ShareThisBy CARRIE PEYTON DAHLBERGTuesday, November 21, 2006A young couple leaned toward each other over cappuccinos, retired roommates sipped red wine, and at the front of a bustling cafe, anthropology professor Sandy Harcourt talked about man and monkey.Monkeys' choices about who they groom, Harcourt said, can help humans understand the biological roots of our own obsession with royalty and movie stars."Monkeys groom the 'Tom Cruise.' They direct their nice behavior to the high-ranking animal," Harcourt said as he wove a tale of primate behavior for a rapt and sometimes skeptical audience.Questions flew, Harcourt's ideas were challenged repeatedly, and the talk was punctuated by breaks for beer and wine _ all trademarks of a growing international movement of science cafes.Such cafis, springing up as science becomes increasingly complex and political, offer a chance to relax with the subject instead. Speakers keep things short. Audiences ask questions and offer opinions, making the evening more dialogue than monologue."In a lecture theater, you expect to be lectured to, but in a cafe, you expect to have a conversation," said Duncan Dallas, a retired TV producer who founded the first "Cafe Scientifique" in the English city of Leeds in 1998.Today, there are a couple of hundred similar venues scattered from Tokyo to Warsaw, Poland, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, some unrelated and others modeled after Dallas' venture. American science cafes have sprung up in Chicago, Dayton, Ohio, Los Angeles, New York and at least two-dozen other cities.In San Francisco, graphic designer Juliana Gallin has created "Ask a Scientist," which she bills as "a lecture series for curious humans."Like Dallas, Gallin founded a science cafe because she wanted one to attend, so she could hear more about science in a casual setting where people mingle."Everyone is just so curious and desperate for information," she said. Gallin coordinates events once or twice a month at San Francisco cafes, finding speakers on subjects that interest her: plant sex, genomes, earthquakes, forensic science, stem cells, planet hunting and much, much more."The ones that are really popular are anything about the brain, neuroscience, human behavior and astronomy," Gallin said. One session on black holes was so jammed, "there were people outside listening through a crack in the door."With new discoveries constantly emerging on how people think, how we've evolved, and how our bodies work, the answers that science is groping toward touch everyone's life, Dallas said.Because there is no umbrella organization, many cafes take on distinctly local flavors.Wherever the setting, the core of the dialogue is universal, Dallas said. It's coming to terms with what we're learning about the world and about ourselves.
Science cafes gain in popularity
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