Being a good sport, Phil stepped up to the challenge and offered to get a reader-suggested tat himself if he achieved his traffic goals.

Well, thanks to you, dear readers, both goals were met back in March of 2009, and Henry has followed through on his end of the deal. The tattoo, seen at left, was inspired by the Book of Kells, a famous illustrated Celtic manuscript from 800 A.D.

Stay tuned to Bad Astronomy for details on Phil’s tattoo.

(Note: According to Phil, no alcohol was involved in their bet. Rather the idea was inspired by Carl Zimmer’s fantastical Science Tattoo Emporium.)

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One of our favorites, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, was awarded to a research team for their study to determine—by experiment—whether it’s better to be smashed over the head by a full beer bottle or any empty one.

The Public Health Prize went to a team that developed a bra that can be used as two gas masks in an emergency.

A complete list of the winners can be found here. If you’re around MIT this Saturday, you can catch the Ig Informal Lectures, a free public talk where most of the winners will explain their work.

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Image: flickr / seeks2dream

Dr. Gupta describes his experience on his blog, Paging Dr. Gupta:

I was nauseated and my entire body hurt. I tried to explain away my symptoms with lots of different excuses. You don’t sleep much while covering a war. My bulletproof jacket didn’t fit perfectly and was very heavy. There was a lot of dust and dirt, and maybe I had what the Marines referred to as the Kandahar Krud. It turned out to be none of those things.

You can read about his entire experience on his blog. Here’s wishing the good doctor a speedy recovery (though it sounds like he’s pretty much there already).

Still no word from  the swine flu twitter feed about its latest victim.

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Image: iStockphoto

Unlike many panel discussions where participants agreeably confirm others’ views, each participant brought a unique perspective to the subject of time. Sacks focused on his clinical experiences with patients whose perception of time was altered by Tourettes’ Syndrome, Parkinson’s Disease, and other neurological conditions. Meck discussed his experiments on how time influences human and animal behavior. Gilbert was more abstract, addressing time as a psychological construct that influences our mental health.

Moderator Sir Harry Evans, editor at large of The Week, just wanted to know the basics. “Why can’t I remember where I put my cell phone this morning, when I can vividly remember events thirty years ago?” he asked.

The banter and different backgrounds among the participants—as well as a subject that provides ample opportunity for puns and jokes—produced a lively and informative discussion. Evans kept the subject accessible; he immediately demanded clarification if the panelists slipped into jargon, and he always had a ready joke.

Granted, some questions were answered more satisfactorily than others. And the panelists themselves noted that it was odd that a physicist was not included in the discussion. But time is a huge topic to cover in (precisely, of course) an hour and a half.

Alas, if only there had been more time.

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Image: Flickr / Courtesy of World Science Festival

The four panelists presented themselves and their work in very different ways. Microbiologist Hazel Barton showed pictures of herself completely covered in mud while studying microbes in caves. Bioengineer and “Da Vinci Detective” Maurizio Seracini played a trailer for a documentary on his discovery of a long-lost famous mural by the mysterious painter. Biologist Tyrone Hayes provided vivid examples of the impacts of pesticides on frogs. Dickson Despommier showed architectural drawings of vertical farms—a topic we’ve touched on before.

But even more inspiring—especially for somebody who already knows that science is cool, which we do—was how the guests explained their career progressions.

Barton stressed that she had taken a meandering path to become a microbiologist, originally focusing on biology because she hated physics, chemistry, and math.

Seracini had studied biomedical engineering as an undergraduate and then attended three years of medical school and one year of architecture school before employing new imaging technology to the field of art history.

Power had always loved frogs—the first book given to him as a child was about the amphibians—but seeing the effects of pesticides on amphibians had led to public health advocacy on behalf of farm workers.

Despommier said he wanted to learn as much as he could by staying in school and teaching.

Unfortunately, delivering all that inspiration took a long time. Although host Majora Carter did a good job posing interesting questions to each presenter, there was no time for questions from the audience—something essential if the goal is to make science more accessible.

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Image: Flickr / Courtesy of World Science Festival

Early on, moderator Bill Blakemore came understandably close to stumbling off the session’s lofty stated aim (a “nuanced conversation that transcends simplistic assertions”) as he introduced the panelists and tabulated how many fell into several categories on the “scientist v. religious leader” spectrum. A list of statements handed out to the audience and beamed onto a screen before the presentation (”Religion is a social reflex,” “Faith is what science and religion have in common,” etc.) also proved to be a bit unwieldy when Blakemore asked each panelist to identify problematic items from the list.

Colin McGinn dove right in, taking issue with the statement: “Atheism is a position of faith…as is religious belief,” by deploying the analogy that no one would say it’s irrational to deny the existence of Santa Claus. But the list spurred panelist Guy Consolmagno to comment that unlike the one- or two-liners on the list, “great truths don’t fit on a bumper sticker,” quipping, “I read that once on a bumper sticker.”

