Events this coming month at the intersection of science and culture.
MUSEUM
The Institute of Sexology. Wellcome Collection, London. Through September 2015. Free.
Human sexual behavior, along with the scientists who track and interpret it, is the focus of this yearlong show at London’s museum of medicine and art. It features sex machines like those used in the laboratory of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, to help them measure heart rate, brain activity and other vital signs in the moments leading to climax — and a metal-lined box that the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich believed would amplify libidinous energy. After the expected tributes to Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey and their respective quests to expose the kinkiness hidden in polite society, a final section praises a public survey that has tracked British sexual habits for decades. For those who worry that such data might be a little dry, the curators have dug into the archives of the museum’s founder, and will offer samples from his erotica collection.
Tools and Beautiful Users. Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan. Opens Dec. 12. $18 (seniors $12; children free).
As it reopens after a three-year renovation, the Cooper-Hewitt shows off the wild variety of technologies that we use to shape the world around us. At the entrance to an exhibit on tools, the visitor faces an imposing swarm of hand implements, with hundreds of handles beckoning inward; inside there are Eskimo snow goggles and a Paleolithic hand ax — as well as tiny flying robots that can help pollinate flowers, among scores of objects gleaned from the Smithsonian’s vast reserves. Another exhibit starts with postwar telephones and thermostats designed with ergonomics in mind, then examines the current wave of do-it-yourself design, from Roomba vacuum cleaners fitted with surveillance cameras to print-your-own prosthetics.
MUSIC
Entertaining Science. Cornelia Street Cafe. 29 Cornelia Street, Manhattan. Dec. 7 at 6 p.m. $10.
At the previous installment of this monthly salon, a biologist dressed as Elvis Presley shared the stage with an artist doing live macramé. This month promises a more sober salon, as an auditory scientist plans to help the audience to make the most of some very minimal music. Nima Mesgarani, a neuroscientist at Columbia, will explain ingenious experiments in which he used brains scans to reconstruct the sounds heard by ferrets and humans. Then he will try to prepare the audience for an auditory challenge: listening to the extended compositions of Phill Niblock, the octogenarian pioneer of minimalism, who will be joined by an avant-garde bagpiper. The composer “can use pure sine tones, but you may hear additional pitches and movement that aren’t being played,” said the neuroscientist Dave Sulzer, who organized the event. “Some are illusions that happen because of physics, and some are hallucinations that happen in the ear and brain.”
TALK
Empiricist League #13: Apocalypse. Union Hall, 702 Union Street,Brooklyn. Tuesday, Nov. 25, at 8 p.m. Advance tickets, $8; $10 at the door.
While previous installments of this Brooklyn series celebrating “the power of the scientific method” have explored themes like love and creativity, Tuesday night’s program dwells on the darker side. The filmmaker Andrew Blackwell will report on his journeys to “the world’s most degraded, despoiled and ruined environments” in a kind of adventure travel he calls “pollution tourism.” The journalist Joshua A. Krisch, an occasional contributor to Science Times, will talk about the potential to produce vaccines — for Ebola, among other diseases — using genetically modified tobacco plants. And to round out the evening, Special Agent Sara Wood will explain the F.B.I.'s efforts to work with amateur biohackers to prevent biological terrorism.
An entry on Tuesday in a listing of coming events about the intersection of science and culture misstated the date for a program at the Cornelia Street Cafe. It is on Dec. 7, not Dec. 5.