Secret Science Club is heading for the South Pole!Prepare for extreme conditions . . . Wed, September 12, 8PM @ the Bell House, $6

SSC SPECIAL EVENT
DESTINATION ANTARCTICA!

The Secret Science Club presents Antarctic explorer Stephen Pekar and
a mind-blowing screening of
Encounters at the End of the World

Wednesday, September 12, 8 pm @ the Bell House, $6

McMurdo Station is home to 1,000 scientists and staff during the Antarctic summer—and its inhabitants are as strange, dreamy, and fascinating as the icy continent itself. Documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog journeyed across a frozen ocean and off the margins of the map to meet biologists searching for sci-fi extremophiles, quantum physicists on the hunt for neutrino particles, glaciologists tracking nation-sized icebergs, and volcanologists exploring the intersection of fire and ice at Mt. Erebus, an active volcano that regularly hurls lava chunks their way.

Scientist and explorer Stephen Pekar gets this cinema party started with a mini-lecture on his own Antarctic research. A veteran of four Antarctic expeditions, Dr. Pekar studies microfossils, ancient sediments, and geochemical data from deep-sea cores to reconstruct past climate changes and gain insight into Earth’s climate future. Please join us for this special lecture and screening of Encounters at the End of the World!

Before & After

--Try our compass-less cocktail of the night, the Terra Incognita

--Groove to sub-zero tunes

--Enter the bipolar trivia contest to score super-cool prizes     

--Stick around for the frosty Q&A

Tickets: Advance tickets are available for purchase here. SOLD OUT!

This icy edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, September 12 at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. 

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+, $6.

COMING UP: Tues, Sept 25, 8PM @ the Bell House
The Secret Science Club explores the heavyweights of the cosmos—supermassive black holes—with Caleb Scharf, astrophysicist and author of the ultra-stellar new book Gravity's Engines. It'll be out of this world . . .

The Secret Science Club presents Marine Biologist Hans Walters, PLUS a special live-screening from Shark Week, Thursday, August 16, 8PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Shark researcher Hans Walters of the New York Aquarium discusses his wet-and-wild work tagging and tracking sharks and curates a live-screening of Great White Highway, a documentary debuting on the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week that follows intrepid marine scientists as they pursue the mysterious migrations of great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias).

Before & After
--Sample our toothsome cocktail of the night, the Land Shark
--Sway to fintastic grooves
--Stick around for the salty Q&A
--Win sharky door prizes

This cartilaginous edition of the Secret Science Club meets Thursday, August 16, 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. 

No cover. Just bring your smart self!

*Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

The Secret Science Club presents Mathematical Sociologist and Social Network Expert Duncan Watts, Wednesday, July 18, 8PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Every single day, people create, collect, and share 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Text. Tweets. Photos. Videos. Clicks. Links. Consumer transactions. Blog posts and comments. And so on . . . down, down, down the rabbit hole . . . While all this ballooning information creates storage nightmares for some, a new breed of computational social scientists is enthusiastically exploring Big Data and extracting surprising insights about human behavior. 

Duncan Watts—principal researcher at Microsoft’s new NYC-based laboratory, former sociology professor at Columbia University, and the author of Everything Is Obvious (*Once You Know the Answer)—is at the forefront of these studies, examining concepts ranging from influence and incentives to social contagion and stereotypes. He challenges over-simplified explanations about human interactions and asks: Why do common sense explanations often turn out to be wrong? Are your friends as similar to you as you think they are? Why do we like the music we like? How do ideas really spread?

Before & After

--Snag a signed copy of Duncan Watts’ brilliant new book, Everything Is Obvious
--Groove to machine-coded tunes

--Try our binary cocktail of the night, the Super-Smartini

--Stick around for the sensational Q&A

This real-time edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, July 18, 2012, at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. 

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. No cover. Just bring your smart self!

Think bigger! Secret Science Club presents “A Whale of a Night” with Comparative Anatomist Joy Reidenberg of Inside Nature’s Giants, Wednesday, June 20, 8 PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Dr. Reidenberg discusses her work dissecting big animals from sperm whales to the giant squid and hosts a special screening of Inside Nature’s Giants

As a scientist, Joy Reidenberg is a rare specimen. She has probed the innards of everything from beetles to human beings, but she specializes in big—whales and their kin. In pursuit of knowledge (and cetacean parts), she’s been chased by sharks, gone through the Lincoln Tunnel with a dead dolphin leaning out her passenger window, and plummeted into the carcass of a beached blue whale to retrieve its 25-foot-long larynx. It’s all in pursuit of studying body structures in order to better understand vertebrate biomechanics and the evolution of life on our planet.

Star of the PBS series Inside Nature’s Giants and professor of anatomy and functional morphology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Reidenberg asks:

--How does the mammalian body work and what are some incredible adaptations seen in extreme environments? 