The panelists quickly dug deeper. Consolmagno, a Jesuit brother and astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, exhorted listeners not to foster preconceptions of what a scientific or religious person is. Fellow Roman Catholic Ken Miller burst at least a few preconceptions when he suggested that the virgin birth of Christ could be a metaphor, written to make people take notice of the importance of that birth.

Lawrence Krauss (known for his writings on physics, especially via Star Trek) said that he doesn’t label himself an atheist—because like most scientists, he doesn’t think about God enough to even talk about the issue. Krauss never sat very deeply in this chair, as if to remind the audience of his discomfort and frustration over sitting on a panel on science and religion. “I’m frustrated that there’s a panel” on the topic, Krauss said, wringing his hands at the thought that such an event “unduly elevates religion.”

“If it weren’t for people like the Templeton Foundation that fund these things,” he said, “we wouldn’t be here.”

Krauss distinguished his lack of interest in religion from the more strident position of Richard Dawkins. The question of whether God exists doesn’t matter, Krauss said—he just wants people to learn science and use it to make the world better.

Miller readily agreed with Krauss about the importance of teaching evolution in schools, and said he had no qualms with joining forces with Krauss. After the presentation, Miller told DISCOVER, “Lawrence and I have fought together” to support the teaching of evolution, citing especially their efforts in Ohio in 2002.

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Image: Flickr / Courtesy of the World Science Festival

In introducing the session, held at New York University’s Kimmel Center, festival co-founder Brian Greene called traffic an “annoying problem.” But before long it was harder to care about the annoyance, in the face of the fascinating paths the speakers described to cure it.

The stage was set by Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist who studies collective behavior in, well, everything: swarms of ants, locusts, cells in tissues and tumors, schools of fish, pedestrians. Where you’d least expect it, he finds simple rules governing how the members of different biological systems move around and interact. Ants that lay down pheromones that others can follow—and so create roads “where and when they need them, on the fly”—are, he said, “one of the wonders of the world.”

Impressively, the panel didn’t just ponder the questions presented by traffic, but leaped into real life problems and solutions. Anna Nagurney (who, like Couzin, studies a dizzying list of systems—the Internet, global supply chains, electric power distribution, and financial networks among them) was grateful for the opportunity to talk about the recent shutdown of stretches of Times Square—done not just to create pedestrian-friendly spaces, but, amazingly, to trim the travel time of drivers, too. That traffic pattern, she said, illustrates a paradox discovered by Dietrich Braess in 1968.

Think of it like this, she explained to DISCOVER after the session: Say drivers who need to get from 48th St. and 9th Ave. to 40th St. and 5th Ave. have three routes to pick from: red, green, or blue. The street cutting diagonally is Broadway. The trouble with the blue/Broadway route is that it loads up the first part of the red route, and the last part of the green. Take away Broadway, and the blue traffic is forced to pick red or green, not both. So, if theory serves, everybody—reds, greens, and former blues—gets where they’re going faster. (If you want to see that in equations, not words, go here.)

Of course, politely explaining this to a driver isn’t going to get her off Broadway, ’cause everybody’s looking out for themselves. And, unfortunately, none of it works unless lots of people make the switch. So shutting down Times Square may have helped everyone to cooperate.

The third panelist, Mitchell Joachim, was decidedly less earth-bound in his solutions for humanity’s transportation needs. Think jet packs, cars coated in air pouches, or a ferry “powered by the human buttocks.” He envisions cars that are “nerf-like” and “social,” communicating with each other and with “intelligent” streets (not so unlike ants and their pheromone trails) to allow the system to come up with communal solutions on the fly to move traffic more efficiently. In other words, in Joachim’s world, you wouldn’t have sole control of your car—a notion that drove moderator Robert Krulwich to gasp, “Are you an American?”

Judging from the laughter each time Joachim flashed slides of massive vehicles that looked like piles of marshmallows or blimps, the audience was entertained by his ideas. Asked by DISCOVER what he thought about all the laughter, he said, “If they’re laughing, that means they bought it, they think it’s great, and that it seems like a realizable solution. A New York crowd would have done something else if they didn’t believe it…We’re so upset with the current system, that the only response at this point is aggression or humor. The solutions that we need are rather broad in their stroke.”

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Image: Megan Talkington

The panel included anthropologists, biologists, a political scientist, and a humanitarian. They engaged in a lively debate on the intersection of genes and culture in the evolution of altruism, the enigmatic human behavior of helping strangers that seems out of step with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Clips from Alan Alda’s upcoming PBS series, “The Human Spark,” fueled the discussion.

E.O. Wilson centered the conversation by posing questions to his colleagues on stage about the impetus of the “boom” in human cognitive and social abilities that allowed us to cooperate with others (and playfully correcting them when he thought they were wrong.)

