TEDBlog June, 2009 Archive
15 June 2009
World Science Festival 2009 report: Battlestar Galactica: Cyborgs on the Horizon
A young and enthusiastic crowd packed the 92nd Street Y on Friday night to enjoy yet another reunion of science and art at the World Science Festival — an event that featured two stars of the SciFi Channel’s hit show Battlestar Galactica, two scientists in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, and one futurist/transhumanist philosopher. The lively, thought-provoking session, moderated by effervescent radio host and actress Faith Salie, covered the prospects for developing real cyborgs and the possible ramifications of creating them.
Swedish philosopher and TEDster Nick Bostrom, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, while unwilling to say exactly when fully functioning cyborgs or artificial intelligence might be created (or exactly what they might do), he was clear that the fact that making them is theoretically possible is reason enough to consider the consequences. He said that we must begin by building frameworks for thinking about such technology’s potential before we plow ahead toward creating them. Clearly, to the crowd, his dry delivery and sharp logic were an amusing counterbalance to the actors on the other side of the panel. The crowd roared when he suggested that Battlestar Galactica was full of flaws — one in particular: “Why would the robots exterminate all of the ugly people first?”
A leading roboticist based at Cornell (and also a TEDster), Hod Lipson‘s video demonstrations of some of his team’s creations were a highlight for many in attendance, and it was a treat to be in the audience as many expressed awe and disbelief at first being exposed to his starfish-like robot, which learns what it looks like and teaches itself to walk. The world of the future certainly seemed much closer after Lipson’s contributions to the discussion, which showed that using evolutionary algorithms running on powerful computers can give robotic creations eerily “biological” forms and behaviors. The concept that robots might break free of the constraints of human imagination and design was certainly food for thought for the Battlestar fans.
Kevin Warwick, a British professor in robotics and artificial intelligence who recently designed an “intelligent” deep-brain stimulator to treat Parkinson’s Disease, is best known for his research with implants, including experimentation on himself. His mind-bending anecdotes from his lab, which managed to use real neurons from a rat’s brain to control a locomotive device via electrodes, wowed the festival attendees (and clearly the actors on the panel too). Though his motivations certainly remained obscure to some in the crowd, the story of how he became the “World’s First Cyborg” yet left a deep impression. (A microchip embedded in a nerve in his wrist transmitted perceptible pulses to directly to his brain, based on signals sent via the Internet across the Atlantic ocean.)
The Battlestar Galactica actors were the crowd favorite. Michael Hogan, who played Colonel Saul Tigh on the show, noted how (Spoiler Alert!) stepping into the mind of a cyborg was not so unlike stepping into a character with some form of mental illness — and, with a character already beleaguered by alcoholism, adding such a new illness was not too difficult a stretch. Academy Award nominee Mary McDonnell, who played the terminally ill President Laura Roslin (nicknamed “Airlock” at the WSF event for her character’s propensity for executing antagonists by flushing them into outer space), closed the session with a moving comment about what she learned from the show: the profound impact that results from the shared study of possible futures — science and art, together.
14 June 2009
WSF Spotlight: A cabaret-style celebration of science (with a song)
The 2009 World Science Festival kicked off its third day of festivities on Friday with a truly original and delightful event called WSF Spotlight, which stripped away the trimmings of what you might think of as “traditional” science presentations (flat lighting? a vast echoey lecture hall? dry droning delivery?), and replaced them with a dramatically lit, intimate, cabaret-style setting — the 92nd Street Y’s new location in Tribeca on Hudson Street.
Cocktails were served as the crowd took seats at the tables along the stage, giving the setting the feel of a late-night comedy club or open-mic night. And the “performers” were easily as entertaining.
It was such a treat, first of all, that frequent TEDster and philosopher-comic-writer-trickster Emily Levine was the night’s MC. She was her usual self: witty, hilarious and slightly (just slightly?) provocative. She was the perfect primer for the challenging marinade of ideas we were about to sink into — providing context and shaping some of the more complex background ideas into a palatable form by drawing analogies between them and her own observations of everyday life — in particular the way that recognition and acceptance of a contradiction can be one of the most wondrous experiences. Then there was this: “Will people like science better if we ply them with liquor?” Yes, probably.