--How is whale song produced?

--Can studying and discovering animal adaptations lead to biomimetric medicines and future machines? 

--Who put the “gross” in gross anatomy?  

Before & After

--Sample our capacious cocktail of the night, the Blue Whale . . . it’ll blast your blowhole

--Sway to humongous grooves and the murmurs of mermaids

--Stick around for the colossal Q&A

This ginormous edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, June 20, 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. No cover. 

The Secret Science Club presents Neuroscientist and IGNORANCE Author Stuart Firestein, Wednesday, May 16, 8 pm @ the Bell House, FREE!

Five hundred years ago, it was possible for one human brain to contain all the world’s scientific knowledge. Since then, the number of scientific papers has been doubling every decade—and it’s barely possible for an individual to master his or her own field of study. In the Information Age—when tens of millions of “answers” are at your fingertips—sometimes it’s the questions that we need to pursue. “Knowledge is a big subject,” says neuroscientist Stuart Firestein. “But ignorance is bigger.” 

Chair of the department of biological sciences at Columbia University, director of the Firestein Lab which researches the vertebrate olfactory system and its role in perception and memory, and author of the new book Ignorance, Stuart Firestein asks: What do humans have absolutely no clue about? How can acknowledging the unknown make us smarter? How will ignorance drive science and exploration forward?

Before & After
 --Saturate yourself in our cerebral grooves 
 --Try our quizzical cocktail of the night, the “WTF?” 
--Revel in the Q&A (emphasis on Q) 
--Snag a signed copy of Ignorance, Dr. Firestein’s brain-boggling new book!

The next brainy edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, May 16, 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. 

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+.

 No cover. Just bring your smart self.

Think again! The Secret Science Club presents Leonard Mlodinow and SUBLIMINAL, Thursday, April 26, 8 PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

A large portion of your brain is devoted to unconscious activity. Bombarded as you are by 11 million bits of sensory information per second, it’s just more efficient for many neural processes to take place automatically. For example, you don’t decide something looks green or tastes sour—you just get the message that it is. However, as scientists continue to learn about the brain, they are discovering that hidden mental processes may be far more influential than previously suspected.

In his latest book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, physicist and best-selling author Leonard Mlodinow probes the brain’s most mysterious territory. 
Dr. Mlodinow asks:

--What types of (tricky) new experiments and technologies are neuroscientists and psychologists using to explore unconscious processes?
--How accurately do you perceive yourself and your motives? What really influences your choices? Does your order-loving conscious mind ever create cover stories to explain unconscious decisions?

--What are emotional illusions? How reliable and malleable are your memories? Do you ever unconsciously confabulate?

Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and now teaches at the California Institute of Technology. He wrote The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, co-wrote The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking, and was once a staff writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Beam us up, Dr. Mlodinow!)

Before & After

--Try our dopamine-spiked cocktail, the Mind Meld

--Groove to synapse-stimulating sounds

--Snag a signed copy of Leonard Mlodinow’s awesome new book

--Stick around for the thought-provoking Q&A

This cerebral edition of the Secret Science Club meets Thursday, April 26 at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. No cover. Just bring your smart self!

The Secret Science Club presents a frightfully free screening of THE TINGLER starring Vincent Price, Wednesday, March 28, 8 PM @ the Bell House

Join us for an experiment in terror!!!

Dr. Warren Chapin is investigating the scientific nature of fear. What makes the spine tingle when we’re afraid? Is it possible to die of terror? Not prone to scare easily himself, the doctor uses drugs to self-induce hallucinatory nightmares. As coroner, he finds disturbing, unexplained marks on the vertebrae of corpses and a mysterious creature lurking on an x-ray … Is fear something more than a passing emotion? To his horror, the doctor learns that fear is a frightfully LIVING force—and the only way to kill it is to scream. Don’t miss this cult classic from director William Castle in glorious black-and-white. And don't forget to scream . . . scream for your lives!

Before & After

--Learn Five Facts about Fear
--Groove to pulse-pounding tunes

--Try our fiendish cocktail of the night, the Chiller

--Win creepy-crawly door prizes!

This "mad scientist" edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, March 28 at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. 

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+  FREE! 

The Secret Science Club Dives Into Inner Space with Molecular Geneticist Alea Mills, Wed, March 14, 8 PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Our genes inform everything from the color of our eyes to the thousands of biochemical processes that construct and maintain our bodies. With rapid advances in gene sequencing technology over the past decade, scientists are increasingly working to pinpoint the specific functions of genes in both wellness and disease.

Molecular geneticist Alea Mills of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is among the most preeminent of these gene hunters and a pioneer in the field of chromosome engineering. Traversing the microscopic world of the cell, she has discovered DNA hotspots that play a critical role in aging and cancer, and most recently, uncovered a genetic cluster that, when deleted, may be a cause of autism. Dr. Mills asks: Where will the future of genetic technology take us?

