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Stories for "DNA"

Avoiding the hunger season: How a TED Fellow is working to save African cassava from whiteflies

Avoiding the hunger season: How a TED Fellow is working to save African cassava from whiteflies

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For decades, the farmers of East Africa have battled the African whitefly, a tiny insect that infests the cassava crop. Cassava, also called manioc, arrowroot or tapioca, is an important food all over the world — more than half a billion people (yes, billion with a b) rely on cassava for their daily meals. For East African farmers, a whitefly infestation can completely destroy the year’s []

7 ways to have fun with DNA

7 ways to have fun with DNA

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[ted id=1942] When TED Fellow Gabriel Barcia-Colombo saw an extraction of strawberry DNA for the first time, he was smitten. “I’d never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before I saw it in this form,” he says in today’s talk, given at the TED Fellows Retreat. Barcia-Colombo was inspired to join the public biotech []

Exclusive video: How to make a cocktail from strawberry DNA

Exclusive video: How to make a cocktail from strawberry DNA

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DNA. It’s what encodes the genetic material of every living thing. And it also makes a yummy cocktail. This video, which stars TED Fellow synthetic biologist Oliver Medvedik, shows you how to make a delicious adult beverage out of frozen strawberries, pineapple juice and Bacardi 151. Follow the adorably animated instructions, and you’ll be able []

What I learned at TEDxDeExtinction

What I learned at TEDxDeExtinction

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How amazing would it be to see a wooly mammoth, raised from the dead, walking the permafrost of the North again? Or to look up at the sky and see a flock of passenger pigeons fly by? Or to witness a gastric-brooding frog hiccup tadpoles out the mouth from an embryo located in its stomach? []

Everything you need to know about TEDxDeExtinction

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Stewart Brand begins today’s TED Talk with an elegy for Martha of Cincinnati, who died in 1914. No, Martha is not a person. She was the very last passenger pigeon. “Extinction is a different kind of death — it’s bigger,” says Brand in this talk, given at TED2013. “This had been the most abundant bird []

Video: Fly to Alaska to “barcode” plants with Ellen Jorgensen

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What is DNA barcoding, you ask? It’s a precise way of identifying plant species using their DNA (as opposed to external characteristics that might vary from plant to plant). In this video, Ellen Jorgensen — who gave today’s TED Talk “Biohacking, you can do it too”  — heads to a remote region of Alaska to collect []

TED2008: What is life?

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(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Third session.) Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, introduces the session with a 3-minutes talk on how America perceives the rest of the world and how the news shape the way the US sees the world. She pulls up a map of the number []

Reading the books of Craig and Jim

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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 []