TEDBlog September, 2011 Archive
30 September 2011
Join TED Conversations about youth
As we approach TEDxYouthDay alongside our very first TEDYouth event, we’re curious to hear what you have to say about all things youth-related. Each week until the last day of TEDxYouthDay, a youth-related question will be asked on TED Conversations. We invite you to sign up or log-in using your TED.com account and jump in the Conversation!
This week’s youth-related question is, “Do you have a story about when a young person first watched a TEDTalk or TEDxTalk? What happened?“
I certainly remember what happened when I first watched a TEDTalk. A friend had sent me a link to Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on how schools kill creativity. I was simply amazed that this professor who works in a prestigious academic institution was giving a talk on things that I never imagined anyone in education would have the guts to say…publicly!
30 September 2011
A flirtatious aria: Danielle de Niese on TED.com
Can opera be ever-so-slightly sexy? The glorious soprano Danielle de Niese shows how, singing the flirty “Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss.” Which, translated, means, as you might guess: “I kiss so hot.” From Giuditta by Frans Lehár; accompanist: Ingrid Surgenor. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 5:55.)
Watch Danielle de Niese’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
30 September 2011
Fellows Friday with Nina Tandon
Using electrical signals to grow cells, TED Fellow Nina Tandon hopes to one day grow whole organs for transplant use.Interactive Fellows Friday Feature:
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Nina asks:
If your cells were used to grow an organ in the lab, is it still “your” organ?
Starting Saturday, click here to respond!
What’s your secret to growing healthy cells outside the human body?
It’s an amazing thing that these cells actually grow outside the body. But if we’re going to make them thrive, we need to do a better job of making the cells feel like they’re in their natural environment. That’s one of my main responsibilities — developing systems that we call “bioreactors” that mimic their environment. The cells are really doing everything; we’re just giving them the right environment. It’s like building them a little home where they’re happy.
Once you have the cells and the scaffolding in the bioreactor, you add the “schmutz:” food and chemicals that the cells need.
Then, at our lab we do something unique: we combine all those things with what we call “biophysical cues.” Biophysical cues, such as mechanical forces for the bones and electrical signals for the heart, for the most part have been ignored by biologists and people who study cells. But biophysical cues are really important because the ideal “home” is going to be different for every kind of cell. Bones in the body, for example, experience a lot of mechanical stress. Those bone cells actually need that mechanical stress in order to be happy. To build a bioreactor for bone cells, you’ll probably want to copy that, and you’ll want to provide scaffolding that mimics what the cells would grow on in the body — probably something hard. To build a bioreactor for heart cells, the scaffolding would probably be something soft, like collagen, that is elastic and can bend and beat.
For which cells are electrical signals most significant?
The three main places that I’ve looked for inspiration in terms of electric fields are in early development, the adult lifetime of the heart, and wound healing. Embryos have tons of electric fields, and they’ve been implicated in getting cells to migrate and transform themselves from “undifferentiated” stem cells into more specialized cells like neurons, bone cells, muscle cells, etc. These currents are really important for getting the cells to move around the embryo. Some of the migration is thought to be caused by electrical fields. A colleague of ours has reversed electrical fields and gotten the heart to beat on the right instead of the left.
29 September 2011
Teaching science by bad example: Q&A with Ben Goldacre
On the stage at TEDGlobal 2011, Ben Goldacre delivered an incredibly fast-paced and informative talk on the subtle ways nutritionists, pharmaceutical companies, and others distort scientific evidence. TED’s Ben Lillie caught up with him to talk about how to read newspapers, the power of the placebo effect, and how people really want to learn if given the chance.
What should someone who just reads the newspaper and wants to learn something about health do?
Don’t start with newspapers! Newspapers have a very unhelpful set of strategies for deciding what to write about: they select stories by what’s eye-catching and melodramatic, but that’s the opposite of what science is about. Science is about carefully documenting and making sure you see all the evidence, rather than just small portions of it. Huge amounts of effort now are about making sure that we do systematic reviews of the evidence that’s available to us, so that we see all of the studies, the positive and the negative ones.