Before & After

--Groove to genetically altered tunes

--Try our experimental cocktail of the night, the Mutating Martini
--Stick around for the scintillating Q&A

This brainy edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, March 14 at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+ 

Free! Just bring your smart self.

The Secret Science Club presents Cognitive Neuroscientist David Carmel, Wednesday, February 22, 8 PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

There are things known, and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception . . . 

Our sensory organs are what connect us to our environment, allowing for our survival, relationships, and experiences. But how is all this sensory data — light, shadow, the motion of molecules — interpreted? Do your eyes ever deceive you? Is your mind playing tricks? Neuroscientist David Carmel of NYU’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science uses brain imaging and behavioral experiments to explore how the brain constructs our perception of the world and how those perceptions can be manipulated. He also addresses the latest scientific research on consciousness, which attempts to answer the question, “How does brain activity make humans self-aware?”

Before & After

--Groove to wet-wired tunes

--Stick around for the sensational Q&A

--Try our synapse-stimulating cocktail of the night, the Gray Matter

This brain-boggling edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, February 22, 2012, at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. 

Free! Just bring your smart self.

The Secret Science Club presents Astrophysicist and Cosmologist David Hogg, Wednesday, January 18, 8 PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains at least 200 billion stars and 50 billion planets. It is just one of about 350 billion galaxies in the known Universe.  And astronomers believe that closer observation and mapping of our own stellar neighborhood may help unfold the story behind the Universe’s evolution.

Cosmologist David Hogg peers into the night sky and asks:

--What can new space missions and digital surveys tell us about Dark Matter and Dark Energy?

--What came before the Big Bang?

--How are Black Holes detected? And how do we know the Universe is expanding?

The co-author of over 100 scientific papers, Dr. Hogg is an associate professor at NYU’s Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, and works with the Gaia Space Mission, an international effort to create the largest and most precise ever 3-D chart of the Milky Way, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, and the citizen science project, Astrometry.net.

Before & After

--Groove to heavenly sounds

--Stick around for the scintillating Q&A

--Try our cosmic cocktail of the night, the Red Shift

The Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, January 18 at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9^th St. Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+

Free! Just bring your smart self!

Hot off the presses: Check us out in this NY Times article, "Continuing Education, at the Bar." Cheers!

Calling All Creatures . . . The Secret Science Club presents the 6th-annual "Carnivorous Nights Taxidermy Contest," Friday, December 9, 8 PM @ the Bell House, $7

Just in time for the holidays . . . the beasts are back!

The Secret Science Club presents the 6th-annual “Carnivorous Nights TAXIDERMY CONTEST,” 
Friday, December 9, 8 pm @ the Bell House, $7

Calling all science geeks, nature freaks, and rogue geniuses! Your stuffed squirrel got game? Got a beaver in your brownstone? Bring your beloved beast to the Bell House and enter it to win!

Eligible to enter: Taxidermy (bought, found, or homemade), biological oddities, articulated skeletons, skulls, jarred specimens—and beyond, way beyond.

Show off your moose head, snake skeleton, rabbit relics, and other amazing specimens. Compete for prizes and glory. Share your taxidermy (and its tale) with the world.

The contest will be judged by our panel of savage taxidermy enthusiasts, including Robert Marbury of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists and feline wrangler Dorian Devins, co-founder and curator of the Secret Science Club.

Plus!

--Groove to furry tunes & video

--See an illustrated lecture on (yes!) taxidermy

--Imbibe ferocious specialty drinks! (They’ll bring out the animal in you.)

Entrants: Contact secretscienceclub@gmail.com to pre-register. 

Spectators: Don’t miss a beastly second of this wild night!

Tickets: Advance tickets are available for purchase here.

This fiercely special edition of the Secret Science Club meets Friday, December 9 @ the Bell House, 149 7^th St. (between 2^nd and 3^rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9^th St. Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. $7 cover.

The Secret Science Club presents Fossil Hunter, Paleoanthropologist, and Human Evolution Expert William Harcourt-Smith, Monday, November 21, 8PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Step into the Way-Back Machine . . . the Secret Science Club is heading back tens of thousands of years to explore the mysteries of human origins! 

As a species, Homo sapiens is a mere 250,000 years old (give or take). Around 100,000 years ago, we walked out of our homeland in Africa and proceeded to populate the entire world. Now, we're the only species of human left. So how did we evolve into our freakishly amazing selves? And what about the other humans? What were our ancestors and extinct relatives like?

Just returned from Kenya and the northern Sudan, paleoanthropologist William Harcourt-Smith of the American Museum of Natural History and Lehman College lectures on recently discovered hominid and primate species, new research on human evolution and our family tree, and his expeditions to a 20-million-year-old fossil site. Dig it!

