Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, is a 500-page exploration of the way the mind negotiates reality. Pinker, who conducts research on language and cognition as a psychology professor at Harvard, exposes how language reveals the way humans perceive space, time, and causality.

William Saletan writes in the New York Times Book Review:

“The Stuff of Thought explores the duality of human cognition: the modesty of its construction and the majesty of its constructive power. Pinker weaves this paradox from a series of opposing theories. Philosophical realists, for instance, think perception comes from reality. Idealists think it’s all in our heads. Pinker says it comes from reality but is organized and reorganized by the mind. That’s why you can look at the same thing in different ways.”

NYAS members can read an excerpt from the book in the current edition of the New York Academy of Sciences Member Magazine. Or buy a signed copy of the book this week at the Academy:

Pinker will speak Friday, October 5, at 6 pm at The New York Academy of Sciences, 250 Greenwich St., 7 World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan. The event marks the launch of the Science & the City Author Series.

Like the progressive and ever-changing nature of scientific research, artistic expression is an eclectic and technologically expanding field. Last April, The New York Academy of Sciences embraced the many connections between science and art with an event entitled Biology and Art Symposium: Two Worlds or One? at which nine scientists and artists presented their interpretations of life science through visual representation. If you missed the event, you can read about it here or take advantage of the many opportunities to explore the link between science and art at the city’s galleries and museums this summer.

On display until November 30, at The New York Hall of Science, is an exhibit entitled BioScapes, which shows the winners of last year’s Olympus International Digital Imaging Competition, a contest to find the best images of life science specimens captured through light microscopes.

The Hall of Science is also currently exhibiting deep water photography of microscopic marine ecology by Michael S. Maurer and is preparing for their September 29 opening of Digital ’07, the 9th Annual International digital print exhibition that “utilizes the structures and patterns of the universe to create art.”

If photography is not your interest, you might prefer learning about the intersection of art and technology in the many design exhibits at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The museum houses an exhibit showcasing the progress of technology and design through an artifact timeline and currently hosts Design Life Now, 2006, an exhibit which curators say “brings together the experimental designs and emerging ideas—including animation, new media, and fashion, robotics, architecture, product, medical, and graphic design—at the center of American culture from 2003 to 2006.”

Or, learn how design can be not just beautiful but extremely useful at Design for the other 90%, an exhibit featuring technologies used for natural disaster recovery and poverty alleviation throughout the world.

Just as art can be found in science, so can science be found in art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art employs advances in science to protect its ancient collection of visual work. Dr. Eleonora Del Federico, a professor at the Pratt Institute who is on sabbatical working as part of the Met’s Art Department of Scientific Research, is studying how Mobile Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (Spectroscopy) can help assess the degradation of mural paintings and manuscripts. Del Federico, along with her colleague and fellow chemist Alexej Jerschow of New York University, were the first to publish an account of why ultramarine — a color of royalty and wealth that was used in the frescoes paintings such as the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — fades over time.

Jerschow said in a Science Daily interview:

Apart from the scientific interest in this work, these activities have created an exciting opportunity for both science and arts students to transcend discipline boundaries. These unique investigations promise to have tremendous impact on our understanding and prevention of the chemical processes that underlie the slow–often irreversible–decay of our cultural heirlooms.

For more science and nature art exhibits in the New York Tristate Area, search Art Exhibits in the Science & the City Calendar of Events.

A scientific illustrator and entomologist, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) created portraits of insects and butterflies that are not just beautiful, but are also empirically accurate. Merian was an avid naturalist and raised butterflies to study the stages of their development. Many of her paintings feature insects in their various stages of metamorphosis alongside the plants upon which they feed.

Metamorphosis was a theme of Merian’s life as well as her work. After stints as an art teacher, business owner, and insect collector, in 1699, Merian transformed herself into a field biologist, and left her husband behind to travel with her youngest teenage daughter from the Netherlands to Surinam, where she spent two years sketching and observing tropical flora and fauna. Her paintings from this period became the book, The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam, published in 1705.

Images from that book are shown in the newest Science & the City online art gallery, published with the permission of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The gallery is accompanied by an excerpt from the new biography of the naturalist, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, called “spellbinding” by the New Yorker. The book is authored by science writer Kim Todd, who spoke recently at the Explorer’s Club in New York.

In the foreword to her masterwork, Merian explained how friends’ insect collections provoked her curiosity and inspired her to travel to the tropics, writing:

In these collections I had found innumerable other insects, but finally if here their origin and their reproduction is unknown, it begs the question as to how they transform, starting from caterpillars and chrysalises and so on. All this has, at the same time, led me to undertake a long dreamed of journey to Suriname.

