Tag Archives: World Science Festival 2010

Events announced for 2010 World Science Festival

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The program for the 2010 World Science Festival in New York City which runs June 2, 05 2010 is available here. Do check regularly as it is being added to and changed. Here’s a sampling of what’s available. For the astronomy buff,

The James Webb Space Telescope

FREE

Tuesday, June 1, 2010, 9:00 AM – Sunday, June 6, 2010, 9:00 PM
Battery Park

The world’s most powerful future space telescope is coming to New York City as part of the World Science Festival. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will allow us to unveil the very first galaxies formed in the Universe and discover hidden world’s around distant stars when the mission launches in 2014. For six days in June, a full-scale model of this successor to the famed Hubble Space Telescope will be on public view in Battery Park.

This detailed scale model, at 80 feet long, 37 feet wide and nearly 40 feet high, is as big as a tennis court. It’s as close to a first-hand look at the telescope as most people will ever get.

There’s more to do than just marvel. Once you’ve taken in the awe-inspiring sight, play with interactive exhibits, watch videos showing what we will learn from the Webb and ask scientists on-hand about how the telescope works.

And don’t miss our Friday June 4th party, “From the City to the Stars,” at the base of a spectacularly lit telescope, where leading scientists will join us to talk about the anticipated discoveries. Bring your telescope if you have one, or just yourself, and come congregate with amateur astronomers and novices alike for a festive evening of marveling at the wonders of the cosmos.

This program is made possible with the support of Northrop Grumman, and presented in collaboration with The Battery Conservancy.

If music and artificial intelligence interest you,

Machover and Minsky: Making Music in the Dome

Tickets must be purchased.

Thursday, June 3, 2010, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

Hayden Planetarium Space Theater

How does music help order emerge from the mind’s chaos? How does it create and conjure thoughts, emotions and memories? Legendary composer and inventor Tod Machover will explore these mysteries with Artificial Intelligence visionary Marvin Minsky. The two iconoclasts will revisit their landmark musical experiment, the Brain Opera, and offer an exclusive sneak peak at Machover’s upcoming opera, Death and the Powers, a groundbreaking MIT Media Lab production that explores what we leave behind for the world and our loved ones, using specially designed technology, including a chorus of robots.

This program is presented in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History.

Participants:

Tod Machover

Tod Machover, called “America’s Most Wired Composer” by the Los Angeles Times, is celebrated for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries. He is acclaimed for inventing new technologies for music, such as his Hyperinstruments which augment musical expression for everyone, from virtuosi like Yo-Yo Ma and Prince to players of Guitar Hero, which grew out of his lab.read more

Marvin Minsky

Minsky is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and had made numerous contributions to the fields of AI, cognitive science, mathematics and robotics. His current work focuses on trying to imbue machines with a capacity for common sense. Minsky is a professor at MIT, where he co-founded the artificial intelligence lab.

This one seems pretty self-explanatory,

Eye Candy: Science, Sight, Art

Tickets must be purchased.

Thursday, June 3, 2010, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Are you drawn to Impressionism? Or more toward 3D computer art? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or is it? Contrary to the old adage, there may be universal biological principles that drive art’s appeal, and its capacity to engage our brains and our interest. Through artworks ranging from post-modernism to political caricature to 3D film, we’ll examine newly understood principles of visual perception.

Participants:

Patrick Cavanagh

Cavanagh helped change vision research by creating the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard and the Centre of Attention & Vision in Paris. He is currently researching the problems of attention as a frequent component of mental illnesses, learning difficulties at school, and workplace accidents.read more

Ken Nakayama

No details.

Jules Feiffer

Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author & illustrator Jules Feiffer has had a remarkable creative career turning contemporary urban anxiety into witty and revealing commentary for over fifty years. From his Village Voice editorial cartoons to his plays and screenplays, including Little Murders and Carnal Knowledge, Feiffer’s satirical outlook has helped define us politically, sexually and socially.

Buzz Hays

No details

Margaret S. Livingstone

Livingstone is best known for her work on visual processing, which has led to a deeper understanding of how we see color, motion, and depth, and how these processes are involved in generating percepts of objects as distinct from their background.

