spherical nature...

  • Process and the Mathematical Revolution

    How do mathematicians work? We’re not asking whether they run on sandwiches or rocket fuel, but rather, “How is a mathematician’s work done?” Is it like the movies, where a...

  • Can Math Be Beautiful?

    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...

  • The Origin of Numbers

    Where did math come from? Which numbers arose first? Did math develop the same way across cultures? While the details are fuzzy, history shows that if people have ever needed to...

  • Welcome to the Mathematical Universe

    Look around you. Underlying every aspect of the world is a language that we all know, though our use and expertise may vary. This language, mathematics, can be used to describe...

  • Interpreting Animal Dreams

    While it may be impossible to wake up a rat, hand it a notebook, and have it write a bleary-eyed account of its dreams, scientists can instead try to go to the source. Matthew...

  • Do Lab Rats Dream of Running Mazes?

    Neuroscientists Matthew Wilson gives the audience a rare look at the activity in a rat’s brain while it runs a maze. Using that data, he then set the rat through the maze again,...

  • Getting Sleep in the Wild

    New advances in brain imaging over the years has allowed researchers to study the sleeping brains of animals. But while scientists have learned much about animal sleep patterns,...

  • Why Study Birds?

    All animals sleep in some form, what makes birds special? Why are scientists like Niels Rattenborg particularly interested in avian sleep patterns? Turns out, birds have evolved...

  • The Safety of Sitting Ducks

    Curious observers have noticed for centuries that ducks sometime sleep with one eye open, but had never really looked into why or how. Neils Rattenborg, a neurophysiologist at the...

  • What is Parasomnia?

    Parasomnias are extreme sleeping behaviors that include bizarre phenomena such as “sleep violence,” “sleep binging,” and “sleep sex.” In his treatment of patients with a...

  • The Curious Case of Kenneth Parks

    In 1987, a Canadian man named Kenneth Parks drove 14 miles to the home of his in-laws. Upon reaching their home, Parks brutally attacked them both, killing his mother-in-law. When...

  • Perchance to Dream about Tetris

    How well do you remember your dreams? Have you ever had a dream about something you were doing earlier in the day—especially if you were doing it when you nodded off? If you’re...

  • Dreams and the Resolution of the Mind

    Our mind’s eye is a space in our heads where memories, images, and sounds all come together in a roiling sea of thoughts. Given that, just how clear is the “vision” of this eye?...

  • Cancer’s Last Stand? The Genome Solution

    Full 90 Minute Program: The deadly scourge of cancer has confounded doctors since ancient Egypt. Now, The Cancer Genome Atlas (modeled after the Human Genome Project) promises a...

  • A Worldwide Standard of Care

    In the fight against cancer, standard of care is king. It would be unethical not to use every treatment at our disposal. So what happens when an overseas researcher discovers that...

  • Our Global Human Genome

    In order to create a comprehensive genomic cancer database, scientists have to reach out to the entire world. Starting with the underserved populations in South Chicago,...

  • Humanizing Cancer Research

    In the 1940s a diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia was a death sentence. But since then, steady progress in treatments have been increasing the survival rates for all forms...

  • Cancer: The Future of a Cure

    Eric Lander believes that one day cancer will be wiped out, much like infectious disease was during the last century. Over the past twenty years, medicine’s ability to treat...

  • Finding the Telltale Genome

    Whenever a cell divides, its genetic code is copied into the new cell. But sometimes an imperfect copy is made, and the result is called a mutation. Most of the time, this does...

  • Spotlight: The Dao of Zib

    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...

  • Spotlight: Life without Cryptography

    Strip away the trimmings of a traditional science presentation, add cocktails, and you have WSF Spotlight. How much of your information would you rather stay hidden from public...

  • Spotlight: Guided by the Stars

    Strip away the trimmings of a traditional science presentation, add cocktails, and you have WSF Spotlight. Priyamvada Natarajan always wanted to be an explorer, and she knew that...

  • Spotlight: The Frontier of the Mind

    Strip away the trimmings of a traditional science presentation, add cocktails, and you have WSF Spotlight. Neuroscientist Joy Hirsch comes from a long line of unorthodox women....

  • Spotlight: From Math to Ants

    Strip away the trimmings of a traditional science presentation, add cocktails, and you have WSF Spotlight. As a young girl, Corina Tarnita found herself with a talent for...