Sarah Hrdy, an anthropologist at the UC Davis, suggested that cooperation started with the need to nurture children through a long childhood. “A mother without help wouldn’t be able to rear young and survive,” she said.

Symbols—flags, jewelry or other insignia—were discussed as another uniquely human trait that enable us to bond with people not in our families. “How do you explain 12 million New Yorkers not all killing each other like chimps?” said Rob Boyd, an anthropologist at UCLA.

How do we know that selfless acts aren’t motivated by personal gain? Dominic Johnson, an evolutionary biologist and political scientist at the University of Edinburgh, brought up the point that individuals stand to benefit from acting altruistically. If you help someone out, your reputation as a good person spreads—other people may be more willing to help you in the future.

Throughout the exchange, Alan Alda kept the crowd amused by cracking a few trademark jokes, topped off by the following: When Wilson made a digression into evolutionary selection theory in ants, Alda teased, “I guess if I can plug my new show, you can plug your new paper.”

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Image: Courtesy of the World Science Festival

In the first scene of the movie, the intrepid Wall-E rolls through streets filled with garbage, crushing waste into boxes and constructing skyscrapers with the refuse.

Ben Schwegler, Walt Disney Imagineering R&D’s chief scientist, offered a more hopeful view of the future during his presentation and the subsequent discussion with two other panelists. “Could we really be overwhelmed by waste” he asked the audience of around 150 people. “Not in the long run, because things will evolve to eat the waste we produce.”

He showed the audience a few photos of what appeared to be the metallic cores of laptops. It was then he revealed that cockroaches had stripped away the plastic casings in about a year and a half, upon which researchers halted the experiment because they were too grossed out.

Perhaps another part of the solution to keep garbage at bay is to change our attitude toward refuse. In a view called renewable urbanism, we would consider waste a valuable resource. That was one suggestion by Mitchell Joachim, who works at Terrefuge, an organization for ecological design in New York. “If I were an alien looking down,” Joachim said, “I would see the city as something meant to produce waste.”

That must change in the future, he said, and the ideal futuristic city is one with no inputs or outputs—it would be self-sustaining, with productive uses for its own garbage.
Some of Joachim’s ideas seemed pretty far-out, such as the meat house… and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Scientists can already grow specialized tissue, such as a bladder, in a lab, and Joachim thinks that in the future, meat could be engineered to join together building materials. It would take the place of the traditional metal screws and nails. “The windows would essentially be an anus-like structure,” he said.
Joachim presented a computer-generated model of the meat-based home, which looked like a gigantic human heart, with holes where veins and arteries would connect. “We know it’s ugly, but we don’t know how a meat house is supposed to look,” he told the audience. I was less concerned with how it looked than about how it would smell on a hot summer day.

Or maybe, like in Wall-E, we humans should leave this planet altogether: “Mars is a world with the potential for life,” said NASA’s Christopher McKay. One of McKay’s projects is planning for future Mars exploration, but before humans can live Mars, we must first establish a long-term human base on the moon.

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Image: flickr / Just Because iCan Flickr

The goal of the celebration, and the whole five-day festival, is to show how science can be fun and mainstream without being mutually exclusive with art, literature, and music. (This rift between science and the humanities took center stage at the Two Cultures Conference sponsored by DISCOVER last month.) Actor and event co-chair Alan Alda set the tone by calling science and art long-lost lovers. “Both light up your neurons like a pinball machine,” he said.

The performances began with Broadway actor Jonathan Hadary singing a musical tribute to every element on the periodic table. String theorist Brian Greene shared the stage with violinist Joshua Bell in a joint production that featured stirring selections from a Eugène Ysaÿe violin sonata interspersed with mind-boggling descriptions of the extra dimensions of space.

The night’s guest of honor was legendary evolutionary biologist and ant enthusiast Edward O. Wilson, who happened to be celebrating his 80th birthday. At the reception following the show, he emphasized the importance of protecting biodiversity. While thankful for the increased awareness of climate change, he warned that “if we save the physical environment only, we will lose everything.”

Nobel laureate James Watson won the most memorable speech award in a landslide. True to the style that has gotten him in trouble in the past, he produced an off-the-cuff tribute to Wilson that generated one part laughter and four parts awkward silence. After saying that he’d initially ignored Wilson because “biologists were the dumb part of science,” Watson congratulated his good friend and proclaimed, “We should be happy he hasn’t died prematurely.”

To close the show, a choir sang “What a Wonderful World” as balloons floated into the crowd. A bit over the top—we were waiting to hold up lighters and sing “Kumbaya”—but we’ll give the WSF organizers a pass on what otherwise was a tremendous start to the festival.

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Image: Stephanie Berger, Courtesy World Science Festival