Findings

What is life? That was the first question at my last festival event of the weekend--which was sold out, like every other event I attended. However you measure it, the festival looked like a hit: packed halls, riveting speakers, belly laughs, probing questions, subtle answers, and diverse crowds of audience members blocking the sidewalks afterward as they continued the debates.

Anyway, what is life? If you believe Steven Benner, a synthetic biologist, it’s a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist, thinks it’s all about information reproduction and processing: “No system other then life or a product of life processes complex information,” he says. And astrobiologist Margaret Turnbull is impatient with the very question. “As soon as we make a definition, it’s only a matter of time before it’s proved limited. I would much rather get out there and look for it and see what it’s like,” she says.

Throughout this weekend, I've seen droves of people, young and old, mobbing panelists at the end of each event. A regular among them has been Richard Diener, a 66-year-old former history teacher from Brooklyn whose camera is now loaded with pictures of many scientific icons who have spoken at the festival.

When I walked into the NYU auditorium this afternoon to listen to physicists talk about the quest for a unified theory of the universe, I saw that Diener had already staked out an aisle seat in the fourth row, with his camera slung over his shoulder. Diener is a large, round man who wears thick glasses. He moves very nimbly for a man of his size, which is an asset given his primary obsession besides travelling the world -- meeting celebrity scientists and opera singers at events and having his picture taken with them.

Yesterday, he grabbed me by the shoulder and asked me to click a photo of him with Francis Collins. I took a horizontal shot. "Now a vertical," he yelled out cheerfully. Collins looked at the camera with the measured smile that celebrities perfect over years of public appearances.

Today, Diener's target was Leonard Susskind (left), one of the pioneers of string theory. As the event ended, Diener leaped out of his chair, much as reporters do in order to buttonhole people for interviews, and got to the edge of the stage in a matter of seconds. A little later, as a swarm of audience members grew around him, I marvelled at how strategic his move had been. Nobody has quite as good an access to Susskind, who was still chatting with his fellow panelists while walking off the stage.

Okay, so the environment is going to hell in a hand basket (see “Are We Doomed?” below). But is there anything we can do to change the basket’s direction? That’s what seven scientists and environmental activists got together to discuss yesterday evening before a high-energy audience at New York University.

Scientists have known for decades that the carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere is warming the planet, said science writer Andrew Revkin, the moderator. So why is it taking us so long to stop it? After all, we quickly passed legislation banning chlorofluorocarbons after scientists--including panelist Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who won a Nobel Prize for the work--showed the connection between the chemicals and the hole in the atmospheric ozone layer.

Rowland pointed out that while chlorofluorocarbons were used mainly in affluent countries, the whole world burns CO2-producing fossil fuels (or would, if it could afford them). And carbon dioxide, added inventor Saul Griffith of Makani Power, “lives a very long time in the atmosphere. You can stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere, you can shut off the tap, but it’s very hard to make the existing CO2 go away.”

Are scientists who say they are agnostic about the existence of God simply being polite? Are they afraid to admit in public that they are atheists? 

Paul Bloom (second from right), a Yale psychologist who studies the biological basis for religiosity, raised the question yesterday at a discussion on science and faith. As you may have guessed, Bloom is an atheist. Bloom's question may have been directed at a fellow panelist -- William Phillips (right), a Nobel Prize winning physicist who calls himself a "serious scientist who seriously believes in God."

To Phillips, the more important question was whether Bloom's atheism was really based on evidence. His own view was that it was not.

Nikolas Rose has an agenda - to dethrone the human genome. Dethrone it, that is, from its perceived status as the material essence of our beings.

Rose is a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. This afternoon, he joined Nobelist Paul Nurse, Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project and two other geneticists in one of the hottest panel discussions at the festival today: how personal genomics might change our lives and how we see ourselves. After Collins had given the audience a quick primer on genomics, using the metaphor of an instruction manual to describe the genome, Rose explained why he thought the metaphor was a bad one.

Science is like a complex number, with a real and an imaginary part. By real, I mean experiments demonstrations and prototypes. The imaginary is ideas and visions. Both were on display last night at an event on the future of cities.

The event wasn't so much about science as it was about development. Among the speakers were Mitchell Joachim, a New York designer who won the 2007 Time magazine inventor of the year award for designing -- along with MIT -- a compact, stackable city car, and Blaine Brownell (left), a University of Michigan materials researcher and architect who specializes in eco-friendly building materials.

Joachim wowed the audience with the imaginary. The animation videos he presented featured not just the stackable car -- the design of the stackable car, that is -- but also ideas such as trees networked together into natural green homes.

Brownell was next, and he riveted the audience with the real.

I was apprehensive last night as I headed uptown to Columbia University to hear anthropologist Richard Leakey and three others remind their audience that our species is driving Earth’s sixth great wave  of mass extinction. I thought the event might be a downer. Boy, was it.

In 20 or 30 years, Leakey projected, “60 to 70 percent of the species we know today will disappear.” The national parks and animal sanctuaries we’ve created are islands, and whenever there’s a significant climate change--like the one we’re causing right now--“island species disappear because they can’t get off the island.” Furthermore, while human evolution has slowed to a crawl or stopped, the pathogens that attack us are evolving like crazy. We exist ourselves because of previous extinctions, Leakey pointed out--if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out, our mammalian ancestors wouldn’t have taken over. However, he said, “There’s no guarantee at all that in a sixth extinction, our species would survive.”

Many scientists confess to having been daunted by science at some point in school before realizing that science could be a career. For marine scientist Ellen Prager (left), the moment came 25 years ago when she took a summer job helping researchers who spent a lot of time swimming behind parrotfish with bags in hand to collect poop as it plopped out of their bottoms. "If that was science, I thought to myself, I could do it too," Prager told the audience.

Prager now helps run the world's only undersea research lab, 63 feet below the surface off Key Largo, where she and her colleagues sometimes spend a few days at a stretch doing experiments. "How do you go to the bathroom there?" a young kid asked Prager during the question-and-answer session.

There is no better way to convey that science is cool than to showcase some of the coolest jobs in science. That's what a primate researcher, a forensic scientist, a planetary scientist, a marine researcher and a theme park engineer attempted to do this afternoon at a cool New York University auditorium.

A few hundred parents and kids sat in attendance. As they settled in, cool music played on the speakers, cool graphics waltzed on a large screen, and cool blue light shimmered on its margins. And six cool red chairs sat centerstage, empty, symbolizing one of the reasons for having the event: which is, some science and engineering fields, despite being cool, are not attracting enough students from the United States.

Before the panelists began talking, the moderator, Bill Weir of Good Morning America, made a comment that would have made some scientists cringe. One speaker, he announced -- referring to Walt Disney simulation expert Ben Schwegler -- had a job that involved turning the "boring laws of physics" into amusement park thrills. If the substance of science is branded as boring, I wondered, can the broader enterprise of science really achieve cool status?

4:00 PM. People are lining up for “Cool Jobs,” one of the festival’s hottest events among the not-yet-employed. A pair of 9-year-olds, Eli Cash and his friend Orion, peer down the escalator and speculate about physics: “Imagine if this disappeared and it was over a hundred million feet down to the bottom and it took you fifty years to get down there? And there was no elevator?”

When he grows up, Eli plans to write a book about history from the 1400s to the 1900s, with special emphasis on the Pilgrims. Orion--“like the star”--plans to be a nuclear scientist “and maybe make something that would go all the way to Neptune in one day.”