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Yesterday, I went on Facebook. Not an unusual activity for someone my age. Or for someone my parents’ age, which I still haven’t gotten used to. But that’s not the point of this. Several of my “friends” had statuses mentioning "Ophiuchus", whatever that is. One girl’s panicked reaction to this…

The innovative new opera by Tod Machover, Death and the Powers, opens this Friday for its world premiere in Monte Carlo at Opéra Garnier de Monte-Carlo. Machover gave Festival-goers a sneak peak of this hugely ambitious work earlier this summer at the 2010 World Science Festival, which included a…

Update: The broadcast went really well. Thanks to everyone for participating. You can check out the replay and transcript with Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak here â Stay tuned for more interactive broadcasts to come. We've got some dingers lined up... Join us tomorrow for a special interactive…

The above video montage was kindly produced by multimedia artist and musician Claire L. Evans (of Universe) to open the WSF 2010 panel "The Search for Life in the Universe," which featured the likes of Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, and Steven Squyres. Unfortunately, due to a production clusterWTF…

Numbers don't lie, but they tell a lot of half-truths. We have been raised to think that numbers represent absolute fact, that in a math class there is one and only one correct answer. But less emphasis is put on the fact that in the real world numbers don't convey any information without units,…

Hey gang! Remember when we set up a model of the new James Webb Space Telescope in Battery Park? If you don't, the people at Behind the James Webb Space Telescope have produced the cool little video above about the telescope's visit to NYC and the World Science Festival.

I got into this stuff because of science fiction. I was a huge nerd in high school. I remember there was a time that between UPN, TNN, and The SciFi Channel you could watch six straight hours of Star Trek on a Friday night. None of those networks exist anymore. I built a Stargate in my parents’…

In the run-up to this year's Faith and Science panel at the 2010 World Science Festival, there was some concern expressed (here and here) about our sponsors' influence on programming. In light of such criticism, we thought it would be a good time to reiterate the Festival's absolute editorial…

The full replay of Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace, featuring Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, Shamit Kachru, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, is now available for streaming for a limited time. If you haven't had your mind blown yet this morning, I recommend you head over to our livestream…

The fine folks at NPR's RadioLab have produced a new episode based on Strangers in the Mirror, which features Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close (and was moderated by RadioLab's own Robert Krulwich). Have a listen over at their site. Or add to your cue wherever podcasts are sold for free (ie, iTunes).…

Have a story to tell from the 2010 World Science Festival? Maybe it was something you learned? (Like, for instance, if the Earth were to be a black hole it would have to collapse to the size of a grain of sand.) Perhaps it was a serendipitous chat you had when bumping into your favorite scientist,…

Well, another World Science Festival is in the books. And what a trip it’s been. One attendee at this year’s festival suggested that, as if conjuring the gravity of a supermassive black hole, we must have slowed down the passing of time in order “to do so much in 5 days.” Accusations of timespace…

We'll be streaming the animal cognition program live from the Skirball Center in NYC, featuring Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods, Jeremy Niven, Patrick Hof, and Klaus Zuberbühler. And moderated by RadioLab's Jad Abumrad. Kick-off is at 3pm today. ScienceBlogs Editor Evan Lerner will be calling the game…

Vanessa Woods joins us from Your Inner Bonobo at Psychology Today. Vanessa is an award-winning journalist and author who studies the cognitive development of chimpanzees and bonobos at sanctuaries in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Join Vanessa and other leading…

Kind of a Big Deal: We'll be streaming the Kavli Prize announcements live from Oslo tomorrow morning as part of a high-end webcast, complete with stateside commentary, featuring Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, Co-Chair of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Antonio…

Christina Agapakis joins us from the ever-inspired Oscillator, her synthetic biology blog at ScienceBlogs. When she’s not reshuffling DNA sequences in her lab at Harvard, she’s usually there making Lady Gaga video spoofs, or something obvious like that. I'm almost embarrassed for eleven year old me…

Shhhh...I have a secret. When we send out information about the World Science Festival, the producers commonly use the phrase, "a Festival meant to engage and inspire the public about science." For me, there's no better way to inspire than to offer the public a  chance to meet one-on-one with…

Want to go to the World Science Festival, but can't bum a ride to New York City? Your favorite program is already sold out? You want to be there for the suspense and drama of the 2010 Kavli Laureates announcement Thursday morning, but you've run out of sick-day excuses at work? Well, buck up,…

Image courtesy of the Cajal’s Butterflies of the Soul gallery at The Beautiful Brain. Noah Hutton is founding editor of The Beautiful Brain, an online magazine that explores recent neuroscience findings through monthly podcasts, essays, reviews, and galleries, with particular attention to the…

Sam McDougle joins us from re:COGNITION at The Beautiful Brain. Sam splits this time between behavioral neuroscience research at the University of Pennsylvania, playing fiddle in an Appalachian string-band, and drumming in an indie rock trio. In my recent career as an undergraduate, I noticed a…

Today, when I was trolling through a stack of dutifully hand-recorded interview notes and research articles with punny names such as, "Reaping the benefits," I came across a fact I had long forgotten about, from the International Food Policy Research Institute: For every dollar of additional…

Maybe you think you already know enough about music. After all, we've been experiencing and describing it for ages. Beethoven called music the "mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life." Others know it as the "universal language" or the "voice of angels." T.S. Eliot said "you are the…

We're delighted to have Carl Zimmer guest blog for us. Carl writes about science regularly for the New York Times and magazines such as Discover, where he is a contributing editor and columnist. He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction To…

If you’re like me, you probably pay much more attention to what you see around you than to what you hear. Maybe you even “tune out” much of the time. But actually sound is just as important as sight to our existence – maybe even more so. We hear before we see in the womb. The vibrations of sound…

Chuck Close, Self-Portrait. Photograph: Ellen Page Wilson/Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York Imagine a chair. It has physical attributes: four legs, a seat, some sort of a back. Now imagine a human face. It also has physical attributes: eyes, a nose, a mouth. But, remarkably, the ways we process…

You may have noticed things look a little different around here. We’ve gussied up for the 2010 iteration of our flagship festival, which officially went on sale last week. There are still a few bugs we’re ironing out on the site (please bear with us!) and a couple of exciting programs yet to be…