Next week the second annual World Science Festival hits New York. I’m now going to be involved in three events that I hope Loom readers can attend.
1. Thursay, June 11, 6:30-8:00 PM “Wall-E’s World: Designs for an Invisible Footprint.” I’ll be talking to designers and an astrobiologist about cities, trash, space travel, and the search for a sustainable future.
2. Friday, June 12, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM “Picturing Earth: The Story of Life in Images.” Frans Lanting takes majestic pictures of our living world (you may have seen some of his stuff in National Geographic). His latest project is called, Life: A Journey Through Time. He has produced a series of wonderful images to capture what life was like over the past 3.5+ billion years. I’ll be moderating a panel about the history of life with Lanting, his wife and partner Chris Eckstrom, and two leading paleontologists. Mike Novacek of the American Museum of Natural History is an expert on mammals and dinosaurs, and Derek Briggs, director of Yale’s Peabody Museum, specializes on the origin of major groups of animals between 600 and 500 million years ago.
3. Sunday, June 14, 11:00 AM-1 PM: Author’s Alley. On Sunday, the World Science Festival hits the asphalt with a science street fair. Among the attractions will science book authors, who will be both signing books and having on-stage conversations. At 11, I’ll be talking with Eric Sanderson, an ecologist who has just published the book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, based on his remarkable project to map out the ecosystems of New York on the eve of the arrival of Europeans. As things are scheduled at the moment, we’ll both be signing our books after the talk, from noon to 1. If the schedule changes, I’ll post an update.
June 4th, 2009 at 9:48 am
[...] Discovered thanks to Carl Zimmer at The Loom. [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Amongst sexually reproducing organisms (“species”),
sexual selection = natural selection (no difference exists) and
mutation = sexual reproduction (no replication exists without permutation, since sex is itself a mutation of asexual reproduction.
Evolution = mutation + natural selection = sexual reproduction + sexual selection
For convenience of comprehension scientists use different words to describe identical actions.