Some selected source material and references from Wednesday night’s TED Salon: David Keith (pictured, left) showed a New York Times editorial on the coming climate change — from May 24, 1953: How Industry May Change ClimateThe amount of carbon dioxide in the air will double by the year 2080 and raise the temperature an average […]
Last night at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, Bono (watch his 2005 TEDTalk) and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (watch her TEDTalks) accepted the Liberty Medal, honoring Bono and DATA for their work in Africa. One of the local papers put together a fascinating section to go along with the event: “Philadelphia’s Team Africa,” profiling 10 locals in diverse […]
Last night in New York City, 250 TEDsters gathered to hear some radical proposals for outsmarting climate change. It’s a fact: Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising, and with them the possibility of severe climate change within our lifetimes. Increasingly, scientists are considering extreme measures that can quickly suck CO2 out of the atmosphere to […]
Paul MacCready — aircraft designer, environmentalist, and lifelong lover of flight — talks about his long career. After his record-breaking work on human-powered aircraft in the 1970s, with the Gossamer Condor and Gossamer Albatross, MacCready’s attention turned to addressing a problem he calls “Nature vs. Humans.” The result: a pioneering electric car, refined alternative energy […]
Last night in Manhattan, TED hosted its 2007 Salon, called “Hot Science: Radical Ideas to Combat the Climate Crisis.” A detailed roundup is coming later today — but first, a few quotes from last night: The first speaker, Michael Oppenheimer, began by saying: “I’m the depressing, immobilizing part of the talk.” He went on to […]
Last spring, singer-songwriter Stew (whose playful, provocative performance was a highlight of TED2006) rewrote the book on musicals with “Passing Strange,” a groundbreaking show that won rave reviews during its limited, sold-out run. Developed with the Public Theater as part of an ongoing effort to bring non-traditional voices into musical theater, Passing Strange was non-traditional, […]
Stephen Petranek reveals the question that occupies scientists at the end of the day (and the beginning of happy hour): How might the world end? He lays out the challenges that face us in the drive to preserve the human race. Will we be wiped out by an asteroid? Eco-collapse? How about a particle accelerator […]
Saul Griffith (watch his TEDTalk) has been awarded a 2007 MacArthur “genius” grant. Griffith is one of the brains behind Instructables, a community website that lets users share directions for … almost anything, from building your own home lathe to “How to Kiss.” His think-tank design firm, Squid Labs, has invented an array of new […]
This week, the UN and the World Bank launched the Stolen Asset Recovery initiative, or StAR — a plan to help poor countries recover funds stolen by corrupt leaders and stashed overseas. According to Reuters: World Bank estimates that cross-border flow of global proceeds from criminal activities, corruption and tax evasion is between $1 trillion […]
Wednesday night, Jill Sobule (watch her TEDTalk performance) and the modern string ensemble Ethel (watch their TEDTalk performance) paired up to play a charming set together in Central Park, a preview of the upcoming album from this partnership that began at TED2006. Backed by Ethel’s wall of sound, Jill’s sweet, funny, wise pop songs — […]
The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art — a place that can get very complicated. Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for […]
Zeresenay “Zeray” Alemseged has been digging the badlands of Ethiopia, looking for clues to humanity’s origins. Here he talks about one of his most exciting finds: the 3.3-million-year-old bones of Selam, a 3-year-old hominid child, from the species Australopithecus afarensis. In studying Selam’s tiny bones, Alemseged is searching for the points at which we humans […]
When she was awarded the 2006 TED Prize, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim expressed a wish: a global acceptance of diversity, mediated through the power of film. (Watch her speech.) The project is taking off, and its ambition level is spectacular. On May 10, 2008, Pangea Day, sites in New York City, Rio, London, Dharamsala, Cairo, Jerusalem, […]
The director of the award-winning documentary The War Tapes, Deborah Scranton makes films that help people tell their own stories. She talks about making The War Tapes, her 2006 doc that put videocameras in the hands of Charlie Company, a unit of the National Guard stationed in Iraq, for one year. Their raw footage and […]
A few days ago TED2005 speaker Craig Venter (watch his talk) announced that his lab has finished sequencing a single human’s genome — his own. At his old company, Celera, Venter worked on sequencing his genome and four other genomes all mixed together, creating an anonymous composite. He told Newsweek: What we got this time […]
This week, Steven Pinker releases his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, about language as a window onto human nature. We present two TEDTalks from Steve Pinker: his 2005 talk at Oxford, in which he offers the TEDGlobal audience an exclusive preview of the book, and his most recent talk, at TED2007, where he previews […]