Images courtesy of (clockwise from top left): Leo Caillard for World Science Festival; iStockphoto © Pavel Gaul; Robert Leslie for World Science Festival; and Julieta Cervantes.

Since its inception in 2008, the World Science Festival set in and around New York City has attracted more than 300,000 visitors. Similarly, this year's programme, which runs from 2–6 June, will no doubt draw large crowds — not least owing to the recent media attention surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, or the Hubble Space Telescope that turned 20 back in April.

Programmes will cover all areas of science and will make use of all available media formats, including technology being developed by the MIT Media Lab. Tod Machover — whose new technologies for music, such as Hyperinstruments, are appreciated by professional musicians and Guitar Hero players alike — and Marvin Minsky, the artificial-intelligence guru, are working on a new opera, Death and the Powers, opening in Monaco in September 2010. It features a chorus of robots. Intrigued? There will be a sneak preview in New York during the World Science Festival.

The opening gala includes the premiere of a film adaptation of festival co-founder Brian Greene's book for children, Icarus at the Edge of Time, about a boy who approaches a black hole. But it's more than a film. There's also a live narrator (John Lithgow) and a 62-piece orchestra playing an original score by Philip Glass.

Of the 40 scheduled events, several are free. One of the most visually impressive may be the full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope, due to be launched in 2014 as the successor to Hubble. Set in Battery Park, the tennis-court-sized telescope will be accompanied by scientists, interactive exhibits and videos. Visitors are even encouraged to bring their own telescopes on Friday 4 June for a star party.

Such festivals bring science and scientists out of the laboratory and are hugely successful in showing the general public that science is not 'out there' but is in fact everywhere.