Happening NOW! World Science Festival

June 13th, 2009 § 0

 Tomorrow is the last day….

The mission of the World Science Festival is to cultivate and sustain a general public informed by the content of science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future.

The World Science Festival, an unprecedented annual tribute to imagination, ingenuity and inventiveness, takes science out of the laboratory and into the streets, theaters, museums, and public halls of New York City, making the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating.

Opening night (last week) sounds awesome!

2009 Opening GalaFEATURING Alan Alda • Marin Alsop • Christine Baranski
Joshua Bell • Danny Burstein • Glenn Close
Todd Ellison • Yo-Yo Ma • Marcus Printup • Anna Deavere Smith
National Dance Institute • The Inspirational Voices of Abyssinian Baptist Church

Performance directed and produced by Damian Woetzel HONORING Edward O. Wilson, explorer, poet and champion of the natural world on his 80th birthday read more 

World Science Festival

Did Darwin Meet Wagner? On Evolution, Education and Becoming

May 5th, 2009 § 0

Harvard Graduate School of Education - Visiting Scholar Lecture

Thursday May 7, 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

208 Longfellow Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Appian Way, Cambridge MA

DID DARWIN MEET WAGNER?  ON EVOLUTION, EDUCATION AND BECOMING

Edvin Ostergaard — composer and science educator — will explore the 1859 parallel emergence of the idea of evolution in Darwin’s _The Origin of Species_ and in Richard Wagner’s opera “Tristan and Isolde.”  The talk will also address the potential of bringing together biology and music in teaching about evolution and becoming.

Edvin Ostergaard, a visiting scholar at HGSE, is Associate Professor in
Science Education, University of Life Sciences, Norway.  His musical
compositions reflect an interest in the relationship between art and
science, as in “The Einstein Resoundings” (2005), based on Einstein’s 1905 physics; and “The Two Moons” (2006), based on Leonardo’s astronomical texts.

MIC Norway: Edvin Østergaard - Biography.

Perigee

April 24th, 2009 § 0

perigeergbwebformat

Rayleigh scattering is the dispersal of wavelengths in the visible light spectrum, resulting in the appearance of colored light in the remaining wavelengths. In one instance, it occurs when sunlight travels through the Earth’s atmosphere towards the Moon, and again when that light is reflected to the surface of the Earth. “Perigee” displays the visible wavelengths emitted by the elements and compounds currently present in the Earth’s atmosphere, to suggest that Rayleigh scattering caused by pollution might generate the phenomenon of an orange moon.

Alicenne Reid

Nature and Inquiry member to be on ArtScience 100K Prize jury

April 23rd, 2009 § 0

Nature and Inquiry member and ArtScience 100K Prize juror, Nita Sturiale, will take part in the ArtScience 100K Prize launch dinner tonight at Cloud Place in Boston. The international panel will brainstorm project directions for High Schoolers in the Boston area to take and run with as they work on their proposals for the competition.

Read more about the prize here.

Cafe Sci events to kick off Cambridge Science Festival

April 23rd, 2009 § 0

Boston’s first “simul-café” is coming up this Sunday evening, just in time to kick off the Cambridge Science Festival.

Pick from three science cafe events starting at the same time, each based on the same theme: “Life as we don’t know it.”

We’ve made it easy to enjoy your Sunday night. No lectures or technical jargon, only great venues, great food and drink, and great conversations. The only hard part is choosing!

THE CAFES:

Café Sci is Digging for Martians.
Sam Kounaves has spent a lot of time on Mars recently, whether it’s scratching the surface with the robotic Phoenix Lander or experimenting in simulated environments. All of this time is starting to pay off, as he uncovers evidence that increases the chance that we will find signs of life there soon. What could this life look like? How would it change our world back on Earth?

Starts at 7:30pm, Sunday, April 26
Tommy Doyle’s Kendall Square (www.tommydoyles.com)
1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02138
Validated parking in Kendal Square garage (by cinema on Binney Street)

Hosted by the public television science series NOVA scienceNOW, produced by WGBH. Watch online at: www.pbs.org/nova/sciencenow
Get started by watching this video online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0306/01.html

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Synthetic Biology: Recoding Life.
If you could use living cells to build anything, what would you build? We can read the language of DNA. And we’ve gotten pretty good at writing it…if only we knew WHAT to write, and how to get new designs to actually work. Peter Carr will give some examples of how this is rapidly changing, from his own work and others in the field of Synthetic Biology.