  • Harnessing Quantum Computers

    Current computing technology utilizes a binary computation system—that is, it reads code embedded with states of “on” or “off” (one or zero) to perform calculations. But...

  • Digital Physics: The Pioneering Konrad Zuse

    Konrad Zuse, a painter and inventor of the first program-driven computer, saw in his invention parallels with the world around him. In his book, Rechnender Raum (translated as...

  • Testing from Inside the Maze

    Science owes its success to its self-correcting methodology and the need for irrefutable experimental evidence. So if you’re trying to prove that the universe is information, how...

  • Is the Universe Analog or Digital?

    The fletcher’s paradox, proposed by pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno of Elea, states that if you watch an arrow in flight, it looks continuous. But if you segment the flight into...

  • How Many Bits Are in the Universe?

    Seth Lloyd, an MIT mechanical engineer, doesn’t think digital physics requires an “unseen programmer.” He posits that the universe could be a computer in and of itself, rather...

  • Where Is the Computer, Who Is the Programmer?

    If everything we know as reality is simply a computer program being run by some complicated set of cosmic algorithms, then where’s the computer and who’s the programmer? Although...

  • Is the Universe Digital?

    When scientists first suggested that universe could be compared to a computer, many balked at the concept. They pointed to the ancient Greeks who envisioned a universe of spheres,...

  • Creating Universes with Digital Bits

    In 1970, a mathematician named John Horton Conway devised a self-sustaining simulation based on several simple rules. What he didn’t know is that his “Game of Life” would create a...

  • What Is the Future of Cryptography?

    Historically, as advances were made in the fields of engineering, mathematics, and physics, so the field of cryptography has advanced with them—usually by leaps and bounds....

  • What Is Public Key Encryption?

    A 1976, two Stanford researchers devised an encryption method that revolutionized cryptography by making it easier to send encrypted information without having to agree on a key...

  • Human Trust vs. Cyber Trust

    Between two humans, trust is based on personal interactions, with the ability to revoke said trust, and not necessarily with the subsumed trust of third parties. But in exchange...

  • Cyber-Terrorism: A Question of Intent

    Security expert Brian Snow lays down the uncomfortable truth: The technology exists today for a malicious group to cripple our nation’s infrastructure; all they need is the...

  • Cryptography’s Human Problem

    How safe is your data? Your money? Your identity? No matter how sophisticated and complex a security encryption system, all of it can be foiled by the simplest of human errors....

  • The Importance of Implementation

    Just as human error can foil a good encryption, so can sloppy implementation. Brian Snow, a former NSA security expert, describes in simplified examples how a badly built...

  • Cryptography: Cracking Codes

    “As soon as you’ve got something precious to hide, someone will want to steal it.” Science journalist Simon Singh sheds light on the dark nature of cryptography. He explains...

  • The Enigma Machine Explained

    As technology increases, so do the methods of encryption and decryption we have at our disposal. World War II saw wide use of various codes from substitution ciphers to employing...

  • Cryptography: Codes, Ciphers, and Connections

    The encryption of information is as old as information itself. Ever since two people wanted to pass something along, so has there been a third party who wanted to be privy to it....

  • Public Perceptions of Privacy

    Would you give somebody your bank PIN for a candy bar? Cryptanalyst Orr Dunkelman tells the cryptography panel about a surprising study that found that most people would. Why is...

  • Moth: The Perfect Human Hand

    Growing up, Kodi Azari was fascinated by the work of Thomas Starzl, who performed the first liver transplant in the 1960s. Stoked by a fascination with the intricacy of the human...

  • Moth: The Long Ukrainian Winters

    Nobel Laureate and chemist Roald Hoffmann was a very young boy when the Third Reich came through his town in southeast Poland. Barely old enough to understand the danger and...

  • Moth: Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath

    Neuroscientist James Fallon is a self-styled “hobbit scientist.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk to the press and don’t go out of your area of expertise. But when a fascinating...

  • Moth: Why I Teach

    In 1989, the use of DNA evidence in criminal cases was nearly unheard of. That year, two lawyers pressed an incredibly busy Eric Lander—a leading contributor to the Human Genome...

  • Moth: Life on a Möbius Strip

    Physicist and WSF alum Janna Levin is accustomed to the mind-bending turns that the theoretical far reaches of the universe can take. But for all the unpredictability of...

