In their new book, Lois Gresh and her coauthor Robert Weinberg use the stories of horror master Stephen King as a jumping-off point to share principles of science. The mayhem caused by psychic abilities in Carrie, Firestarter, and The Dead Zone paves the way for a discussion of human consciousness and modern neuroscience; The Stand provokes a look at fictional and real plagues; while the parallel worlds and alternate histories at the heart of The Dark Tower bring up theoretical physics from relativity to wormholes.

Gresh will sign copies of her book and talk about the “science” in science fiction at a Science & the City @ NYAS event on November 29.

Click here for more information about the event.

Image courtesy of John Pazmino

If you’ve received an e-mail touting the appearance of two moons in the August sky, you have been deceived.

The Mars Hoax reappears every summer in a pesky e-mail chain letter designed to mislead gullible readers and stargazers. The spam missive claims that the red planet will come abnormally close to Earth on August 27 and appear the size of the moon in the night sky. As a result, astronomers throughout the country find themselves explaining how this event is utterly impossible to those who have fallen for the scam.

These are the facts: When Mars is closest to Earth, it is 56 million kilometers away. On August 27, 2003, when the red planet came as close to the earth as it will for another several thousand years, it appeared six times larger and 85 times brighter than usual—although nowhere near the size and brilliance of the moon.

Even when the moon is farthest from the Earth—some 405,503 kilometers away—Mars is still too far away to appear the size of the moon to the naked eye.

The hoax stirred up in 2003 may be especially compelling this year, says John Pazmino of NYSkies Astronomy, because a lunar eclipse will occur at 4:51 AM on August 28. If observers go out that night they may actually see the large red ball they expect.

“They are bamboozled by the eclipsed moon, believing it is Mars!” he said.

In reality, the red planet will appear low in the northeast sky during the eclipse, says Pazmino. “Look at the moon, then do an about-face. You’ll be looking right at Mars.”

However, contrary to what you may have heard, Mars will actually be closest to Earth in December this year.

Join NYSkies on August 16 for the next lecture in their seminar series which is held the first and third Thursday of every month.

Next Friday, August 17, the Columbia Department of Astronomy will open its roof for a stargazing session at the Rutherford Observatory. Stargazers will be able to see the craters on the moon and Saturn’s rings through an assortment of telescopes, and volunteers will be available to offer insight on the night sky.

The annual late summer Perseid Meteor Shower can be seen for several weeks but the best night to catch a glimpse of shooting stars may be the weekend of August 11th — the peak of the event when as many as 60 meteors per hour will streak the skies over New York.

The Perseid shower occurs each year when the Swift-Tuttle Comet crosses earth’s orbit. The meteor shower reaches its peak when the earth passes through the dustiest part of the comet’s tail.

Shooting stars will radiate from the constellation Perseus from which the meteor shower gets its name. Although the moon will be close to new during the shower’s peak, light pollution will make it hard to see the star show from the city itself.

Luckily, on Saturday August 11th, the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York (AAA) is hosting three free observing events in dark sky locations: the Anthony Wayne Recreational Area, Great Kills, and Inwood Hill Park.

However, August 13th might actually be the best evening to go outside and look up. Not only will the meteor shower reach its peak that morning but Neptune will emerge as it reaches opposition in Capricornus later that day.

Just how enthusiastic are New Yorkers about stargazing? Some residents are choosing their homes based on their fascination with watching the stars. Arc Development, a New York-based real estate company, has created Solaria, the city’s first residential building with an exclusive stargazing deck and rooftop observatory. Residents can watch the stars through a top-of-the-line Meade telescope and receive stargazing sessions and educational astronomy programs through AAA as well as a one-year-complimentary membership to the association.

For those of us unable to invest in real estate to satisfy our interest in astronomy, we can still learn more about the heavens at a handful of events that will be held throughout the city this week.

