Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Bernie Krause is here to talk about soundscapes, the unique sound signatures he says are the foundation of every habitat, if only you know what you’re listening for. He certainly knows; the sound engineer has been recording in the wild for the past 45 years. “There was a time when I considered natural soundscapes to be a worthless artifact,” he acknowledges. “Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly useful tools by which to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life.”

First, some basics. A soundscape essentially consists of three sources: the “geophony,” or the non-biological sounds of any habitat, such as the wind in the trees and the waves on the beach; the “biophony,” or the collective sound organisms make in their collective wild habit; and the “anthrophony,” which is the sound humans make.

Nowadays, soundscape ecologists examine all three sources together. After all, “you wouldn’t try to understand the magnificence of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part.” So why would we try to understand only one line of nature’s musical notation system?

Not all of the changes he has observed over the years have been positive. “When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for ten hours and capture one hour of usable material good enough for an album, a film soundtrack or museum installation,” says Krause, a quiet but dignified figure on the TEDGlobal stage. “Now, because of global warming, resource extraction and human noise, among other factors, it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing.” Some of the locations he has recorded over the years have slowly fallen silent. It’s a sobering thought; the audience, appropriately, is entirely silent, spellbound.

Krause has some examples of soundscapes to play us. He shows a graphic spectogram of a soundscape recorded in Lincoln Meadow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In 1988, a logging company had convinced local residents there would be no environmental impact whatsoever from the new method of “selective logging.” Krause recorded the meadow before the loggers went in (note the dawn chorus of the birds):

A year later, he returned to record once more. By now, the birds have all but gone, minus one resilient woodpecker who shows up halfway through:

Krause has returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the past 25 years. “The density and diversity of that biophony has not yet returned to anything like it was before the operation.” He shows us a photograph of the meadow, pointing out that it looks like there is no obvious change. “Hardly a stick or tree is out of place, which would confirm the logging company’s contention that there was no environmental impact. However, our ears tell us a very different story.”

He has other snippets to play us, including a fabulous clip of a sea anemone swallowing — and spitting out — his underwater microphone. Turns out, belching is funny in any language. There’s a toad chorus of Great Basin Spadefoot Toads living just east of Yosemite Park, recorded before and after being buzzed by jet pilots. Then there’s the heartbreaking sound of a beaver, mourning the murder of its partner and child by two humans. One of Krause’s colleagues witnessed this random act of violence and, horrified, stayed around to record what happened next. It’s heartbreaking. Krause plays the sound of “the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles, crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring. This is probably the saddest sound I’ve ever heard coming from any organism, human or other.” Sniff.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“While a picture may be worth 10,00 words, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures,” Krause concludes. “Our ears tell us the whisper of every leaf and creature and speak to the natural sources of our lives, which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things, especially our own humanity.” The last word goes to the sound of a jaguar, recorded in the Amazon, while Krause stands framed in shadow on the stage. A dramatic end to a poignant, thought-provoking talk that receives prolonged applause.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

At TEDGlobal 2013 environmental systems researcher Lian Pin Koh presents a new and unexpectedly benign use for drones: nature conservation.

Nepal has natural landscapes that are beautiful — and in danger. But wildlife conservation is costly, and time- and labor-consuming. Behold: Conservation drones, a new tool being used in Nepal to combat wildlife crime. These drones give a bird’s-eye view of the landscape and capture detailed, high-definition images of objects on the ground.

Conservation drones are cheap and simply made. At the core, they are model aircrafts fitted with autopilot systems. Each contains a small computer chip equipped with a GPS, barometric altimeter and other sensors, and carries a payload such as a video or photographic camera. The software allows a user to program the drone easily on an open-source Google Maps interface, and the drone even lands itself. All told, one drone costs no more than a decent laptop.

Koh’s drones are now used in remote parts of the Indonesian rainforest to track orangutan nests and monitor the species population. Traditionally, orangutan monitoring happens on foot with binoculars, and in the past it has cost up to a quarter of a million dollars to estimate the size of the population in this region.

Seeking orangutan nests in Langkat, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Lian Pin Koh

Orangutan nest in Langkat, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Photo: Lian Pin Koh

Koh and his team have been able to capture dozens of nests on camera, and are working with scientists now to develop algorithms that could automatically detect orangutan nests from among thousands of photos.