Click here to see some of her paintings from Surinam.

Maria Sibylla Merian died in 1717. Six plants, nine butterflies, and two beetles are named for her.

For more about the contributions of female scientists, you might enjoy this podcast of a roundtable discussion at the American Museum of Natural History, held in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson, entitled Remembering Silent Spring.

For 200 years Governors Island, a 172 acre piece of land in New York Harbor, at the mouth of the East River, was a military outpost. In 2003 the island was sold to New York State for the token sum of $1 — with the stipulation that there be no residential development on the property.

The planning and redevelopment of Governors Island is the responsibility of The Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation which recently shared with the public the five proposals they commissioned for the 40-acre park area at the southern half of the island.

You can see the five visions for Governors Island online here and in person at an exhibition on Governors Island entitled The Park at the Center of the World. The organizers of the exhibit write:

The title “pays homage to Russell Shorto’s book, The Island at the Center of the World, a history of the Dutch in Manhattan, and references not only Governors Island’s location at the center of New York Harbor but its potential role in future waterfront access and recreation in the region.”

In an analysis of the designs, the New York Times voiced the city’s high hopes for the site, writing:

Its history and location give the island the potential to become one of the great civic undertakings in New York City, a rival in beauty, if not in scale, to Central Park and Prospect Park.

Yet realizing that potential is not without its challenges. According to a recent New York magazine article about the options for the island’s development, the island is a “remarkably difficult development conundrum, whose recent history is littered with failed plans.”

To maximize the site’s potential, designers have had to address the two major questions New Yorkers have been asking themselves when thinking about the island and its redevelopment: 1) How do I get out there? and 2) Why should I bother going?

Future development will offer new answers to those questions, but even now there are ways and reasons to go to Governors Island. Weekends in the summer a free ferry service departs from the Battery Maritime Building located adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry in Lower Manhattan and CUNY is hosting an exhibit and lecture series on the historic island. The theme of this year’s second annual series is Stabilizing the Climate in the 21st century and Energy Solutions for the 21st century.

This Saturday William Solecki of Hunter College will give a lecture entitled Environmental Change and Urban Sustainability — The Case of New York City.

More information on the event can be found here.

For more about urban development and design check out these podcasts from Science & the City:

• Urban Sustainability — Albert Appleton.
• Skyscraper Science — Carol Willis, founder, director, and curator of the Skyscraper Museum.
• Is Sustainable Development Feasible? — Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute

As Natalie Angier’s New York Times tribute to the splendiferous sperm attests, Father’s Day is a true celebration of basic science. Then there’s anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s essay today in Time Magazine, The Psychology of Fatherhood, which points out that “Father’s Day salutes the world’s greatest dads, but it takes science to explain why some aren’t so great.” With no disrespect to all the fellas who’ve heroically taken on parenting of another’s offspring with little concern for what Angier calls “the central verity of paternity — that it’s a lot more fun to become a father than to be one,” we think Sunday seems the perfect holiday for a science outing.

Here are some fun ways to spend time with Dad, in New York or elsewhere this weekend:

• Check out Dad’s Day Out at the Bronx Zoo, 10:00-5:30, Saturday and Sunday. Enjoy games, storytelling, and music while zookeepers demonstrate the toys that help animals stay as physically fit and mentally stimulated as dear old Dad.

• Stay up superlate Saturday night and greet the dawn on Father’s Day watching the sky with Dad and the New York Amateur Astronomers Association at Bear Mountain or at Great Kills in Staten Island

• If you’re in the Boston area, take in Father’s Day brunch at the Boston Museum of Science.

• In Avon, Ohio, a weekend-long fair pays tribute to Dad’s favorite quick fix tool. The Duct Tape Festival promises lots of low tech educational entertainment.

• In Oakland, Calif., Dads can take a mission to Mars at the Chabot Space Center.

• If Dad has more fun tinkering around the garage, check out Make Magazine’s guide to DIY gifts for Dad. If you happen to be a Dad yourself, you’ll find plenty of projects here you can rope the kids into.

If theater is, as W. R. Inge said, a reflection of life, it stands to follow that practically every kind of person is likely to be represented on the stage. Yet even though theater audiences have embraced plays featuring pirates, trains, and African animals, there have been few plays about scientists.

Why are scientific themes — so important in this technology-driven modern era — rarely explored in drama? What barriers prevent producers from bringing science to the stage?