We first heard from Dominic Johnson, a scientist in both evolutionary biology and political science. His dual background may have seemed a contradiction at first, but he showed that the two fields can be strongly related. He hopes that evolutionary-based lessons from nature can help us improve human security as it pertains to threats like climate change and terrorism. With our planet cradling somewhere between 10 and 100 million species, each with their own solutions to the unique life-threatening problems endemic to their habitat, Johnson suspects that many organisms may have solutions that map onto the sorts of threats to human safety today’s governments face. Just as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) represent an “evolving strategy” on the part of terrorists to injure governments and societies, we might consider our own society/government a sort of organism that must develop adaptations on the fly in order to meet those threats.
Kristin Baldwin‘s dry humor was the highlight of the night for many of us. (She noted that her lab students who grew up playing video games tend to be the best at completing some of the lab procedures, such as inserting nuclei into host egg cells with a sort of microscopic syringe called a pipette.) She showed how contentious issues such as cloning and stem cell research are not nearly as simple as the mainstream media — and science fiction — make them out to be — nor are they quite as ethically problematic as some would claim. Baldwin, who wants to use stem cell technology and genetic engineering to understand the brain and neurological diseases, used clips from films such as Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Harold Ramis’ Multiplicity (with Michael Keaton) to show what depictions of cloning have gotten right about the real science, and also how they diverge from it.
Christopher McKay talked about his search for a “second genesis” somewhere in our solar system, and the captivating notion that if life began twice in a single solar system, then there would be a high possibility that our universe is teeming with life. McKay, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, covered some of the more tantalizing possibilities for the discovery of life on other planets, including our best bet, Mars, and also moons of the outer gas-giant planets like Titan and Enceladus. He noted that the molecules that build living organisms tend to exhibit a certain chirality, or “handedness,” and that searching for samples of molecules that are completely left-handed (rather than a mix of right and left) would be a powerful indicator of biological processes taking place. He also shared plans for a new Mars mission that would dig four meters into the Martian crust in search of evidence of life.
Sean Carroll, a Senior Research Associate at Caltech who studies cosmology and the so-called “arrow of time,” proved to be a crowd favorite with his simple, memorable explanations of exceedingly complex scientific concepts such as entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. (I think he deserves the “great science communicator” badge that is also donned by the likes of Marcus du Sautoy and Bonnie Bassler.) He began with the observation that time is an intrinsic part of our daily lives, but it is extremely difficult to say what time actually is. Unlike space, which has no direction, time apparently does have a direction, and that direction is defined by the law that says disorder can only increase in a closed system (such as a universe). In other words, it is easier to make a scrambled egg from a whole egg than to make a whole egg out of scrambled egg. His own conclusion? This fact — “You’re more likely to find a scrambled egg floating in space than a whole, unbroken egg” — is our best evidence for the possibility that we actually inhabit a multiverse — our universe is only one of many, or one small part of a larger one.
The grand finale was physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek, who told a funny, three-part story of quantum physics, as illustrated by the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. “Why would we want to hurt a cat,” he started, “and how might we go about doing so?” He used the interesting properties of subatomic particles to segue into a discussion about a new type of composite particle made out of “cunningly arranged components” that might be useful to research in quantum computing — because these particles only seem to be effected by the same type of particle. And finally, he surprised and delighted the crowd by suddenly calling a keyboardist to the stage and performing a seven-minute ditty called “No Wandering Atom I,” a song of an atom that falls in love with a human female.
13 June 2009
Follow this weekend's World Science Festival in pictures
Photographer Robert Leslie is sending TED some wonderful shots from the World Science Festival, happening right now in New York City. Check this Flickr set for more images from this celebration of science and curiosity … and if you’re inspired to catch an event (there’s a packed schedule of events running through tomorrow night), visit worldsciencefestival.com for a full schedule.
The image above comes from “Navigating the Cosmos,” Thursday night, June 11, 2009, at the Hayden Planetarium. Photo: Robert Leslie
12 June 2009
From WSF: The intriguing study of nothing — vacuums, voids and the time before time
Photo: Robert Leslie. Courtesy WSF
Last night, the TEDBlog attended the World Science Festival‘s second night of proceedings, specifically the session titled “Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness.” The evening began with a warm welcome for the illustrious journalist John Hockenberry, who described himself as our “launch vehicle into an area of sophisticated science.” He stayed true to his word throughout proceedings, laughing and joking the audience through deep quantum theory. Some of the most difficult concepts in science today were explained for the amateur enthusiast.
