Happy birthday, National Geographic. The intrepid magazine turns 125-years-old this month. Yesterday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation invited TED speakers Robert Ballard and Sarah Parcak on the air to discuss the notable anniversary.

Robert Ballard on exploring the oceansBallard, who is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, talked about a recent expedition to the Black Sea, where he discovered a very well-preserved shipwreck. Ballard, who gave the TED Talk “On exploring oceans,” told host Neal Conan, “The deep sea is the largest museum in the world. It has more history in it than all the museums of the world combined.”

Ballard also proved that he has a photographic memory for National Geographic issues, telling a caller who described his favorite story that it came out in December 1981.

Sarah Parcak: Archeology from spaceTED Fellow Sarah Parcak, who gave the talk “Archeology from space,” also joined the program to talk about her work as one of National Geographic’s emerging explorers.

“When you think about the scale of human populations all over the world and the fact that there’s so much here, really the only way to be able to visualize that is to pull back in space … It allows us to see hidden temples and tombs and pyramids and even entire settlements,” she says. “What satellites help to show us is we’ve actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world. … It’s the most exciting time in history to be an archaeologist.”

Parcak said that, growing up, she kept every National Geographic issue that contained images of Egypt. “It’s both Indiana Jones and National Geographic that inspired me to be an Egyptologist,” she said.

To hear much more about the magazine — like how its second president, Alexander Graham Bell, caused a scandal when he decided to publish pictures — listen to the full interview on NPR’s website » 

Unsurprisingly, almost half of the National Geographic Explorers, as well as a few members of their staff, have given TEDTalks. Below the jump is a list of links to all the talks that bring TED and National Geographic together.

Here’s National Geographic Explorer and TED Prize 2009 winner Sylvia Earle:

National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence:

Robert Ballard, Oceanographer
Robert Ballard: Exploring the ocean’s hidden worlds

Jared Diamond, Scholar
Jared Diamond: Why societies collapse

Louise Leakey, Paleoanthropologist
Louise Leakey: Digging for humanity’s origins

Paul Sereno, Paleontologist
Paul Sereno: What can fossils teach us?

Jane Goodall, Primatologist and Environmentalist
Jane Goodall: What separates us from the apes?

Jane Goodall: Helping humans and animals live together in Africa

Wade Davis
Wade Davis: Cultures at the far edge of the world

Wade Davis: The worldwide wed of belief and ritual

Tierney Thys, Marine Biologist/Filmmaker (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Tierney Thys: Swim with giant sunfish in the open ocean

Spencer Wells, Genographer (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Spencer Wells: Building a family tree for all humanity

Zeresenay Alemseged, Paleoanthropologist (a 2004 Emerging Explorer)
Zeresenay Alemseged looks for humanity’s roots

Joseph Lekuton, Teacher (a 2006 Emerging Explorer)
Joseph Lekuton: A parable for Kenya

Corneille Ewango, Tropical Botanist (a 2007 Emerging Explorer)
Corneille Ewango: A hero of the Congo Basin forest

Nathan Wolfe, Biologist (a 2009 Emerging Explorer)
Nathan Wolfe: Hunting the next killer virus

National Geographic staff

Frans Lanting, National Geographic Photographer-in-Residence
Frans Lanting: A lyrical view of life on Earth

Keith Bellows, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Traveler
Keith Bellows: Celebrating the camel

David Griffin, Director of Photography, National Geographic Magazine
David Griffin: Photography connects us with the world

Tidally bound to face its mother planet, Europa consistently offers breathtaking views of Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, while its breezy hardly-there chemise of molecular oxygen is delicate enough to leave the magnificent sight unobstructed. (But, beware the occasional barrage of comets yanked in by Jupiter’s gravity.) Adventurers wishing to forgo Europa’s “spa experience” will be at home, too: drill through miles of icy crust to access this satellite’s vast subsurface ocean of liquid saltwater — and whatever may lurk there.

Unlike visitors to other Jovian moons, sailors to Callisto can leave their ionizing radiationscreen at home: though excessively pockmarked by impacts, its outer orbit saves it from the effects of Jupiter’s monstrous magnetosphere. Hiking enthusiasts can traverse its gigantic basin of concentric rings, Valhalla, spanning 600 kilometers, kicking through wisps of condensed oxygen. This moon’s lack of tectonic activity makes for easy access to its likely ocean of liquid saltwater. (Robert Ballard has made the case that Earth’s own oceans are still deeply mysterious.)