Chemist-turned-playwright, Carl Djerassi suggests in his essay, Contemporary “Science-in-Theatre”: A Rare Genre, that audiences might perceive a play about science as too educational. He writes :

The standard dictionary definition of didactic—“designed or intended to teach”—sounds harmless enough, and especially to a scientist, who after all is primed to write nothing but didactic prose. But listen to the literati say the word and the pejorative overtone is clear. “Didactic” is the sharpest stiletto in any dismissive review of a work of fiction or drama. People do not pick up a novel or go to the theatre to be educated, the professionals tell us — people go to be entertained.

Luckily, this summer’s spate of science-in-theater performances seem likely to entertain as as well as teach. Theater buffs with an interest in science might want to check out:

• Phallacy — a new play by Carl Djerassi, the chemist responsible for the birth control pill. The play, staged at the Cherry Lane Theater, tells the story of a struggle between an art historian and the chemist whose analysis casts doubt on the provenance of a Roman sculpture.
• Inherit the Wind — a new Broadway production starring Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s legendary 1955 drama about the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”
• Einstein’s Dreams — a workshop version of a new musical by Albert Innaurato, based on the novel by Alan Lightman.
• SeaChange: Reversing the Tide — a performance piece which combines the knowledge of science with the wisdom of poetry to argue compellingly that man an integral part of life’s complex web.

Learn more about science on the stage…

In this podcast, Carl Djerassi, “father” of the birth control pill and the playwright behind Phallacy, speaks to Science & the City about his journey from the lab to the theater and the difference between science fiction and science in fiction.

Einstein’s back in the news. He got more press than any other scientist in 2005 when the world celebrated the 100-year anniversary of his Annus Mirabilis Papers with lectures, concerts, performances and the World Year of Physics.

But Walter Isaacson’s newly released biography of history’s most famous geek, Einstein: His Life and Universe, is generating new media attention for the immortal genius.

Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute and former CNN chairman and Time Magazine managing editor, describes previously unrevealed detail about Einstein’s inner world, which he uncovered in papers that were only unsealed last year.

The author will speak on the evening of June 12 at the New York Academy of Sciences.

Listen to Science & the City’s podcast conversation with Isaacson, or read an abridged version of the interview online.

Or choose between these two Einstein events next week, both at 7:00 p.m. on May 30:

• At Brookhaven National Lab, famed physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve gives a lecture, Einstein’s Biggest Blunder? A Cosmic Mystery Story.
• At CUNY Graduate Center, a performance of Einstein’s Dreams, a workshop version of a new musical by Albert Innaurato.

“Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons; for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”

Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, explained yesterday that the museum has ignored the warning above and chosen to meddle in the affairs of dragons — and those of unicorns, griffins, sea monsters, and other fantastic beasts — to create the new exhibit, Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids, which traces the cultural and natural history roots of some of the world’s most enduring mythological creatures.

The exhibit displays sculptures, paintings, textiles, and cultural objects from around the world alongside fossils and preserved specimens. The collection suggests that legendary beasts may have arisen from imaginative misidentification of physical artifacts. A narwhal tusk looks just like the horn of the unicorns depicted in ancient drawings, while a fossil of the beaked dinosaur Protoceratops (above) looks uncannily like the griffin depicted on Greek coins and Egyptian statuettes.

The exhibit also highlights artifacts and stories that depict less well known mythical creatures like Sedna, (left) the inuit goddess of the sea.

Sedna married a man who was actually a sea bird and she was unhappy. After a year, her sad singing encouraged her father to get in his boat and come rescue her. As Sedna and her father paddled away from the home Sedna shared with her husband, a flock of birds chased them. The sea birds’ flapping wings stirred up waves that threatened to capsize the boat carrying Sedna and her father. Sedna’s father, afraid of drowning, tossed his daughter overboard to save himself. Sedna clung to the side of the boat, but her frightened father chopped off her hands and she fell into the sea. Sedna’s severed fingers became the whales, seals, and polar bears and as Sedna sank, she was transformed into a mystical being who reigns over all the creatures in the ocean.

The exhibit also has an actual FeeJee mermaid and a computer kiosk that lets visitors design their own dragon.

Click here for more information about the exhibit.

Check out our exhibitcast of Gold.

Also running at the American Museum of Natural History is the exihibit Gold, which explains the scientific, historical, cultural and financial significance of one of the world’s most rare and highly prized metals. Science & the City took a guided tour of the exhibit with the co-curator and recorded it for a podcast.