World Science Festival: Cabaret science
Happy hour starts early in New York, at least it does when you're hanging out with scientists. At 5 pm on Friday an eager audience took their seats at the 92Y-Tribeca for a cabaret-style presentation of science, comedy and, the biggest surprise, a singing Nobel Prize physicist.
The comedy was provided by Emily Levine, stand-up comedian and MC for the night, who introduced the event as "a scientific experiment to see if people like science better if we ply them with alcohol". She kept the tone light between speakers and came up with more scientific one-liners than I had thought was possible. Did the experiment work?
A family I met who had travelled to NY from Syracuse, 250 miles away, found plenty to like. The mother enjoyed the talk by Dominic Johnson, an evolutionary biologist and political scientist from Edinburgh University, who spoke about borrowing ideas from biology to help respond to terrorist threats. The father warmed to NASA's Chris McKay and his search for life on other planets and moons in our Solar System, and the daughter was fascinated by Kristin Baldwin's talk about cloning mice from their own nose cells and making embryonic stem cells that might be used to treat disease. So there was something to please everyone.
Kristin probably had the toughest, or most controversial subject, to tackle. She won the audience over with a mix of movie excerpts (Woody Allen's Sleeper movie beat her to the idea of cloning someone from their nose) and self-deprecating humour: "I can't really see you [the audience] but I feel like I'm in a bar, which makes me happy." She's also clearly excited about some of the recent advances in her field, including work on iPS cells, which allows scientists to reprogram adult cells without the controversial use of embryos.
Cosmologist Sean Carroll, from CalTech, possibly delivered the most memorable take-away fact: the Universe is 100 billion dog years old. But the bravest man in science, and showbiz, was definitely Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek. After a short talk about shepherding Schrodinger cats Frank launched into a song (and dance) about an oxygen molecule that fell in love with a human being. If you don't believe me I'm told a video should be available on the WSF website.
After that we all stumbled back out into the light of a warm New York evening - it's still early in the city and there's plenty more science to go see.