John Barrow, cosmologist at Cambridge first took the stage to present a brief history of nothing. He highlighted the role of nothing in the arts and music, reminding us of The Beatles statement that “Nothing is real,” and John Cage’s piece 4’33″ — the sound of nothing. He took us back to the beginning of human civilization to ask the question of why the concept of zero arose in some cultures but not others? The Greeks, Barrow explained, had no zero, because to create the concept of zero would have been to sow the seeds of negativity.
Barrow went on to address harder science, chronicling the development of the understanding of nothing. Beginning with Aristotle’s view that the vacuum could never be realized, he worked his way through the discoveries of Blaise Pascal, Otto von Guericke and James Clerk Maxwell to arrive at the theories of present-day quantum mechanics. At this point, he made the grim conclusion that vacuum states can change, that our universe may be at an intermediate vacuum state and that there is always the possibility that we could drop to a state whose physics we don’t know and consequences we can’t predict — in other words, the end of all existence as we know it. On a lighter note, it was then time to introduce the panel.
To great applause, John Hockenberry introduced Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, co-author of the The Large Scale Structure of Space Time George Ellis, and co-director of the ASU Cosmology initiative, Paul Davies. As the discussion warmed up, Ellis launched into one of the physicist’s greatest struggles and one that he deals with in his book Before the Beginning — what was there before space and time, if anything? And how did this all begin?
READ MORE: Explanations of why something rather than nothing, why not to fear the LHC and why we should all heed the example of Copernicus. (more…)
12 June 2009
"Success is a continuous journey": Richard St. John on TED.com
In his typically candid style, Richard St. John reminds us that success is not a one-way street. He uses the story of his business’ rise and fall to illustrate a valuable lesson — when we stop trying, we fail. (Recorded at TED U 2009, February 2009, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 3:58)
Watch Richard St. John’s talk on TED.com where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks.
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11 June 2009
Science and art, long-lost lovers, reunite for opening night of the World Science Festival
The second year of the World Science Festival got off to a spectacular start last night at New York’s Lincoln Center, with a program star-studded from both science and the arts. We loved it here at TED, not just because it featured so many of our TED favorites — physicist Brian Greene (who co-founded the Festival with partner Tracy Day), biologist E.O. Wilson, actor Anna Deavere Smith, Nobel winner James Watson, photographer Frans Lanting and cellist Yo-Yo Ma to name a few — or because we share a lot of cross-disciplinary DNA with WSF, or because it was held in the new Alice Tully Hall (designed by TED speaker Liz Diller) but also for the its fresh, innovative approach and playful sense of fun.
The evening paid tribute to legendary biologist (and beloved TED Prize winner) E.O Wilson, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, but the program was really a love letter to science itself — for its importance, yes, but also for the inspiration and wonder it offers, and for its deep but often-unacknowledged kinship with the arts.
“Tonight, science and art, long-lost lovers, reunite” Alan Alda said, as he opened the show. And that sensibility pervaded the program, as it blended science and the arts in innovative and unusual ways — from a sequence of broadway musical stars singing light-hearted tributes to science (For example, a guided tour of the periodic table, set to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “I am the very model of a modern major general”. Brilliant!) to an intellectual pas de deux, featuring Brian Greene waxing eloquent on the nature of the universe, and Joshua Bell performing lyrically on the violin.
The evening included several heartfelt odes to Wilson — the transcendent cellist YoYo Ma performed playfully as young “ants” wiggle-danced around him (Wilson’s career was built on his research on ants); Anna Deavere Smith impersonated Wilson as only she could. And Nobel winner James Watson (of Watson & Crick double-helix fame) paid homage in his own eccentric way: “When we first met, Ed thought I was the most unpleasant person he’d ever known,” Watson explained to a chuckling audience. “And when I first met Ed, I didn’t think there was any point in knowing him. Because everyone knew: Biology was the dumb part of science.”
Photos: Robert Leslie. Courtesy WSF (more…)
10 June 2009
Scenes from the Millennium Seed Bank: Q&A with Jonathan Drori
Last week, we posted Jonathan Drori’s fascinating short talk about the Millennium Seed Bank — a massive effort to preserve the world’s threatened plant life within a global network of seed archives. It’s a big topic to cover in 3 minutes, so the TED Blog asked Drori if he had time to answer a few more questions — like, How do seeds die? He happily obliged. (In the photo above, Drori is on a collecting trip looking for rare bamboo.)
Where’s the Millennium Seed Bank, and what happens there?
The Millennium Seed Bank is part of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, spread across two sites in southeast England. We have a large group of scientists researching botany, plant biodiversity and restoration ecology, as well as operating the enormous and internationally known gardens themselves, which are of course, living scientific collections.