Recently Koh and his team have begun experimenting with thermal imaging cameras to detect poachers. And conservation drones are rapidly improving; Koh’s latest MAJA model has a 1.8-meter wingspan, weighs two kilograms, and can stay in the air 40 to 60 minutes at a time. The potential uses are endless: They can be used to monitor other species populations, the health of trees, deforestation, agricultural expansion, illegal logging, and so on. As Koh and his team are showing, drones are not only the ultimate “toys for boys,” but can be effective tools in protecting the environment.

Anyone who lives in a major city, where pollen-thick summer air seems incompatible with the dearth of trees, it can be easy to forget the fact that plants make the world go round. Here to remind you is a playlist of 10 TED Talks on the majesty and awesomeness of plants. Hear from not one but two rebel gardeners, as well as vegetarians, designers and conservationists.

Watch the playlist Plantastic! »

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built to illuminate ideas in context. A new playlist is added every week. We hope you enjoy this installment.

By Daniel Colón-Ramos

I could not have designed a better experiment if I had tried.

I am a neuroscientist and I am the father of two-year old triplets—two identical and one fraternal. As a professor at Yale University, I spend most of my time designing experiments, researching or teaching about the brain and the nervous system. The rest of my time I spend surrounded by my three daughters. To understand the dynamics in my household, think terrible-two’s, and then cube it.

In the quiet sanctity of my lab, we study how the nervous system forms during development. In all animals, from humans to the tiny worms that we use for our experiments, neurons connect to each other and form circuits that underlie behaviors. Genes (made of DNA) underpin many aspects of development — from how our brain forms to the color of our eyes.

James Watson: How we discovered DNAMy identical twin daughters look identical because they share all of their DNA; they are essentially clones of each other. They teethed exactly the same day, and their funky hairstyle is not the result of a visit to a stylist, but of genetics. Their personalities, however, are not identical. Not even close. The twin’s personalities, which share 100% of their DNA, are curiously more similar to their fraternal sister than to each other.

That certainly came as a surprise to me. After all, argue all you want about nurture, but behaviors do have genetic underpinnings in the animal kingdom. Take reptiles; soon after hatching from its egg, a baby crocodile can hunt dragonflies with the same dexterity that its parents can hunt antelopes. Who taught the baby crocodile to hunt? Genes.

I reflected about this a lot as I held my newborn daughters in the nursery room of the hospital. Human brains, at birth, do not appear nearly as impressive as a reptilian brain. For crying out loud, the tiny nematodes we use in the lab for our experiments can move around better at birth than a human baby! Newborns appear as blank slates. Are we really a “tabula rasa”? What are the roles of nature (genes) and nurture (our environment) in the development of our brains, in making us human?

Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?My epiphany came with the first visit to the pediatrician. She closely monitored our daughters as they met, in unison, one developmental milestone after the other. As a neuroscientist, I knew what this timely emergence of complex behaviors meant: it is a hallmark of pre-programmed brains. But our pre-programmed brains are not for hunting dragonflies. The evolutionary pressures that have shaped our brains are different from those that have shaped the brains of swamp-bound reptiles.

We are born into complex societies and quickly have to learn to negotiate our place within them. My three kids, the ones playing with my iPhone, are the same species as my ancestors, who 40,000 years ago were figuring out how to sharpen a rock and fit it into a spear. The Homo sapiens brain is wired in a very particular way: to allow us to connect to other human brains.

Our home is testament — a cross between the Tower of Babel and a Univisión soap opera. It is filled with sound, from the tonal Chinese my wife has taught the triplets, to the slurred Puerto Rican Spanish they have learned from me. During the past two years I have witnessed how each of my daughters have masterfully decoded the complex rules of language and social interactions, in three very different and overlapping cultural contexts, and simultaneously. They confidently navigate between languages in a way that sometimes neither my wife nor I can follow. Chatty conversation and festive giggles are only one disagreement away from despair and temper tantrums over a train-set, a Crayola or a dinosaur shirt. But most melt-downs end with hugs, sometimes all three at the same time, as they can’t wait to make up.

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies My daughters’ desire to connect is not just cute, it’s a matter of survival. So important is our need to connect to other human brains that extreme cases of child neglect have resulted in developmental problems not unlike those seen for mental retardation. These extreme cases tell us something profound about the brain. It tells us that even in cases in which normal genetics prime the brain to connect to other brains, the absence of human input cripples brain development. Our brains need other brains to develop properly.

These seemingly delirious thoughts of a sleep-deprived scientist are neither new nor original ideas. Today it is broadly accepted that trying to separate nature from nurture is as asinine as trying to debate if a cake is made out of milk or flour. But this is important beyond a mere academic debate. In science, extreme cases are used to understand concepts.  If no human contact during critical developmental periods can cripple brain development, what are the consequences of reduced stimulation due to a defective and underfunded educational system? The United States incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world — what are the consequences of growing up in a prison?  We are social and co-dependent animals — what are the hidden costs to our society when we ignore the “nurture” part of the human development equation?

