FASHION Week, Restaurant Week, the Tony Awards: New York wastes no oppor tunity to make its cultural supremacy known. But now the city’s geeks are getting in on the action, too.
Yesterday marked the start of the World Science Festival, a celebration of research, analysis and innovation. We caught up with some of the festival’s speakers, whose work includes some weird science indeed. (See worldsciencefestival.com for a full schedule of events.)
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Traveling to the future is entirely possible, says Brian Greene, a math and physics professor at Columbia University. All you need is a spaceship that can travel to the edge of a black hole. If you hang out around the black hole’s edge, the intense gravity means that time will pass more slowly for you than it will on Earth. Spend a year in your spaceship, and 1 million years will have passed back in New York. Time travelers take note, however. Just because it’s easy enough to skip ahead a few centuries doesn’t mean getting back will be effortless. Many physicists, Greene included, believe that reverse time travel is probably impossible.
EAT LITTLE, LIVE LONG?
We’re taught that a balanced diet leads to a long, healthy life. But what if the sheer quantity of food we eat – no matter how nutritious – actually shortens our life span? In what might be bad news to all the hearty eaters out there, it seems that eating three full meals a day can shorten your life span.
For the past 30 years, Richard Weindruch, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, has been studying the effect of calorie restriction on animals. The results are striking. Mice that are fed a healthy diet – but 25 percent less food than they would normally eat – actually live an average of 25 percent longer. Not only that, but they look younger and have a high resistance to disease.
To get around the brain’s impulse to eat, scientists hope to figure out how eating less benefits the body, then recreate that effect in pill form. If it works, the pill could be something of a fountain of youth – but only to a point. “With this we would be seeing more and more people reaching 110, 120, 130 years old,” Weindruch says.
THE SMELL OF NUMBERS
Have you ever heard a noise and immediately seen a certain color in your mind? What about tasting something and then feeling an intense sensation on your skin? While most of us experience such things once in a while, about 4 percent of the population regularly experiences these mixed sensations, a condition known as synesthesia. David M. Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine’s neuroscience department has identified more than 6,000 “synesthetes.” No one knows exactly how or why synesthesia developed. Some say synesthetes actually have more brain cells than the rest of us. Others think it just breaks down to how well the mind can talk to itself. “It’s interesting to realize that about 4 percent of the population perceives reality different than you do,” Eagleman says.