Erik Schlangen: A "self-healing" asphalt

In today’s talk, given at TEDxDelft, civil engineer Erik Schlangen reveals a fascinating solution: a road that is able to heal. He gives a demonstration of a new type of asphalt, which incorporates tiny strands of steel. He breaks a piece of it in half and puts it in the microwave for two minutes. He takes it out, fully formed again.

The application? This asphalt can be laid on a road. According to Schlangen’s tests, it will last about four years before it gets damaged. At that point, an induction machine would drive over the road, catalyzing its ability to repair itself. Schlangen imagines that roads could last twice as long if made of this material.

To see this amazing demonstration, watch the talk. And here, more TED Talks about infusing inanimate materials with life-like qualities.

Theo Jansen: My creations, a new form of lifeTheo Jansen: My creations, a new form of life Theo Jansen makes animal-like sculptures out of plastic tubing, drink bottles and foam. And yet, they are able to walk and move — even live on their own in herds on the beach and protect themselves from storms. At TED2007, Jansen shows us these creatures in motion.

Lee Cronin: Making matter come aliveLee Cronin: Making matter come alive It’s amazing that the organic, living world arose out of inorganic, dead matter. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2011, chemist Lee Cronin wonders: can we create life, if we define life as anything that can evolve? (See our playlist of talks to celebrate Charles Darwin’s birthday.)

Todd Kuiken: A prosthetic arm that "feels"Todd Kuiken: A prosthetic arm that “feels” Both a doctor and an engineer, Todd Kuiken is creating a prosthetic arm that not only performs tasks — but that is able to connect to a person’s nervous system. At TEDGlobal 2011, he brings a patient on stage to demonstrate how it gives more control and a sensation of feeling.

Reuben Margolin: Sculpting waves in wood and timeReuben Margolin: Sculpting waves in wood and time Kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin creates stunning, meditative pieces that move — emulating the patterns of falling raindrops and undulating waves. In this talk at TED2012, Margolin introduces us to his sculptures, including “Double Raindrop,” which he calls “the most talkative” of his works.

Thomas Heatherwick: Building the Seed CathedralThomas Heatherwick: Building the Seed Cathedral At TED2011, architect Thomas Heatherwick shows off his bio-inspired designs, including a moving bridge that “kisses itself,” constricting into a circle and then unfurling over a body of water. He also shows us the “Seed Cathedral,” a building made of plants and dedicated to growth.

Suzanne Lee: Grow your own clothesSuzanne Lee: Grow your own clothes Cloth can be sewn and worn. But can it be grown? In this talk from TED2011, Suzanne Lee shares how she creates living material for her fashion designs. Get ready to see how kombucha — a mix of bacteria, yeasts and micro-organisms — ferments into a vegetable leather.

Matt Mills: Image recognition that triggers augmented realityMatt Mills: Image recognition that triggers augmented reality Aurasma is a app that can make paintings dance and newspapers talk. At TEDGlobal 2012, Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts demonstrate this technology, which uses a smartphone to overlay video content over something static — thanks to an image trigger. (Give Aurasma a test drive through this TED Blog post.)

You may have heard of Google Glass — a new venture by Google, where a user wears a head-mounted display (think, futuristic sunglasses) that overlays digital information and images onto the physical world.

Tom Chi was on the team that developed Google Glass, and spoke about the experience at TEDYouth. In this newly released TED-Ed lesson, “Rapid prototyping Google Glass,” Chi shares how the team greatly sped up their process of creation.

This method goes by the name of “rapid prototyping,” and it is just what it sounds like. While you might guess that Google Glass took months, even years, to create, the prototype for the headset was made in a single day. And when it came time to take the technology to the next level and prototype projections for the device, Chi’s team did so in just 45 minutes.

(Bonus: see NASA engineer Bobak Ferdowsi try on a prototype of Google Glass at TEDYouth.)

Chi’s team made these prototypes using some very unsophisticated materials– ones that expedited the process and didn’t require overthinking. For the headpiece, Chi used pieces of clay that weighed the same amount as the electronic pieces that would be used in the product. He wrapped the clay in paper and attached it to the modeling wire — and voila, makeshift glasses. From this, he was able to determine how the weight needed to be distributed between the nose and ears on this distinctive headpiece.

To prototype the projections, Chi’s team used binder clips, hairbands, a white board and chopsticks. Thanks to these materials, the team was able to practice the movements of playing with the projections, and realized that they weren’t something they wanted to include in the final Google Glass product after all.

“Doing is the best kind of thinking,” says Chi of rapid prototyping, “They teach you to think in school, but I think it’s a little bit overrated.”

Rapid prototyping isn’t just useful for the scientist, Chi emphasizes, but also for poets, artists and musicians – anyone who feels they want to share something and needs to build an instant framework for it. It’s as simple as using some paper, clay and tape to advance the idea.