  • The Puzzle of Heterosexual Women

    As a graduate student, psychologist Meredith Chivers was studying sexual responses in women. The participants were shown explicit video of men and women for the purposes of...

  • The Origins of Orientation: Sexuality in 2011

    Full 90-minute program: Sexuality and gender play a profound role in shaping identity, but for much of human history how they are determined has remained obscure. How does sexual...

  • Sexuality across Cultures

    How much of sexuality is cultural? Paul Vasey, a neuroscientist, explains how society and culture can affect biology—specifically homosexuals in cultures where there is no...

  • Love and the Opportunistic Brain

    When neuroscientist Jim Pfaus wants to study monogamous animals, he turns to prairie voles, due to their tendency to form life bonds. Similarly, he studies rats for their...

  • The Birds and the Bees across Species

    During his research into pleasure centers in the brain, neuroscientist Jim Pfaus noticed that the same areas of the brain activate with clitoral stimulation—regardless of...

  • What is Sexual Orientation?

    What is sexual orientation? What criteria can you use to define it? Is it behavior? Is it psychology? How have these notions changed over time? After all, what is now sexual...

  • The Many Faces of Human Sexuality

    When were you first aware of your sexuality? Where did the notion of a defined sexuality come from? Join us as we explore the cultural, biological, psychological, and historical...

  • Is Sexuality a Choice?

    How much is choice a factor in our sexual orientation? Can we choose our behaviors, who we are, or what we’re attracted to? Neuroscientists Paul Vasey, Jim Pfaus, and psychologist...

  • The Transgender Decision

    The decision to change one’s gender, or even to decide to start this course of action, isn’t one to be taken lightly. Paul Vasey and Marc Breedlove speak of fellow psychologist...

  • The Problem of Being Almost Consistent

    The laws of quantum mechanics are pretty clear: information cannot be destroyed. But when Stephen Hawking showed that a black hole could evaporate into a spray of particles over...

  • How Do Holograms Work?

    When you look at a hologram—for example, the one on your credit card—you’ll notice that it is a seemingly three-dimensional image mapped onto a two-dimensional surface....

  • Good Physicists Are as Variable as Snowflakes

    Any new, radical concept in physics—like that of the holographic principle—tends to garner differing levels of support and skepticism within the field. Theoretical physicist...

  • A Conflict of Principles

    Stephen Hawking’s premise was sound; his math irrefutable. As matter falls into a black hole, quantum events cause it to emit particles. These particles—what became known as...

  • What Is Information?

    What is information? While it is a good question, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft thinks it misses a fundamental point. Instead of asking about the physical world as...

  • How Much Information Exists in the Universe?

    How can we measure all the information in the universe? Physicist Raphael Bousso explains how all information is bound by lightwaves that have traveled for billions of years since...

  • The Cost of 2-D Coding

    Physics tells us that the amount of information that can be placed within a Planck area—the smallest, indivisible unit of space—is finite and immutable. Thus one can map out...

  • What Is the Holographic Principle?

    When Stephen Hawking elegantly described the relationship of quantum mechanics with black holes, he inadvertently opened the door to a radical possibility: that our universe, as...

  • A Coat of Many Odors

    Ever leave a bar or restaurant and find your clothes still carrying that telltale scent? Well, it may hang on longer than you think—along with all sorts of other smells. In a...

  • A Culture of Human Cheese

    Smell is one of those senses where context can play a huge role. A fine cheese and a dirty foot share the same molecular smells, yet one is a delicacy and other is repulsive. In...

  • The Smell of Fear

    People always claim that animals can smell fear. Is there anything to it or in this case does “smell” just represent a wide range of perceptions? Artist and scent researcher...

  • Strip Club Science

    Hormonal changes in the body can often give off scent cues, whether we’re aware of them or not. For example, factors such as sexual maturation, pregnancy, and ovulation all cause...

  • The Smell of Clean

    Do you smell that? If not, don’t worry. Like many things, smell has a genetic component, and not all smells are detectable by everybody. At Scents and Sensibilities, the audience...

  • Are Flowers Smelling You Back?

    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...

  • Smell: Fact or Fiction?

    Blind people gain an enhanced sense of smell to compensate for the lost sense, right? Right? Wrong. It turns out that it’s a total myth. Avery Gilbert, a scent psychologist, takes...

  • The Great Pheromone Debate

    Pheromones are chemicals secreted by an organism that trigger a social response in members of the same species. Hive insects such as bees and ants rely on these chemical signals...