On August 2, the NYSkies Astronomy Seminar series will host Lyman Page from Princeton University who will discuss the first half million years after the Big Bang in a lecture entitled Observing the Birth of the Universe.

The Hudson River museum will also hold their weekly Friday Star Night planetarium show.

On August 7, The Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History will show Virtual Universe: The Dark Side, a presentation in which viewers will explore the world’s largest cosmic atlas that extends from Earth to the furthest points charted by NASA.

For maps of the August sky visit www.aaa.org

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.

— Graphic contributed by John Pazmino, author of the SpaceWalk column for the New York Space Society.

Look to the western sky this Saturday or Sunday evening just after dusk and you will see Venus and Saturn getting cozy. For the last month, the two planets have been approaching one another in the night sky; each night getting closer to this weekend’s convergence.

On Saturday evening, Venus — the planet that is switching next month from its role as Evening Star to that of Morning star — will appear directly underneath Saturn. By Sunday evening, skywatchers will see Venus on Saturn’s lower left.

After this weekend, Venus and Saturn will pull apart and appear closer to the horizon at sunset each night.

According to Space.com, if you compare Venus and Saturn with a telescope, it is easy to see a difference in brilliance between the two planets. Venus appears much brighter than the mellower yellower Saturn.

An author on the eponymous Science Blog explains the reason for Venus’ shining appearance and offers a word of caution for people dreaming of visiting the planet named for the goddess of love, writing:

Venus is so bright because the planet’s clouds are wonderful reflectors of sunlight. Unlike clouds on Earth, which are made of water, clouds on Venus are made of sulfuric acid. They float atop an atmosphere where the pressure reaches 90 times the air pressure on Earth. If you went to Venus, you’d be crushed, smothered, dissolved and melted–not necessarily in that order. Don’t go.

Skywatching material provided to S&C by NYSkies Astronomy Inc. Click here for information about the next NYSkies event.

— Graphic contributed by John Pazmino, author of the SpaceWalk column for the New York Space Society.

Venus, the second-closest planet to the Sun, appears brighter than the brightest stars in our night sky. Because she orbits the Sun every 224.7 days — faster than the Earth’s 365.2 day orbit — Venus overtakes the Earth every 584 days, at which time the planet changes from being the Evening Star, visible after sunset, to being the Morning Star, visible before sunrise.

The ancient Greeks identified a morning star and an evening star which they called Eosphoros and Hesperos. But after noticing the stars would appear and disappear at intervals and could never be seen in the sky at the same time of year, they concluded the stars were a single celestial body. The planet was later named Venus in honor of the Roman goddess of love.

After shining brilliantly in the evening sky all through the spring, this month Venus starts fading from the view of nocturnal skywatchers. By late July she’s lost in strong twilight and by mid August she will have shifted to the dawn sky. Venus will remain the morning star for the rest of 2007.

In her endgame as evening star, Venus puts on two final shows. On June 18th she convenes with Regulus, Saturn, Moon, and Beehive star cluster, lining up with them in a slanted row in the west. You may need binoculars to make out the Beehive cluster in strong twilight or misty summer air.

For the rest of June, watch Venus and Saturn converge, night by night, until on July 1st, they almost touch.

This skywatching material is provided by NYSkies Astronomy Inc.

This week Nature reports that a trial run of the Large Hadron Collider planned for November of this year will likely be cancelled due to construction delays.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and will be the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator. The LHC will help physicists in their search for the elusive Higgs boson particle — nicknamed the God Particle — a hypothetical elementary particle which is predicted by the Standard Model, a theory which describes all known fundamental interactions between the elementary particles and is consistent with both quantum mechanics and special relativity.

Construction setbacks — including the failure earlier this year of key ultra-cold magnets — may push back the date that the LHC becomes operational, Nature reports.

Until the LHC is complete, the Fermilab’s Tevatron, with a circumference of approximately 4 miles, remains the highest energy accelerator in the world. Last year, experimenters at Fermilab caught what they perceived to be a hint of the existence of the Higgs boson. While rumors that Tevatron has already confirmed the existence of the particle have recently gained traction, the evidence Fermilab has thus far shared has not fully convinced the scientific community.