Starts at 7:30pm, Sunday, April 26
Cambridge Brewing Company (www.cambrew.com)
1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02138

Hosted by MIT’s Technology and Culture Forum: http://web.mit.edu/tac/
Get started by watching this video online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3410/03.html

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At Sea with Symbiotic Outlaws: exploring the mysteries of a marine ménage à trois.
Much of modern biology is based on intense study of “model” organisms: lab rats, E. coli, fruit flies, and the like. But millions of other species live on our planet—some right here in our neighborhood—that have not read the textbooks and happily go about their lives without obeying the rules we’ve created for them. We’ll discuss the value of these unique life forms as provocateurs that encourage us to re-think the way that life can be organized.

Starts at 7:30pm, Sunday, April 26
Atwoods Tavern (www.atwoodstavern.com)
877 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138

Hosted by Harvard’s Science in the News: www.hms.harvard.edu/sitn/
Get started by watching this video online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0305/04.html

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SPECIAL EVENT ON WEDNESDAY

Picked out your café for Sunday? Save your Wednesday too…

NOVA: Meet the Producers
Starts at 6:30pm, Wednesday, April 29
WGBH Studios, One Guest Street, Boston, MA 02135

Catch a preview of NOVA’s 36th season and NOVA scienceNOW’s fourth season (premiering June 30, 2009) followed by a discussion with the filmmakers. Director of the WGBH Science Unit and Senior Executive Producer NOVA and NsN, Paula Apsell, Senior Science Editor of NOVA and NsN, Evan Hadingham, and Senior Producer for NsN, Julia Cort, will discuss what it takes to produce two of television’s most critically-acclaimed science programs with moderator Philip J. Hilts, Director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program. After the discussion, meet the team in the WGBH Yawkey Atrium during a light reception. The event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. RSVP at: http://support.wgbh.org/site/Calendar?view=Detail&id=101861

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Cafe Sci encourages open, easy-to-understand conversation. No lectures. No PowerPoint. No technical jargon.

Cafe Sci is free and open to all.
Bring your friends, tell your neighbors, post this message, and pass it along.

Cafe Sci is an ongoing series.
To be added to the e-mail list write to getinvolved@wgbh.org.
Find other science cafes at www.sciencecafes.org.

Teen Brains Clear Out Childhood Thoughts | LiveScience

March 24th, 2009 § 0

Teen Brains Clear Out Childhood Thoughts | LiveScience.

Ahh…. explains so much!

A Question of Time

March 20th, 2009 § 0

IS TIME INCREMENTAL OR CONTINUOUS?

earth5400x2700

Here is a short description of the nature of time (Time’s Constant), and several other pieces that consider various ways that we experience time.

Time’s Constant

Common Time

Now and When

Procrastination

author: John Holland

(photo credit: Reto Stockli, NASA Earth Observatory)

More Americans say they have no religion

March 9th, 2009 § 0

More Americans say they have no religion.

Call for Submission - Eye of the Storm

March 4th, 2009 § 0

An Arts Catalyst / Tate Britain Conference

Eye of the Storm

An interdisciplinary conference on scientific controversy

19 / 20 June 2009

Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1, UK

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The Arts Catalyst and Tate Britain announce an international call for artists, scientists, social scientists, theorists, policy-makers and other disciplines, to present in Eye of the Storm, a conference exploring scientific controversy from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Eye of the Storm aims to explore a range of controversies, from esoteric arguments between physicists over the structure of the universe, to disputes about the causes of species decline and climate change, and highly charged public controversies around the use of stem cells and the distribution of genetically modified organisms. When heated debates around the challenge of climate change have shown how abstruse uncertainties within a scientific community can be amplified and distorted to challenge the whole notion of human-caused greenhouse warming, Eye of the Storm sets out to examine the relationship between scientific uncertainty and public controversies around science.

via The Arts Catalyst.

Another Natalie

March 3rd, 2009 § 0

Natalie Angier is one of my favorite writers. She knows how to write about science in an artistic and informative way that really works towards understanding at a deep level. 

This is her web site which highlights her latest book, The Canon.

 

From her website - 

“Of course you should know about science,” writes Angier, “for the same reason Dr. Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things are fun and fun is good.”

THE CANON is a joyride through the major scientific disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Along the way, we learn what’s actually happening when our ice cream melts or our coffee gets cold, what our liver cells do when we eat a caramel, why the horse reveals evolution at work, and how we’re all made of stardust. It’s Lewis Carroll meets Lewis Thomas—a book that will enrapture, inspire, and enlighten.

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