  • The Power of Smell

    Despite being one of the oldest senses, our sense of smell is easily one of the least understood. It’s also the only one with a direct connection to our brain. With each breath we...

  • How Do We Smell?

    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...

  • The Unbearable Lightness of Memory

    Full 90 Minute Program: It’s the thought of your childhood home. It’s that comforting aroma you can still smell ten years later. It’s the way you define yourself. It’s...

  • The Making of a Spotless Mind

    How close are we to the selective memory engineering depicted in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Perhaps closer than you think. Neuroscientist Todd Sacktor demonstrates a...

  • What Is Memory?

    Just what is memory anyway? How much of it is conscious, and how much of it is subconscious? Find out in this short, animated primer on the different types of memory.

  • The Fallibility of 9/11 Memories

    How confident are you in your memories? After a dramatic, emotionally charged event such as the 9/11 terrorist attack, people describe their memories of the event as being...

Blog Posts

  • Of Math and Ants

    As a young girl, Corina Tarnita always had talent for mathematics, something she had thought was the norm. As she grew up, however, she quickly realized the difficulties of being a woman in a male-dominiated field.

  • Harnessing Quantum Computers

    Current computing technology utilizes a binary computation system—that is, they use states of "on" or "off" (one or zero) to perform calculations. But scientists have been working to expand on this using the fuzzy nature of particles, which can exist in a variety of states,...

  • Richness from Simplicity

    Computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber may have a solution to the Holographic Principle's problem of dynamics.

  • The Science and Business of Keeping Secrets

    Cryptography is a unique field in both it's age and the way it spans many different fields. Psychology, engineering, mathematics, physics, and sociology all get wound up together into one goal.

  • A Question of Intent

    Security expert Brian Snow lays down the uncomfortable truth: The technology exists today for a malicious group to cripple our nation's infrastructure, all they need is the intent.

  • Machine Encryption

    As technology increases, so do the methods of encryption and decryption we have at our disposal.

  • The Long Ukranian Winters

    Nobel Laureate and chemist Roald Hoffmann was a very young boy when the Third Reich came through his town in southeast Poland.

  • Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath

    Neuroscientist James Fallon is a self-styled "hobbit scientist." The rules are simple: Don't talk to the press and don't go out of your area of expertise. But when a fascinating new brain scanner enters the lab, Fallon can't resist. He ends up breaking both rules, and learns a...

  • Why Do I Teach?

    In 1989, the use of DNA evidence in criminal cases was nearly unheard of. That year, two lawyers pressed an incredibly busy Eric Lander—a leading contributor to the Human Genome Project—to testify about this emerging technology in their case.

  • Presenting The Moth: Janna Levin

    Physicist and WSF alum Janna Levin is accustomed to the mind-bending turns that the theoretical far reaches of the universe can take. But for all the unpredictability of space-time, it was life here on Earth that threw her for a loop.

  • Is Homosexuality Evolutionarily Selected for?

    At first glance, homosexuality presents a evolutionary quandary. Since homosexual couples cannot reproduce, how do the genes get passed on? Researchers have studied this problem for a while, and are starting to make some interesting discoveries.

  • Full Program: A Thin Sheet of Reality

    All this week we wrestled the radical notion that reality as we see it may be mapped out onto a two dimensional surface—like a hologram. Now, view the full program.

  • WSF Reaches New Heights

    Neuroscientist Douglas Fields just sent us this great photo of him climbing a mountain range in West Virginia. Notice the WSF swag hanging prominently from his belt.

  • The Problem with Black Holes

    The laws of quantum mechanics are pretty clear: information cannot be destroyed. But what happens when an exception is found?

  • The Variability of Physicists

    Any new, radical concept in physics—like that of the holographic principle—tends to garner differing levels of support and skepticism within the field.

  • Asking the Right Questions

    What is information? While it is a good question, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft thinks it misses a fundamental point.

  • The Cost of 2-D Coding

    What we touch. What we smell. What we feel. They’re all part of our reality. But what if life as we know it reflects only one side of the full story?

  • Full Program: Scents and Sensibiities

    What does fear smell like? Love? Can we use scent to control behavior? Do humans really sense pheromones? What if you could diagnose diseases just by smelling them? And exactly how does our brain convert floating organic molecules into chemical signals that our brain processes...

