Watch the World Science Festival On the Internet

The big get-together of scientists and the artists who love them is happening right now in New York City, but you can watch some of it live from home. The festival, launched by string theorist Brian Greene and his wife, the TV producer Tracy Day, is also starting to offer a neatly-organized collection of videos of past events on their site, TED-style, so you’ll always have a place to go when you forget where the universe put its dark matter, what consciousness is, or when we’re going to get warp drive.

There are a few standout panels we hope you’ll be able to stream, if you can’t find a worm hole to New York.

Friday

The Illusion of Certainty: Risk, Probability, and Chance
Risk, probability, chance, coincidence—they play a significant role in how we make decisions about health, education, relationships, and money. But where does this data come from and what does it really mean? (Instant Rebroadcast from Thursday)

The Mind after Midnight: Where Do You Go When You Go to Sleep?
7:45 PM — 9:30 PM
We spend a third of our lives asleep. Every organism on Earth—from rats to dolphins to fruit flies to microorganisms—relies on sleep for its survival, yet science is still wrestling with a fundamental question: Why does sleep exist? More

*Saturday

Cool Jobs
1:45 PM — 3:30 PM
Imagine hanging out with some of the world’s kookiest critters in the jungle’s tallest trees, building a robot that does stand-up comedy, inventing a device that propels you into the air like Batman, or traveling back in a DNA time machine to study ancient animals! Meet the scientists who make it possible. More

Rebooting the Cosmos: Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer?
7:45 PM — 9:30 PM
As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer? More