Christopher W. Tyler

Tyler has spent his research career exploring how the eyes and brain work together to produce meaningful vision. Dr. Tyler, director of The Smith Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center, has developed rapid tests for the diagnosis of diseases of this visual processing in infants and of retinal and optic nerve diseases in adults. He has also studied visual processing and photoreceptor dynamics in other species such as monkeys, butterflies and fish.

Finally, there’s the importance of sound,

Good Vibrations
The Science of Sound

Tickets must be purchased.

Thursday, June 3, 2010, 8:00 PM – 9:30 PM

The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College

We look around us – constantly. But how often do we listen around us? Sound is critically important to our bodies and brains, and to the wider natural world. In the womb, we hear before we see. Join neuroscientists, biophysicists, astrophysicists, composers and musicians for a fascinating journey through the nature of sound—how we perceive it, how it acts upon us and how it profoundly affects our well-being—including a demonstration of sounds produced by sources as varied as the human inner ear and gargantuan black holes in space.

Moderator: John Schaefer

Participants:

Jamshed Bharucha

Bharucha conducts research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, focusing on the cognitive and neural basis of the perception of music. He is a past editor of the interdisciplinary journal Music Perception.

Jacob Kirkegaard

Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard explores sound in art with a scientific approach. He focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible.

John Schaefer

John Schaefer is the host of WNYC’s innovative music/talk show Soundcheck, which features live performances and interviews with a variety of guests. Schaefer, Executive Producer, Music Programming, WNYC Radio, has also hosted and produced WNYC’s radio series New Sounds since 1982 (which Billboard called “The #1 radio show for the Global Village”) and the New Sounds Live concert series since 1986.

Christopher Shera

Shera has done extensive research in solving fundamental problems in the mechanics and physiology of the peripheral auditory system. His work focuses on how the ear amplifies, analyzes, and emits sound, and his research combines physiological measurements with theoretical modeling of the peripheral auditory system.read more

Michael Turner

Turner is the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is a theoretical cosmologist who coined the term, “dark energy.” He has made seminal contributions to the understanding of inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter, and the theory of the Big Bang.

Mark Whittle

Whittle uses large optical and radio telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, to study processes occurring within 1,000 light years of the central supermassive black hole in Active Galaxies. His most recent interests focus on the way in which fast moving jets of gas, which are driven out of the active nucleus, subsequently crash into, accelerate, and generally “damage” the surrounding galactic material.

If you can’t make it to the festival in June, there are always the videos.

Science festivals in the US; nanoparticles and environmental health and safety report from ENRHES; new technique in molecular biology; PEN’s site remediation webcast commentary

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I just came across a notice for the first ever USA Science and Engineering Festival to be held in Washington, DC, Oct. 10-24, 2010. From the Azonano news item,

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) today announced its support of the USA Science & Engineering Festival, the country’s first national science festival. The event will take place in Washington, D.C., in October 2010. The festival, expected to be a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary celebration of science in the United States, will offer science and engineering organizations throughout the country the opportunity to present hands-on science activities to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. Festival organizers already have engaged more than 350 participants from the nation’s leading science and engineering organizations.

From what I’ve seen of their website, they are using the term multi-disciplinary in a fairly conservative sense, i. e., different science and engineering disciplines are being brought together. This contrasts with the approach used in the World Science Festival, being held in New York, June 2-6, 2010, where they mash together artists as well as scientists from many different disciplines.

Michael Berger at Nanowerk sputters a bit as he comments on the Engineered Nanoparticles Review of Health and Environmental Safety (ENRHES) report,

Before we take a look at the report’s findings, it’s quite remarkable that the authors feel compelled to start their introduction section with this sentence: “Nanotechnology is a sector of the material manufacturing industry that has already created a multibillion $US market, and is widely expected to grow to 1 trillion $US by 2015.” Firstly, a lot of people would argue with the narrow definition of nanotechnology as being a sector of the material manufacturing industry. Secondly, it appears that still no publicly funded report can afford to omit the meaningless and nonsensical reference to a ‘trillion dollar industry by 2015’. It really is astonishing how this claim gets regurgitated over and over again – even by serious scientists – without getting scrutinized (read “Debunking the trillion dollar nanotechnology market size hype”). It would be interesting to know if scientific authors, who otherwise operate in a fact-based world, just accept a number picked out of thin air by some consultants because it helps impress their funders; or if they deliberately use what they know is a fishy number because the politicians and bureaucrats who control the purses are easily fooled by sensational claims like these and keep the funding coming.