Read more about technology on the TED Blog » 

Massoud Hassani is the creator is the Mine Kafon, a tumbleweed-like apparatus that uses wind gusts to roam through land mine-filled areas and detonate hidden mines as it goes. Born from the designs of the wind-powered toys that Hassani and his brother sent tumbling in the desert outside of Kabul as children, the Mine Kafon almost looks like a toy itself — a giant mass of poles and suction cups, made from bamboo and biodegradable plastics.

During his talk at TEDxUtrecht in The Netherlands, Hassani explained the process of designing the prototype, something he hopes will soon turn into an affordable alternative to the very expensive land mine clearing methods currently in use.

“I was born in Afghanistan … [In school], usually you get math, languages, and so on, but we got classes about land mines — so I know all of them. I know how to open them, because every day [they were] on our playground,” says Hassani. “We have to do something about it…but for now it’s really commercial companies [clearing them] — and they want to keep it like that, because they are earning money. They are [employing] not really trained people — just locals — and the locals, they want to earn money, [so] they are taking the risk to clear the land mines. The time you have to invest to find a land mine — it takes days.”

Hassani saw a way to clear land mines much more quickly and without the risk.

“I went back to my childhood and made a few toys,” he says. “I enlarged one of the ones that we were playing with on the ground in Afghanistan, and I thought, ‘Okay, if you make it bigger…it will become stronger as well, and heavier, and now if it runs over a land mine, it’s heavy enough to detonate it — because it has the same weight of a foot.’ …So I built it.”

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Hassani is raising the funds via Kickstarter to build a better prototype of Mine Kafon. Thanks in part to coverage from The BBC, The Atlantic and CNN, the project has already surpassed its fundraising goal of £100,000 with seven days left to go in its campaign. Hassani hopes that, soon, the Mine Kafon will soon be available to clear mines in his home country and across the world.

This post originally ran on the TEDx blog. Head there for lots more on the hundreds of TEDx events happening across the globe »

Everything is a remix, Kirby Ferguson told us at TEDGlobal 2012, explaining that the essence of creativity is the welding together of others’ ideas to form something new. We couldn’t help but think of this when we saw an article on TheVerge.com about researchers at Zhejiang Univeristy’s CCNT lab who have combined brainwave technology and airborne robotics to create a quadcopter that is controlled by thought alone. See how the Flying Buddy 2 works in the video above.

This amazing creation seems like the meeting of two classic TEDTalks. Below, watch Tan Le and Vijay Kumar discuss their advancements in brainwaves and robotics, respectively.

Tan Le teaches us the intricacies of the technology we see at work in the mind-controlled drone — the algorithms through which they taught a machine to map brainwaves, facial expressions and neuron firings.

Vijay Kumar gives a demonstration of cognizant flying robots. The robots are so responsive and durable that they can be used as autonomous first responders or to transport cargo.

In June, TED favorite Marco Tempest told us about the “electric rise and fall of Nikola Tesla,” the late 1800s inventor who held more than 700 patents, including for concepts still used today like alternating current, radio, remote control and robotics. However, after building a wireless telegraphy center in upstate New York that he envisioned being used to contact other planets, Tesla’s reputation was irreparably tarnished. He became a recluse, living alone at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel until his death in 1943.

The website The Oatmeal recently called Nikola Tesla “the greatest geek who ever lived.” And now the site is campaigning for a Tesla museum.

Tesla’s laboratory — known as Wardenclyffe — was located in Shoreham, New York, and was abandoned in 1917 when funding for his telegraphy project was cut. The gigantic tower that once loomed over the property has long since been destroyed. But Tesla’s underground lab has remained in tact.

The property is currently for sale for $1.6 million. And, according to Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal, a non-profit is trying to buy it to build the only Tesla museum in the United States, the Nikola Tesla Science Center. (There is currently a Tesla museum in Belgrade, Serbia.) New York State is even offering a matching grant of $850K to make the property a historic site, meaning that only $850K needs to be raised.

And thus, the website has launched the campaign with a NSFW title.

Operation Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum is brought to you through the crowdfunding site Ingiegogo.com. Donate $50 and get a Wardenclyffe t-shirt and Tesla-themed bumper sticker. Give $1,000 and get a poster autographed by Tesla’s last remaining relative. So far $426K has been raised with 44 days left to go in the campaign.

But that’s not all.

The Oatmeal points out that the money being raised is for the purchase of the property only, not for the building of the center itself. The site is also issuing a call out for corporate sponsors.

“J.P. Morgan, you there? One hundred years ago you believed in Tesla and backed him financially. Honor his legacy and help him out again,” Inman writes. “General Electric: Thomas Edison founded GE and screwed Tesla out of A TON of money. It’s never too late to make amends. Sponsor this museum! The internet will love you forever, I promise.”

Another potential backer Inman has in mind: Christian Bale, the star of the upcoming Nikola Tesla biopic.

How did you come to invent the Sisal Decorticator and Sisal Twinner?

My work started very simply, as a young person who wanted to solve a problem. Where I live in western Kenya, sisal is a plant that we process for fiber whenever we need to make a little money. There is a market for sisal: a good percentage is used in Kenya for ropes and carpets, and another good part of it is exported. It grows everywhere, but it’s not a crop that’s planted in fields; it’s simply a hedge plant grown along fences, and is a fall-back source of income when our normal crops decline due to drought.