  • The Smell of Fear

    Yesterday we looked at the power of scent to signal biological changes and influence attraction. But what about other emotions? Can one really smell fear?

  • Love Is in the Air

    Hormonal changes in the body can often give off scent cues, whether we’re aware of them or not.

  • 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...

  • The Unbearable Lightness of Memory

    This week we explored our tenuous relationship with our own memories. We learned how powerful they could be, as well as how they can lead us astray.

  • A Folly of Confidence

    Yesterday we saw just how easily one can hone their memory with simple techniques. Conversely, it's just as easy for our memories to fail us.

  • Does Genius Come from a Dark Place?

    When talking about geniuses, the conversation inevitably strays towards topics of eccentricity, or even madness. But is there really anything to this idea of the "tortured genius?"

  • What Is Genius?

    Yesterday we discovered a biological mechanism in the brain which may play a key role in genius potential. In today's clip, Brian Greene poses the question, "What do we mean by genius?"

  • Is Genius Hiding in Plain Sight?

    After his death in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was studied by scientists worldwide—all wanting to gain insight into the anatomy of a genius.

  • I, Learning Robot

    Yesterday we saw Eric Horvitz's Bayesian Medical Kiosk in action. He showed us the potential in human/robot interaction and it's potential in public health applications. Today we look at machines that interact on an interpersonal, physical level—from making eye contact and...

  • Medical Machines

    The goal of the WATSON/Jeopardy! project seen earlier this week was to demonstrate the power of natural language interfaces when connected to a trove of knowledge. Scientists like Eric Horvitz and David Ferrucci envision computers like WATSON being in hospitals worldwide to aid...

  • Machine Intelligence: Stronger, Faster, Smarter?

    Computers and robots have long been able to crunch impossibly large numbers and execute complex, scripted tasks. However, now they're winning game shows, teaching themselves how to walk, and even rediscovering calculus. But do they truly think? Can they ever learn to feel? And...

  • Are Flowers Smelling You Back?

    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...

  • Announcing: Cool Jobs 2011 on WSFtv

    We are proud to announce the WSFtv debut of the 2011 Cool Jobs event, where the audience was shown a variety of unique career paths by the people who love what they do. The program also proudly introduced Kevin Temmer, a multi-talented teenager who wrote, scored, and animated...

  • The Smell of Sexy: Leslie Vosshall Featured in NY Times

    World Science Festival alum, Leslie Vosshall, is featured in today's New York Times. She discusses the neuroscientific relationship between scent and arousal, and the perfume industry's never-ending quest to bottle sex appeal.

  • 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.

  • Four Years of Faces

    Face-paintier Christopher Agostino has been at the Street Fair since the beginning, and he recently wrote about his experiences with the Festival over the past four years.

  • 2011 Interactive Broadcasts are here!

    We're excited to announce the first installation in our series of interactive broadcasts from the 2011 World Science Festival, The Illusion of Certainty, which will air next Wednesday, June 22.

  • Instant Reaction: A Thin Sheet of Reality

    Physicists delve beyond quantum mechanics to a level where the universe is represented as pieces of information. At the size of one planck, each bit of information is posited to be the fundamental material making up our universe.

  • Instant Reaction: The Invisible Language of Smell

    A neuroscientist, a chemical ecologist, a sensory psychologist, and a scent artist revealed the hidden information found in smells and debated the role of pheromones in human behavior, while the audience explored surprising smells using specially treated scent cards.

  • Instant Reaction: The Enigma of Genius

    Genius: What is it and how do geniuses get that way? This diverse panel of scientists and artists discussed the characteristics that define a genius, its relationship with mental illness, sacrifice, and whether modern information overload could degrade creativity.

  • Instant Reaction: Music and the Spark of Spontaneity

    In the Great Hall of Cooper Union, a panel of musicians—one professional, Pat Metheny, and four scientists who study their beloved hobby—discussed the art of improvisation and what happens in the brain when you do it. Casual banter and fact-dropping was highlighted by live...

  • Instant Reaction: Man-Made Minds

    Saturday's Man-Made Minds event was an in-depth exploration of artificial intelligence, featuring emoting machines, digital assistants and diagnosticians, robots that could program themselves, and an impromptu round of Jeopardy! with IBM's Watson.

