In this Starbucks era where coffee is frequently a dessert-like confection full of caramel, chocolate syrup, or other exotic flavors, people may have lost their ability to enjoy a plain cup of coffee. But great coffee doesn’t need adulteration. On December 6, learn how the bean, the roast, the water, and other ingredients combine to create a cup of the good stuff at a lecture by Andrea Illy, Chairman of illycafe, S.p.A. and coauthor and publisher of Espresso Coffee: the Chemistry of Quality. At this first event in the Science & the City Food Series, discuss the science of coffee and enjoy an espresso or cappuccino at the post-event reception.

Click here for more information about the event.

After almost two years and $109 million of renovations, the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City will reopen Thursday, debuting new exhibits, refurbished old favorites, and the unprecedented Jennifer A. Chalsty Center for Science Learning and Teaching.

The new exhibit Skyscrapers! allows guests to explore a model skyline revealing the careful planning of these giant buildings, while kids and adults alike can join the action in a video game battle between invading germs and the immune system in Infection Connection. Just next door, Eat and Be Eaten houses some of the latest additions to the center’s family—leaf-tailed geckos, snapping turtles, mantids and many more exotic reptiles and insects.

The Communications exhibit features “The Eye Gaze,” a motion tracking device that allows visitors to use a computer without their hands. Instead of a keyboard and mouse, the users direct their eyes at an onscreen control to play music or turn on a light. The exhibit also looks at the history of writing. Guests can engrave clay, explore calligraphy, and even take the journey of a text message through fiber optic cable and radio waves.

Visitors should prepare to spend at least four hours if they want to catch most exhibits but should still save time for an IMAX show. The museum’s Dome Theater hasn’t changed and is still the largest in the world. Opening week will feature daily showings of Hurricane on the Bayou, Roving Mars, and Mummies: Secrets of the Pharaohs, which features the first scientists to extract DNA from ancient Egyptian pharaohs.

The Chalsty Center invites students and teachers from around the area to take part in hands-on labs. The popular Live From… lab will continue in the new center so that 7-12 grade students can once again watch live cardiac, neuro, or robotic surgeries while participating in on-site discussions with the surgeons and nurses as they work! As part of the museum’s refurbishment, handheld keypads were integrated into the exhibit so that students can respond to questions from the instructors and see how their answers compare to those of other students.

Also new to the center is the sophisticated Global Microscope, which shows digital images of global warming indicators, atmospheric changes, and other occurrences on earth’s surface as well as other planets in our solar system.

Best of all, the Liberty Science experience doesn’t end when you walk out the door. The Center has developed the Science Now, Science Everywhere program which allows guests to use their cell phones to download exhibit information not only while they’re in the Center but also long after they leave. To check out more information on exhibits, IMAX show times, and Learning Center activities, visit www.lsc.org and the Science & the City events calendar.

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.

The latest event in the New York Academy of Sciences’ Science of Food series, will be a lecture by Paul S. Kindstedt, codirector of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese and author of American Farmstead Cheese: The Complete Guide to Making and Selling Artisan Cheeses. In honor of the event, which will be held May 10 at 6:00 PM, we’d like to share some cheese trivia.

Did you know….

• Cheese is made mostly from the milk of cows but can also be made from the milk of other mammals, including sheep, goats, buffalo, reindeer, camels, and yaks.
• People started making cheese before the time of recorded history, likely soon after they started to raise domestic animals and became able to digest their milk.
• There are more than 1,400 cheeses that can be grouped in 20 or so distinct families of cheese.
• Clifton Fadiman called cheese “milk’s leap toward immortality.”
• Over 18 million metric tons of cheese were produced worldwide in 2004.
• Rennin, the enzyme obtained from the fourth stomach of a cow and used chiefly in the manufacture of cheese, is capable of coagulating more than 25,000 times its weight of fresh milk. (!)

Also, check out these cheese-themed blogs:

• curdnerds.com
• Big Cheese Stories
• News from the Cheese Caves
• Cheese By Hand
• Cheese Underground

Click here for more information about the May 10 lecture by Paul S. Kindstedt.

Interviews with previous speakers at Science of Food events are available as podcasts:

• Shirley Corriher: From Bunsen Burners to Baked Alaska
• James Kennedy: A Toast to Tannins
• Charlie Bamforth: The Science of Beer
• Hervé This: Dinner — The Final Frontier