What’s surprising, in some respects, is that this is a fairly recent phenomenon, only about 25 years old. It used to be that if you were writing a review — on treating diabetes, for example — you would stroke your chin and you’d say, “Well, I quite like this paper and I like that paper, and this one’s written by my friend, and this one validates my pre-existing prejudices. So I’ll just put those into a chapter and write about it.” And that was a bizarre state of affairs — we’re so obsessed in science with making sure that our individual experiments are carefully controlled, that we remove any bias, we exclude any extraneous explanations for any phenomena that we observe. We’re incredibly cautious for individual experiments. But then, at the crucial second step — the part of the process where you bring together all the evidence to produce a summary that’s useful in the real world — we suddenly threw all these principles out the window.
(more…)
29 September 2011
Battling Bad Science: Ben Goldacre on TED.com
Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they’re right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 14:20.)
Watch Ben Goldacre’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
28 September 2011
Filming democracy in Ghana: Jarreth Merz on TED.com
Jarreth Merz, a Swiss-Ghanaian filmmaker, came to Ghana in 2008 to film the national elections. What he saw there taught him new lessons about democracy — and about himself. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 8:37.)
Watch Jarreth Merz’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
27 September 2011
A short intro to the Studio School: Geoff Mulgan on TED.com
Some kids learn by listening; others learn by doing. Geoff Mulgan gives a short introduction to the Studio School, a new kind of school in the UK where small teams of kids learn by working on projects that are, as Mulgan puts it, “for real.” (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 6:16.)
Watch Geoff Mulgan’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
26 September 2011
Announcing TEDYouth, November 19 in New York City
In honor of Universal Children’s Day, we are excited to announce TEDYouth — November 19, 2011, at the Times Center in New York City. TEDYouth will coincide with more than 85 self-organized TEDxYouthDay events happening worldwide on November 19-21, 2011.
The theme for our TEDYouth program is “Play, Learn, Build and Share.” Be inspired and challenged by 20 passionate TEDYouth speakers who’ll inspire creativity, share mind-shifting stories, and engage their physical and virtual audience in ways that every student deserves.
We are opening attendance to 300 students from 6-12th grades within the New York area. Students outside the city are welcome to apply, but you might also look to see if there is a TEDxYouthDay event in your area — they’re happening around the world November 19-21. And many of these events will be livestreamed — including our own!
Interested in applying to attend TEDYouth? Here’s how:
– Fill out the application (www.ted.com/TEDYouth) as best as you can
– Turn in your application by October 17
On November 1, 2011, we will notify all applicants on the status of their applications. If you are a student who needs assistance with your application or have any questions about your application, please contact Nick Weinberg at (212) 346-9333 or nick@ted.com.
Looking forward to your applications!
26 September 2011
Honoring Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, died yesterday, September 25, at the age of 71. A former member of the Kenyan parliament, Maathai combined not only peaceful community-based activism and forest-conservation efforts, but also government transparency and women’s rights, all in one game-changing project called the Green Belt Movement, which has planted more than 40 million trees in Kenya and abroad.
Join us in honoring her memory in the words of these two TED speakers who’ve spoken of Maathai as an example of courage in action:
“They call [Maathai] the tree lady, but she’s more than the tree lady … When she was planting those trees, I don’t think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country.”
– from Jody Williams’ TEDTalk
“[Maathai] talks with the women, and explains that the land is barren because they have cut and sold the trees. She gets the women to plant new trees and water them, drop by drop. In a matter of five or six years, they have a forest, the soil is enriched, and the village is saved.”
– from Isabel Allende’s TEDTalk
26 September 2011
A doctor’s touch: Abraham Verghese on TED.com
Modern medicine is in danger of losing a powerful, old-fashioned tool: human touch. Physician and writer Abraham Verghese describes our strange new world where patients are merely data points, and calls for a return to the traditional one-on-one physical exam. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 18:32.)
Watch Abraham Verghese’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
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