  • Instant Reaction: On the Shoulders of Giants

    Yesterday, Steven Weinberg delivered the inaugural "On the Shoulders of Giants" address. Weinberg shared his experience championing Big Science and stressing the importance of pure research and international cooperation to a captive Festival audience.

  • Instant Reaction: Rebooting the Cosmos

    What if the universe is actually a computer simulation? What operating system does it run on? Where do you put a computer like that? Rebooting the Cosmos took four great minds and four differing views on a wild ride into the fringes of the understanding of our universe.

  • Instant Reaction: Cryptography in a Connected World

    Cryptography—the art and science of hiding information—was once the work of scholars with a bit too much time on their hands but is now inescapable in our digital world. The truly brilliant panelists explained not only how encryption works on the web (Think: really hard...

  • Instant Reaction: Rhythms on the Brain

    One of life's eternal questions was addressed at the Eyebeam Center for Technology, one that each of us has been pondering since birth: What makes The Beatles The Beatles? The World Science Festival brought four music-lovers onstage—a neural scientist, a producer, and two...

  • Instant Reaction: The Mind after Midnight

    At The Mind after Midnight: Where Do You Go When You Go to Sleep?, we learned that every organism, every life form, from protozoa and coral to flies to us, needs something resembling sleep. It seems to be inexorably tied to what we know as life.

  • Instant Reaction: Another Earth

    The Museum of the Moving Image hosted an intriguing and eye-opening event Friday night. The audience was treated to a screening of the Fox Searchlight motion picture Another Earth—recipient of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film and the Special Jury Prize at Sundance -...

  • Instant Reaction: Mysteries of the Mathematical Universe

    Following a short film about the omnipresence of math in our everyday lives, whether we notice it or not, four men who eat and breathe mathematics discussed their passion: how they got into math, whether the eccentric mathematical genius is a true trope, and why current...

  • Instant Reaction: Longevity

    Astounding developments in the science of longevity necessitate the questions: can and should we manipulate human lifespan? Molecular, cell, evolutionary, and gerontological biologists battled it out on Thursday night at the World Science Festival.

  • Instant Reaction: Women in Science

    At the Galapagos Art Space under the Manhattan Bridge, with candles and cocktails reflected in dark pools below, five scientists shared what they research, why they do it, and what it means for each of them, personally, to be a woman scientist.

  • Instant Reaction: The Dark Side of the Universe

    In a creative panel format, Team Dark Matter (Katherine Freese, Elena Aprile, and Glennys Farrar) squared off against Team Dark Energy (Michael Turner, Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Greene) in an attempt to shine a flashlight on the nether regions of our universe. Oh and the...

  • Instant Reaction: Improvising Science

    Yesterday afternoon, at the Paley Center for Media, Alan Alda took the stage for an eye opening presentation. Alda told the audience of his many experiences speaking with scientists, and how he came to realize that most scientists have two modes when explaining their work — a...

  • Instant Reaction: Telling Science Stories in Print and on the Web

    Thursday afternoon found prominent science writers on stage discussing the increasing relevancy and influence of the blogosphere on the scientific process. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the science community will have to shift in the face of rapidly responding,...

  • Brian Greene offers picks, and other news

    The outlets are running a good number of stories about the Festival, which kicks off...OMG...tonight! Talking with MSNBC, Festival co-founder Brian Greene even offers some of his picks, in case you still haven't grabbed a ticket to one of the few events not sold-out yet:

  • 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?

  • 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...

  • Live from the World Science Festival

    Can’t make it to New York for WSF11? Or, your favorite event sold-out? Fret not. You can watch WSF11 events live from your computer. This year, we're excited to offer free, high-quality streams of select events from this year's lineup. Accompanying the webcasts will be...

  • 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...

  • 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: 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...

  • Maggie Gyllenhaal Steps into Marie Curie Role

    Award-winning screen and stage actress Maggie Gyllenhaal steps into the role of history’s most famous woman scientist for a special reading of Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie, a new play by actor/writer Alan Alda. Gyllenhaal replaces the previously announced Meryl Streep,...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Tickets on Sale for the 2011 World Science Festival

    Attention science enthusiasts of the world: This morning we are proud to announce that tickets for the 2011 World Science Festival—being held from June 1st to the 5th in New York City—are now officially on sale.

  • The 2011 World Science Festival

    The World Science Festival returns to New York City June 1-5, 2011 with a sweeping array of cutting-edge science programs designed to make the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating.

  • 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...

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