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.