Blogs / Discoblog

Time is a constant in modern life. We waste it. We obsessively track it. We continually wonder “where it goes.” We run out of it. We never have enough of it. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, psychologist Daniel Gilbert, and psychologist and neuroscientist Warren Meck from Duke University gathered Saturday evening at the World Science Festival’s “Time the Familiar Stranger” event for a discussion on our most precious commodity. They addressed both complex questions such as the existentialism and relativity of “the present,” and more mundane topics such as why children must continually ask “are we there yet?” on long car trips.

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.
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At Friday’s “Cool Jobs” panel at the World Science Festival, a microbiologist, parasitologist, bioengineer, and biologist demonstrated that science is in fact not only important but also pretty darn cool.

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.
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An assemblage of thinkers sat down on Saturday afternoon at The New School to talk science, faith, and religion. Befitting an event of New York City’s World Science Festival, science was decidedly not on trial. Instead, the group—three practicing scientists and a philosopher, along with one journalist—took turns defining and professing their ideas about a supernatural force and the relationship of religious faith to science.

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.
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Friday night’s “!@#$% Traffic: From Insects to Interstates” panel during the World Science Festival had all the makings of a giant show-and-tell: a merrily provocative title, a wildly diverse collection of topics, and a lineup of much-talked-about speakers.

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.
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What sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom? Alan Alda posed the question to a panel of five evolution experts, including E.O. Wilson, at the World Science Festival’s “What it Means to be Human: The Enigma of Altruism.” The sold-out event took place Friday night at New York University’s Skirball Center.

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.
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The 2008 blockbuster Wall-E won heaps of awards and made over 150 critics’ lists of the best movies of the year. But the also movie made a statement about how we treat the planet today—and how we can make sure that it’s habitable tomorrow. That was the basis of the event put on Thursday night by the World Science Festival, entitled “Wall-E’s World: Design for an Invisible Footprint,” which was moderated by DISCOVER’s own Carl Zimmer and held at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

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.”
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Last night at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York City, the second annual World Science Festival kicked off with a gala that attracted scientists, actors, and musicians alike.

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.”
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