Sadly, picking a number out of thin air happens more often than we like to believe. A few years back I was reading a book about food and how it’s changing as we keep manipulating our food products to make them last longer on the shelf, etc. In one chapter of the book, the author chatted with an individual who helped to define high cholesterol. As he told the story, he and his colleagues (scientists all) got in a room and picked a number that was used to define a high cholesterol count. (I will try to find the title of that book, unfortunately the memory escapes me at the moment. ETA: Mar.4.10, the book is by Gina Mellet, Last chance to eat, 2004) I’ve heard variations of this business of picking a number that sounds good before.

As for the rest of the ENRHES report, Berger has this to say,

Thankfully, the rest of the report stands on solid ground.

I’m using those last two words, “solid ground” to eventually ease my way into a discussion about site remediation and the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies’ (PEN) recent webcast. First, there’s a brief and related item on molecular biology.

Scientists at the University of Chicago are trying to develop a method for understanding how biological processes emerge from molecular interactions. From the news item (which includes an audio file of Andre Dinner, one of the scientists, discussing his work) on physorg.com,

Funded by a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, University of Chicago scientists are aiming to develop a reliable method for determining how biological processes emerge from molecular interactions. The method may permit them to “rewire” the regulatory circuitry of insulin-secreting pancreatic beta cells, which play a major role in type-2 diabetes.

…

A second goal: to control cell behavior and function more generally, which may ultimately culminate in other applications, including the bioremediation of environmental problems.

…

The four scientists [Aaron Dinner, Louis Philipson, Rustem Ismagilov, and Norbert Scherer] share an interest in the collective behavior of cells that emerges from a complex ensemble of atoms and molecules working in concert at different scales of time and space. “In a living system you have this hierarchy of coupled time and length scales,” Dinner said. “How is it that all of these different dynamics at one time and length scale get coupled to dynamics at another scale?”

In other words, how does life begin? I know that’s not the question they’re asking but this work has to lead in that direction and I imagine the synthetic biology people are watching with much interest.

In the more immediate future, this work in molecular biology may lead to better bioremediation, which was the topic at hand on the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies’ recent (Feb.4.10) webcast.From their website (you can click to view the webcast [approx. 54 mins.] from here),

A new review article appearing in Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) co-authored by Dr. Todd Kuiken, research associate for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), Dr. Barbara Karn, Office of Research and Development, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Marti Otto, Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency focuses on the use of nanomaterials for environmental cleanup. It provides an overview of current practices; research findings; societal issues; potential environment, health, and safety implications; and possible future directions for nanoremediation. The authors conclude that the technology could be an effective and economically viable alternative for some current site cleanup practices, but potential risks remain poorly understood.

There is an interactive map of remediation sites available here and, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find a link to the review article or you can go here.

I found the information interesting although I was not the intended audience. This was focused primarily on people who are involved in site remediation and/or are from the US. The short story is that more research needs to be done and there have been some very promising results. The use of nanoscale zero-valent iron (nZVI) nanoparticles was the main topic of discussion. It allows for ‘in situ’ site remediation, in other words, you don’t need to move soil and/or pump water through some treatment process. It’s not appropriate for all sites. It can be faster than the current site remediation treatments and it’s cheaper. There was no mention of any problems or hazards using nZVI but there hasn’t been much research either. The technique is now being used in seven different countries (including Canada with one in Ontario and one in Quebec). If I understand it rightly, there is no requirement to report nanotechnology-enabled site remediation so these numbers are based on self-reports. From the article in Environment Health Perspectives,

The number of actual applications of nZVI is increasing rapidly. Only a fraction of the projects has been reported, and new projects show up regularly. Figure 2 and Supplemental Material, Table 2 (doi:10.1289/ehp.0900793.S1) describe 44 sites where nanoremediation methods have been tested for site remediation.

I think that’s it for today, tomorrow some news from NISENet (Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network).