The human brain has over 100 billion neurons — there are more neurons in a single human brain than stars in the Milky Way. When a parent stares at the lost, unfocused gaze of a newborn child, they are literarily staring at a constellation of possibilities, at a brain primed through evolution to connect to other brains, to devour information, to adapt and to reach its potential. In truth, I’m highly trained, but not that special; we are all born scientists, and our brains are molded by our favorite subjects of study, other humans. And I have the perfect experiment to prove that — my brain, which has been transformed by my daughters.

Daniel Colón-Ramos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and the Program in Cellular Neuroscience at the Yale school of Medicine, and is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project. Watch his talk from TEDxSanJuan, “Lost in Translation: The value of basic research in medicine,” below.

Most people rarely feel compelled to stare at grains of sand. But when those same grains are magnified hundreds of times and rendered in three dimensions, they appear like individual pieces of colored glass crafted by a skilled artist — no two pieces the same.

In today’s TEDTalk, photographer turned microbiologist turned inventor Gary Greenberg introduces us to the micro world, revealing the hidden wonder of everyday objects in nature as seen close-up using his high-definition, 3D microscopes.

“It’s a magical world beyond reality,” says Greenberg in this talk from TEDxMaui.

In the talk, Greenberg shows us what a bee’s eye look likes when magnified, how human nerve cells look as they fire, and what the stamens in flowers appear like to bugs.  But he spends the most time on his recent obsession — sand. For his book A Grain of Sand, Greenberg photographed samples around the globe, from Bermuda to Japan. (The image above is sand from Maui.) These photos make you realize that, when you take a long walk on the beach, you are walking over thousands of years of geological history. Greenberg even shows close-ups images of dust from the moon — which appear like woven crystals — procured by NASA’s Apollo 11 Mission.

In honor of Greenberg’s work, here are eight talks that give other unexpected views of nature.

Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude.
Louie Schwartzberg is not content to let us pass by the wonders of nature without taking a movement to be thankful. In this talk from TEDxSF, Schwartzberg shows his amazing time-lapse images of flowers blooming — which can take a month to film. “Theirs is a dance I will never tire of,” he says. “Their beauty immerses us with color, taste and touch.”

Frans Lanting: The story of life in photographs
“Nature is my muse,” says Frans Lanting as he describes his attempts to photograph the places where earth’s evolution began. In this talk from TED2005, he shares striking photographs of what our surroundings looked like before the oceans formed and before the exhale of oxygen.

Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil
If Frans Lanting photographs the “before,” Edward Burtynsky photographs the “after” — how humans have altered and ravaged the earth. He chalks up the majority of these modifications to nature to one thing: oil. At TEDGlobal 2009, he shares large format photographs of our drilling, production and automobile use, sounding a warning bell about peak oil.

Nick Veasey: Exposing the invisible
Nick Veasey captures images of ordinary sights — people, animals, familiar objects — but he does so in an extraordinary way: using X-ray photography. Most inspired by nature, Veasey shows us our surroundings from the inside out at TEDGlobal 2009.

Karen Bass: Unseen footage, untamed nature
Karen Bass records the previously inaccessible parts of nature. Traversing the remotest parts of the globe by helicopter for weeks at a time, Bass uses new technology to show the world recently discovered species while also solving the mysteries of nature. At TED2012, she shows the astonishing nature footage she’s shot for the BBC and National Geographic.

Reuben Margolin: Sculpting waves in wood and time
Mimicking the beauty of nature, Reuben Margolin sculpts massive structures — like one that imitates the landing of two raindrops next to one another and another that emulates the collision of waves. In this talk from TED2012, he describes the mechanisms and inspirations behind his art.

Camille Seaman: Haunting photos of polar ice
Who knew that icebergs and glaciers have personalities? In this talk from TED2011, TED Fellow Camille Seaman shows her stunning photographers, which somehow humanize massive bodies of ice. As they document the beauty of polar regions, they also highlight a tragedy — that glaciers and icebergs are melting, some giving up quickly and others fighting the good fight. (As a bonus, make sure to watch James Balog’s wonderful talk, “Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss.”)

Louie Schwartzberg: The hidden beauty of pollination
Pollination is an intimate dance between honeybees and flowers. In this talk from TED2011, Louie Schwartzberg gives us an up-close look, showing high-speed footage from his film “Wings of Life.”