The 2014 World Science Festival started Thursday in Brooklyn, and continues throughout the weekend! If you can’t make it to New York for all the goodness, don’t worry – they’ve got livestreams for that, and you can check out today’s events right here, at 2pm and 8pm EDT.
The first event at 2pm EDT is called “Better, Stronger, Faster: The Future of the Bionic Body.” It sounds pretty good, and it’s sold out – so be glad you can catch it online:
Forget “wearable tech”—we’ve entered a zone where deploying engineering and circuitry inside the human body can help erase disabilities and, more controversially, enhance human capacities beyond their evolutionary limits. Peek into a future where technology will have the capacity to make us stronger, faster and by some measures, better.
At 8pm EDT, you’re going to have to choose between to streams. The first is “Alien Life: Will We Know It When We See It?” which involves a little of this:
When searching for life beyond our home planet, how do we know what to look for? Learn how scientists across disciplines—astronomers, chemists and microbiologists—are intensely studying the evolution of life on Earth to help identify life abroad, a research agenda with wide-reaching ramifications for science, philosophy, religion, and much more.
If aliens aren’t your thing, you can also catch “The Craving Brain: The Neuroscience of Uncontrollable Urges” at 8pm EDT:
[T]hrough a steadily developing understanding of the brain, scientists foresee a future in which a simple medical procedure—even a shot or a pill—could defuse addiction’s power. Join leading researchers studying how addiction changes the very fabric of the brain, and what new insights could mean for addicts trying to win back their lives.
(via World Science Festival, image via Erica Anderson)
Meanwhile in related links
- Here’s the full livestream schedule for the Festival
- You can make a baby with three biological parents
- LeVar Burton explains the double rainbow