Nobody takes sisal seriously as a source of profit because it’s a tedious plant to process; accessing the fiber is highly labor intensive. First you need to cut the leaves, and then you need to cut them into several strips. These need to be dried, and then you have to pull the dried flesh off those leaves one by one using a rudimentary machine. Every leaf yields almost eight strips, and removing the flesh to get to the fiber takes almost all day using the traditional tools we had.

This work was too much for me. I thought, “Why can’t I make a machine where you just put sisal in, and then it does the work for you, rather than following all these processes?” My character is that I always want to find an easier way of doing things. That’s what makes me happy. This is why sometimes I call myself a born innovator, not a made one!

Over the course of ten years, you made a variety of prototype sisal-processing machines until you came up with one that worked to your satisfaction. But what drove you to develop this machine when so few people took the plant seriously?

I realized that sisal is a crucial crop for survival. Without sisal, there’s nothing else to live on when everything else fails. And if people could live on income from processing hedge sisal during dry periods, selling it for money to buy food, what if we planted more so that we could profit from it? It became clear to me that we need to take it seriously.

This added urgency to my work. Besides continuing to develop the machine, I started talking to farmers about the importance of sisal, and trying to convince them to plant it as a crop. Unless I could convince them that my machine would help them process sisal easily and profitably, nobody would be willing to invest in the plant as a source of income – traditional sisal processing is too time-consuming to make it worthwhile as a regular business. I knew that making my machine would help people understand the importance of planting more sisal on their farms.

I later learned that sisal rope fetches much more money than the fiber itself. This realization forced me to develop another machine that would make rope out of the fiber – the Sisal Twinner. Making sisal into rope adds value of up to almost 180 percent – a very, very good incentive for promoting sisal amongst farmers.  The Sisal Decorticator takes around two months to pay for itself. The Sisal Twinner takes only one month to pay for itself.

What is the state of your food crops?
Our food crops are not doing as well anymore because of climate change, and the little that we harvest cannot take us through the year, because we only have one season annually. This forces the government to come in with food donations, which is not enough. People need more to survive. The government comes and gives maybe five kilos of maize and maybe two kilos of beans and maybe half a kilo of oil. How long will this last you? It’s very few days. What about the rest of the days; what will you survive on? Nothing. So instead of depending on the government or other aid, let’s plant and process sisal so that we can survive on our own.

Right now, most farmers in my region are not planting new sisal, but are depending on the few hedge plants they have, and these are finishing. Sisal has a lifespan of 10 years, after which the plant gives out suckers and the main plant dies. At the very least, we to plant need new sisal plants for the sake of survival. But my aim is to encourage each farmer who buys my machine to plant at least one acre of sisal crop, managed so that there is never a pause in harvest and production.

Where are you in your project now?
Right now I’m selling my machine to farmers who are willing to plant more sisal. I’ve sold around 20 machines. I still need to do a lot of marketing. Farmers need training, they need teaching, they need to be convinced. I need to do find a way to do a major campaign about sisal growing.

When a farmer buys a machine, I normally take the machine to him and demonstrate. Sometimes I tell him to call the community, and then I take the opportunity to tell everyone about sisal. Some communities who already have a farmer with a sisal machine call me back for further training or explanation. It’s easier once there is someone within the community who is associated with the project, proving that it works. So I sit them down and talk to them, tell them all the benefits of sisal, the machines and so on.

I don’t have help with this: right now, it’s just me. It’s sometimes so hectic, I don’t know what to do. But in the future, I want to train some boys to help me in the production of the machine, in repair, even marketing.

How have the people in your community responded to your ideas?

Sometime back they thought I was crazy, and that I was doing everything for my own benefit. And it was challenging because nobody, in fact, nobody in my own village embraced my idea. Even people in my family, who say, “Okay, it’s good, it’s good,” sometimes don’t come through when I need their support. I think they don’t really understand the importance of what I’m doing. So it’s very hard to promote this technology in my own area. It’s a very big challenge.

But I just want to see my people living a life that is enjoyable, a life that is not suffering. I want to see them getting good food. I want to see them leading a life that somebody would want to live for. You see? I don’t want them to regret where they were born. I want them to use their resources productively.

What was your most moving experience as a Fellow at TED2012?

There were many things that moved me, but the speakers who really touched my heart were Bryan Stevenson’s talk about racial injustice and Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian Nobel Peace Price laureate, who spoke about protecting the rights of girls. They spoke of things that really effect our communities, that will really mold our future.

Coming to TED as a Fellow has helped me realize that I didn’t fully recognize that what I do is important for others in the world. You may start something very small, but in doing so, you can really affect other people’s lives without even realizing it. The part you play may be little in your mind, but you actually can change a lot of lives.

How will being a TED Fellow affect your work when you go home?

I’m going to do things differently: I see now that I’ve learned a lot, but I need to do much more than I’m doing. Before I came here, I took things just simply. But now I’ve realized people expect a lot from me. And there’s a lot I need to deliver.