Yet the delayed launch of the LHC might allow Fermilab to pip CERN at the post, suggests Nature, writing “there is a chance that a competing US instrument at Fermilab might spot the Higgs boson before the LHC turns on.”

In a video interview at the New York Academy of Sciences Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics, shared his hope that the LHC will help physicists to understand dark matter — material which we know makes up the universe but which is not the quarks, gluons, photons, and electrons that we understand. He says:

Astronomers have told us there’s something else out there that interacts only very weakly with the kind of matter we know, sort of a shadow world that weighs five times as much as the world we know. It’s very mysterious what it is… One of the leading candidates for what it might be is a kind of particle called the WIMP, for weakly interacting massive particle, that, if it exists, there’s a fair chance it will be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider now in the last stages of construction in Geneva. If that’s the right idea, or part of the right idea, it will have enormous implications for the unification of all the forces and the deep structure of space and time.

To watch Wilczek’s video interview in its entirety and to see interviews from up-and-coming physicists Max Tegmark and Nima Arkani-Hamed, visit the Web site of the New York Academy of Sciences’ New Vista Series.

The end of May brings a phenomenon peculiar to Manhattan — the fabled Stonehenge sunset.

Since the vernal equinox in March, the Sun has gradually been setting farther and farther to the right of the West compass point. Today the concrete towers that line the city streets will catch the light like the stone plinths of Britain’s Stonehenge structure and the sun will line up perfectly with the East-West streets on the Manhattan grid.

Photo by John Pazmino

Today, keep watch at dusk to see the Sun glide out of the towers on the left side of the street, then slant down and right to cross the street. You’ll see the solar disc balanced on the centerline, like a coin on edge. Then the sun will set a little to the right of the centerline a couple of minutes later.

A good vantage point for the sun show is the East end of a street that starts at a park or superblock and runs toward the Hudson. Or you might try watching from an accessible overpass where you can align yourself with the centerline of the street but be safely above vehicle traffic.

**If you miss today’s apparition, there is a second chance around July 10th when the Sun is migrating right to left, after the summer solstice of June.

This skywatching material is provided by NYSkies Astronomy Inc., the support group for home astronomy in New York. Click here for information about the NYSkies event tonight at 7:00 PM.

Stargazers might also enjoy these recent astronomy and cosmology podcasts from Science & the City:

• Paul Davies: Cosmic Jackpot
• Neil deGrasse Tyson: Death by Blackhole
• Carl Sagan’s Search for God: with Ann Druyan, Steve Soter, and Neil deGrasse Tyson

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.

The waxing moon can be our guide to the heavens this month as she passes by several interesting celestial features May 19 - 23. With the moon as a reference point, keep your eyes to the western sky from dusk through the early night to see:

• May 19 — Venus standing to the left of the Moon.
  • Distance of from Earth: 7m 15s
  • The light we observe at 21:00
    left Venus at: 20:52:45

  ……………….

• May 20 — Castor & Pollux, the lucidae of Gemini, sitting to the right of the Moon, forming a bent row with her. Pollux is the newest bright star found to have a planet and is the brightest, by far, of the planetary stars.
  • Distance of Pollux from Earth: 33.7y
  • The light we observe at 21:00 left Pollux in: 1973
  • Distance of Castor from Earth: 51.5y
  • The light we observe at 21:00 left Castor in: 1955

  ……………….

• May 21 — The Beehive star cluster a little below the Moon. Use your binoculars to look for a softly glowing tangle of stars filling about 1/4 of the binocular field.
• Distance of from Earth: 590y
• The light we observe at 21:00
  left the Beehive in 1417 (!)

……………….

• May 22 — Saturn at the lower right of the Moon.
• Distance of from Earth: 1h 18m 07s
• The light we observe at 21:00
  left Saturn at: 19:41:53

……………….