And what do you do there?
My role is as a main-Board Trustee. There are 12 of us, responsible to the nation for ensuring that the strategy and operations of the organization are excellent. My own particular interests are in our use of technology and the web, in public understanding of our scientific work and in education, outreach and marketing. I also spend some time fundraising; though Kew itself is about half-funded by the UK government, the Millennium Seed Bank is financed from other sources, including philanthropic organizations and business sponsors.
You mention in your talk that the seed bank does some high-tech things with the seeds. What are a few examples?
Kew has a project that uses gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze the air just above the stored seeds. The aim is to identify and quantify the volatile organic compounds that are released by dry seeds during long-term storage. Seed species that can be stored successfully long-term will be compared with some species that suffer damage during storage (“recalcitrant” seeds) and are less able to germinate as a result. The aim is to see if there are volatile marker compounds that could be used as non-invasive real-time monitors of the long-term viability of seeds in seed banks. The results from the project could additionally have implications for horticulture, in terms of a non-invasive method for rapidly assessing the health of seeds.
Can you talk a little bit about the search for viability markers? What are some of the possible genetic and molecular clues that a seed might be viable?
Ilse Kranner is one of our experts on seed viability. She and her colleagues are looking for chemical or other indicators of cell death. Her detection methods look for these indicators either directly or through the switching on or off of genes. The Holy Grail is to find a universal, non-destructive, rapid technique — a tall order!
Seeds do give us some molecular clues that allow us to diagnose their viability. We use methods of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography) to analyse what goes wrong when a seed dies. An example is Kranner and her colleagues’ work on antioxidants in seeds. Antioxidants mop up “free radicals” (these are the villains that can destroy big molecules such as DNA, RNA, lipids and proteins). Some of these antioxidants used by plants turn out to be important vitamins for humans, e.g. vitamins C and E. The team has found that antioxidants help the seed to survive stress, but when aging conditions (high temperatures at high seed water-content) persist, the antioxidant system eventually breaks down. Calculating how powerful these antioxidants need to be to counteract the seeds’ stress allows us to predict whether or not a seed will die upon water uptake, or if it will germinate and form a new seedling.
There are also indicators of “programmed cell death.” This is a program of cellular suicide at the end of which a cell cuts up its own DNA into very small fragments that cannot be re-assembled again. Programmed cell death has evolved because it is better for an organism to destroy a cell that is damaged beyond repair rather than putting energy into sustaining it. Also, cell division must be balanced by such processes, otherwise there would be tumor-like growth. The team has found such DNA fragments in dead seeds, and these fragments tell us that many (or all) cells in a seed have undergone programmed cell death as the seed aged. So these fragments may lead us to a useful indicator of seed viability.
How long do the seeds last?
Seed longevity is extraordinarily variable — by at least four orders of magnitude. Seeds from plants that grow in cold, wet places tend to have shorter lives — just a few years in some cases, such as the wood anemone. At the other extreme, plants that have evolved in hot, dry places such as eucalypts and some grains tend to have the greatest longevity –- probably thousands of years.
Can you grow plants from the stored seeds just by warming them up and adding water?
In some cases, yes. Many seeds, though, are very fussy. They need special combinations of temperature, moisture and the right timing to get them to germinate. Sometimes they need a particular cycle of conditions before they’ll sprout. One of the very worrying aspects of climate change is that these precise conditions may not occur, which would mean that whole populations of plants could die out if they cannot adapt quickly enough. Our research gives us germination protocols, sets of rules and methods for storing and germinating every species, and we make these freely available. These germination protocols are already being used by farmers to increase the yields they get on cultivated crops.
In the seed bank’s work in the field, how often do the collection teams discover unknown plant species or variants?
In places like Madagascar, fairly frequently — we probably have 20 or so species thought to be completely new to science, collected over the past five years. Elsewhere, the species may be well known and documented, though not collected or preserved. About 1,000 of our seed collections have not yet been identified — many of these will be new to science, but we won’t know for sure until the relevant experts have a look at them.
READ MORE: Jonathan Drori talks about how hard it is to choose a favorite plant, collecting seeds in the Andes, and remembering exactly how important plants are. (more…)
10 June 2009
TED's embeddable video player: Now with subtitles!