Before & After

--Groove to primordial sounds

--Stick around for the scintillating Q&A

--Try our Darwinian cocktail of the night, the Fossil Evidence

--Special guests: Australopithecus sediba, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis!

This (r)evolutionary edition of the Secret Science Club meets Monday, November 21 @ the Bell House, 149 7^th St. (between 2^nd and 3^rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9^th St. Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+

Free! Just bring your smart self.

The Secret Science Club presents a live screening of NOVA's "The Fabric of the Cosmos," with special guest astronomer Munier Salem, Wednesday, November 9, 8 PM, FREE!

Grab your gravity boots, hold on to your wigs and keys, and have us pour you a cosmic cocktail . . .

The Secret Science Club shatters the space-time continuum with a special live screening of physicist Brian Greene’s NOVA: The Fabric of the Cosmos---The Illusion of Time. 

Is “time” nothing more than a product of our imaginations? Join us as we hurtle 50 years into the future, then step into a wormhole to travel back to the Big Bang—where the ultimate secrets of time may be hidden.

PLUS! Blast off into the stratosphere with an awesome pre-screening lecture and Q&A on the "Anatomy of the Universe" with Munier Salem of Columbia University's Astronomy Public Outreach Program

Before & After

--Groove to tunes from another dimension

--Imbibe a rocket-fueled cosmic cocktail! (It’ll knock you into orbit . . .)

--Enter our spacey trivia contest and score celestial prizes

This intergalactic edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, November 9, 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St.

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+.

No cover! Just bring your smart self.

Special thanks to NOVA and the WGBH Educational Foundation

Image of the Tarantula Nebula courtesy of the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA)

The Secret Science Club hosts the Imagine Science Film Festival and a NIGHT OF SCI-TASTIC CINEMA @ the Bell House, Monday, October 17, 8 PM, FREE!

SPECIAL EVENT: The Secret Science Club is teaming up with the Imagine Science Film Festival for “Controlled Experiment,” a night of science-inspired short films. Documentary. Music Video. Animation. Don’t miss some of the festival’s coolest, most futuristic entries, including Transgenic Spider Goats, Stanley Milgram: The City and The Self, Protein Expression, E. Chromi, Creature Cast: Footage From the Deep, Fossil Carrion Feeders, and Four Letter Words.

Plus!
--Groove to cinematic sounds and live music by Victoire
--Sample our animated cocktail of the night, the Stop Motion
--Meet filmmakers and ISFF artistic director Alexis Gambis

When: Monday, October 17, 8 pm 

Where: The Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

FREE! Just bring your smart self. Doors open at 7:30 PM. 21+.

The Imagine Science Film Festival runs from October 14 to 21 at venues all around the city. Visit here for a complete listing of events.

The Secret Science Club Goes Off the Grid with Ecologist Eric Sanderson, Thursday, October 13, 8 PM at the Bell House, FREE!

The Secret Science Club presents NYC's wild past and wilder future with landscape ecologist and Mannahatta author Eric Sanderson

What was here before New York City? Ecologist Eric Sanderson wanted to know—and his curiosity turned into a decade-long environmental and cartographic investigation. To discover what Manhattan looked like 400 years ago, he mined through historic documents and scientific data—and plugged every hard-won bit of information into computer models. The resulting 3D maps and visualizations revealed a lost world of diverse ecosystems. Forests covering what’s now Times Square. Beavers in Greenwich Village. Wolves pacing the Lower East Side.

Now, with Manhattan under his belt, Dr. Sanderson has expanded his project to embrace all five boroughs and to explore, not only the city’s past, but also its future. He asks:

--What will NYC’s ecological footprint look like in the year 2411—400 years from now?

--What remains of forgotten ecosystems? Do ghost-like streams still run?

--How can citizens, scientists, planners, designers, architects, and artists reintegrate and re-connect with nature in the city?

--What wildness pulses beneath the Secret Science Club’s Bell House lair? Does the city’s lost wilderness lurk beneath your neighborhood?

Eric Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, and founder of the Welikia Project, which aims to explore, digitize, and map Gotham's wild history.

Before & After

--Groove to geo-referenced tunes

--Sample the cartographic cocktail of the night, the “Urbanist”

--Stick around for the uncharted Q&A

This edition of the Secret Science Club meets Thursday, October 13 at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St.

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+

Free! Just bring your smart self.

COMING UP… On Monday, October 17, 8 pm @ the Bell House, the Secret Science Club teams up with the Imagine Science Film Festival for “Controlled Experiment,” a night of science-themed short films, including Transgenic Spider Goats, Stanley Milgram: The City and The Self, Protein Expression, E. Chromi, Creature Cast: Footage From the Deep, and Four Letter Words.