• May 23 — Regulus sitting to lower right of the Moon, now in the high south. Regulus is one of the few stars whose physical shape and temperature contours was measured from Earth. It is a flattened star from rapid rotation, with hotter poles and cooler equator.
• Distance of from Earth: 77.5y
• The light we observe at 21:00
  left Saturn in: 1930

On the chart above, the position of the moon is indicated with a cross by the date. May 19th is a crescent Moon. On the following nights, the Moon gets a bit fatter until she approaches a half Moon by May 23.

This skywatching material is provided by NYSkies Astronomy Inc., the support group for home astronomy in New York. Click here for information about the next NYSkies event.

Stargazers might also enjoy these recent astronomy and cosmology podcasts from Science & the City:

• Paul Davies: Cosmic Jackpot
• Neil deGrasse Tyson: Death by Blackhole
• Carl Sagan’s Search for God: with Ann Druyan, Steve Soter, and Neil deGrasse Tyson

One of the most-read articles in the May 14 edition of The New Yorker is a feature by John Seabrook about the The Antikythera Mechanism. The 2000-year old Greek instrument, fragments of which were hauled up from a shipwreck in the Aegean Sea where they were discovered in 1901, has been an object of fascination and puzzlement for generations of scientists who have tried to determine the instrument’s function.

But recently, the custom development of a 3D X-ray machine has provided computer tomography images that have enabled scientists to decipher a written user’s manual beneath the corroded surface of the fragments. Those findings were published in a letter in the November 30, 2006, edition of Nature.

Referred to by some as the world’s first computer, the geared box, now believed to have been used for predicting eclipses and other cosmic events, is held up as a rare piece of evidence of Greek superiority in technological development. Seabrook describes the first X-ray images of the mechanism’s innards as “a geared embryo—the incipient bud of an industrial age that remained unborn for a millennium.”

A slideshow of the images can be found at The New Yorker, and a replica of the instrument goes on display at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan later this month as part of its new exhibit, Gods, Myths, and Mortals: Discover Ancient Greece.

You can also hear Greek physicists, Xenophon Moussas and John Seiradakis, members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, describe the amazing object in a Science & the City podcast.

In his book, Cosmic Jackpot, Why our Universe is Just Right for Life, cosmologist Paul Davies takes on one of the big questions, a question more usually confined to the realms of priests or theologians: Why are we here? Or, rather, why is here, this moment in space and time, filled with the appropriate conditions to support life?

Recent scientific discoveries have illuminated the fact that many basic features of our physical universe are almost peculiarly “fine-tuned for life.” A small change to any of a group of physical parameters, such as the speed of light or the strength of gravity, would render the universe inhospitable — inhospitable not just to carbon based life-forms like ourselves, but to any kind of life that we might reasonably envision. If the physical laws were different from what they are, the universe would be radically different. There would be no stable atoms, no complex molecules, no planets, no stars…

The happy alignment of physical constants that allows our universe to exist is in some ways so unlikely that it appears, in the words of the late British cosmologist Fred Hoyle, to be a “put-up job.”

But is there an intelligent designer who turned some metaphysical dials to set the universe’s parameters to values that make life possible? Or is our universe a happy accident? Davies writes:

Other features of the world that we currently regard as law-like might also turn out to be accidents of history. Could it be that some of the regularities of nature that we dignify as “laws of physics” are actually frozen relics from the formation of the universe?

Davies, who will speak at the Academy on May 9th, discussed the big questions of existence in a recent podcast with Science & the City.

Last year, Davies spoke at the Academy as part of a panel discussion about the biggest scientific ideas and stories likely to capture scientists’ imagination in the coming decades. The event, which is available as a podcast, also included biologist E.O. Wilson and sociologist Sherry Turkle.

You can read an excerpt from Davies’ book here.

Click here for more information on the Readers and Writers event with Paul Davies at the New York Academy of Sciences.