Because you asked: TED’s embeddable video player now has subtitles built right into the player. So wherever you’ve embedded a TEDTalk, you can now see English subtitles and any languages into which the talk has been translated. Check out the effect below:
(You may need to refresh your browser once, to see the new embed player.)
Learn more about TED’s Open Translation Project >>
08 June 2009
Erin McKean launches Wordnik — the revolutionary online dictionary
Today, Erin McKean realized the idea behind her 2007 TEDTalk with the launch of Wordnik.com, a dictionary that evolves as language does. On Wordnik, users can add new words and meanings, tag words with related expressions, see real-time search results for words from Twitter and Flickr, discover how many Scrabble points each word is worth — all on one page.
Here’s what it looks like when we search the word “blog”:
To further understand this amazing project and its implications, the TEDBlog talked with Erin this afternoon. In the middle of a hectic launch day, she gave the following excited interview:
We love Wordnik here at the TED office. Some of us may have spent the majority of the morning playing with it.
That’s great! We’ve been joking that we’d like to be so addictive that IP managers ban us.
So, how long has this been in the making? You talked about a similar concept in your TEDTalk from 2007, but when did it start concretely?
We consider Leap Day of 2008 our real start date. It was almost a year after the TEDTalk that we got together the money and the team.
We’ve heard that Wordnik.com may have had its beginnings at TED? Can you confirm this rumor?
Yes, yes! It was after the talk at TED that Roger McNamee said, “Let’s have lunch.” I had lunch with him and his wife Ann. We started with the idea that we could use language analysis techniques to help other companies. But as we were discussing it, we realized that it wouldn’t be all that different to start this as a stand-alone being.
Then Roger brought in Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Steve gave a lot of advice on the practical end, which was great, because my career as a dictionary editor did not completely prepare me for my new role as a start-up CEO. I found Grant Barrett and Orion Montoya who I worked with at Oxford University Press. Steve and Roger then found Tony Tam, who became our head of engineering. And that was the beginning of our staff.
Without TED this would not have happened. There’s zero chance that I would have met Roger McNamee, and even less of a chance that I would have had 20 minutes to speak at him. The TED video was also a great recruiting tool because when I needed to explain my idea I could just email the link. You know, for when people ask, “Who’s Erin? What does she want to do?” I could just direct them to the talk.
Everyone at TED has been so helpful. Tom Rielly has given me so much support. And I had a conversation with June (Cohen) this morning where she offered to add the transcripts for the TEDTalks to our text examples. So when you look up a word like “synecdochically,” which I mention in my talk and probably isn’t found in many other places, there will be a reference. And, because the transcripts link to the actual video, people can hear the words for which we didn’t have a link to the pronunciation.
That’s another thing about this system — people who are contributing don’t even know they are. If you tweet a word, we’ll link to your tweet on Wordnik, so you don’t even have to go out of your way.
We love that you included Twitter and Flickr elements. How did you decide on pulling these in? It doesn’t seem to be an immediately intuitive decision, but is so helpful to understanding a word’s use and meaning.
It’s funny because it’s completely intuitive to dictionary editors. How can we show how a word is really used? The other day I tried to find out if “pants” was being used as a suffix and I found a tweet for “awesomepants.” Twitter is like overhearing people’s conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.
Flickr — well, if you’ve looked at dictionary illustrations you know that they tend to be uninteresting, and so small. With Flickr, you get a lot of abstractions too. What dictionary would have pictures of “honor”? When you look “honor” up on Wordnik, you get pictures of women named Honor, which tells you that it’s also used as a proper noun. You also get images of flags and different symbols of the military. Now you can see what feelings words evoke.
READ MORE: Erin McKean on sourcing text examples, swine flu tags and coming to your own conclusions on words (more…)
08 June 2009
It's World Oceans Day! Take a poll to help Sylvia Earle's wish come true
Take 3 minutes to help celebrate World Oceans Day by helping us grant Sylvia Earle’s 2009 TED Prize wish.
Our partners at Razorfish have created an ocean survey regarding the threats to marine life today. This survey will offer valuable insights into the public’s knowledge of the dangers facing our oceans. We would love to hear from the TED community — please tell us, how often do you think about the ocean?
Please take a few minutes to fill out this survey, and help us move one step closer to making Sylvia Earle’s wish come true. Keynote Solutions, a test and measurement company, will be organizing the information gathered here, and it will be used to help design an awareness campaign to fulfill this inspiring wish.
Share this poll: http://on.ted.com/h
Watch Sylvia Earle as she makes her TED Prize wish:
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