If the rule is that three items make a trend, then we present a little more than a trend. In the past 12 months, New York has become home to a number of what can only be called science salons; places where ordinary people can sit in an informal setting, have something to eat and drink, and talk science with each other and real scientists. It's like something out of the late 1700s, when "natural philosophers" would go down to the coffeehouse and talk about their latest experiments with pendulums or microscopes. Only now they're going to a bar or restaurant and talking about their work on stem cells or string theory.

There are at least five regular science salons in New York right now:

- Cafe Scientifique, which meets at 7:30 PM on the first Tuesday of every month at the Rialto Restaurant, has scientists from local universities and museums (e.g. Columbia and the American Museum of Natural History, most recently) talk about the work they're doing.

- Cafe Science, which meets the second Monday of every month at 5:30 PM at the PicNic cafe, is open to all, though it is run by the Columbia alumni association and exclusively presents Columbia professors.

- Competing for the first Wednesday of the month science crowd are two salons that both meet at 7PM, Dorkbot at Location One in Soho, and the Secret Science Club at Union Hall in Brooklyn. Dorkbot is closer to a technology salon, since it presents researchers, artists, and academics doing things with electricity and electronics. Secret Science Club combines science with music, presenting speakers from local universities followed by local bands (and sometimes the scientist is IN the band!)

- Entertaining Science meets on the first Sunday of the month, 6 PM at the Cornelia Street Cafe. Hosted by Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann (Chemestry 1981), this series explores the juncture between the arts and science.

These salons are special for a number of reasons. Of course, they're loads of fun. The audience is emphatically not a bunch of science geeks -- they're just ordinary people, perhaps with an above average interest in science. The salons are also great Darwinian self-selecting hook-up opportunities: here, the fittest is someone who is likely to be a little more interesting than your average club goer.

But these science salons also serve a serious purpose: so far, every one I've been to has discussed, in an intelligent way, ideas that have never been presented by most news media because they're too controversial, or too boring, or too hard to simplify; questions like the ethics of using stem cells derived from teratomas, and the resulting question of "What really is human?". These are exactly the ideas that people should know about and should be talking about, but rarely get the chance to. As science and public policy influence each other more and more, these salons present the opportunity to discuss ideas that should be discussed endlessly.