Athletes and thrill-seekers delight at Enceladus‘ suite of extreme winter features and low gravity: spirally slalom the slopes of its unforgettable impact craters; gawk at the ivory, propane-scented violence of erupting cryovolcanoes as the panorama of Saturn‘s rings sets below the horizon; bobsled along thousand-mile escarpments of fresh chemical ice. Meanwhile, geology geeks can enjoy exploring this highly reflective moon’s incredible tectonic scars and stripes. But let divers beware: the existence of a liquid subsurface is only speculative.

Titan‘s atmosphere, unique among moons, makes it a mysterious entity among other natural satellites and an attractive destination for Saturn-bound families seeking an exotic experience without patent danger (asteroid strikes are rare). Visitors willing to endure its unusual weather — the nitrogen-humid nights with the sky awash in orange; monsoons of methane and other hydrocarbons — will be rewarded by its Earth-like terrain: newly discovered lakes of ethane, vast sand dunes, a probable ocean of water-ammonia under the surface, and perhaps even microbial life. (Get your vaccinations!)

Our solar system is truly a cornucopia of enchanting and enigmatic phenomena. Make sure your frequent-flyer miles go to good use on your next trek by studying TEDTalks by Carolyn Porco, Bill Stone, George Dyson, Freeman Dyson and other adventurers. – Matthew Trost

Last week, TEDTalks celebrated our 50 millionth view by counting down the Top 10 TEDTalks of all time (so far) — and inviting people to share their own favorites. Here are a few:

My favorite is still Susan Savage-Rumbaugh and those bonobo apes.
– S.F., Boynton Beach, Florida

Stamets (mushrooms), Isabel Allende (passion), Dave Eggers (schools), and Ballard (ocean) — not to be missed.
– Marian Angele

Majora Carter’s talk on her environmental work in the Bronx.
– lydia chadwick

Majora Carter‘s is my absolute favorite!
– Ariel, a TED fan

I am dropping a line to say how much I enjoyed Aubrey de Grey’s speech on aging.
– Diana Pasley

I think Malcom Gladwell is that hidden gem.
– +Jono

I nominate Theo Jansen’s talk on creating new creatures as one of the “Hidden Gems.”
– Paul

If your own favorite TEDTalks aren’t on the Top 10 list yet — or you’d like to share your own hidden gems — write to us at contact@ted.com or post a comment.

Watch Robert Ballard’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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“Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream … But I don’t know if the others will buy it.’” - Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, on the importance of persuasive leadership

“Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.” - Musician and activist Bob Geldof (above)

“Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?” - Ocean explorer Robert Ballard

“I think it’s the dopamine.” - Anthropologist Helen Fisher, explaining to Chris Anderson why she’s still optimistic about love, despite understanding its chemical and biological basis

“Relative to the universe, it’s just up the road.” - Physicist Brian Cox, after referring to Chicago as ‘just up the road’ from Monterey, CA

“If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix … Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.” - Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” - Jonathan Haidt, quoting Sent-ts’an, from 700CE China

“The job of the C is to make the B sad.” - Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, deconstructing a piece by Chopin

“How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world? It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious… If economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.” – Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion

“In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to solve the democracy crisis.” - Al Gore, urging citizen involvement not only on a personal level, but also on a political level

“How dare we be pessimistic? Maybe the future is better than it used to be.” - Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business Network

“It’s important to leave the security of who we are, and go to the place of who we are becoming. I encourage you to let yourself out of any prison you might find yourself in. Because we have to do something now. We have to change now.” - Environmental advocate John Francis (below), who went 17 years without speaking

"What’s out there?" is the question of this session. First to try to give an answer is particle physicist Brian Cox, from the University of Manchester. He also work on the CERN‘s LHC ATLAS, part of one of the most ambitious scientific experiments currently taking place in the world, the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (see my notes and pictures from a visit to the LHC last year, including explanation of the science involved) and spends alot of time trying to make heady scientific concepts understandable to the public.

The Large Hadron Collider will be switched on later this year. It is a particle accelerator 27 km in circonference, being built at an average depth of 100 meters under the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It is fitted with several giant detectors (ATLAS is the one in the photo above, notice the man in the foreground for scale) that are essentially digital cameras, trying to capture the collision of particles as they travel at high speed in opposing directions. With the LHC scientists are trying to re-create the conditions that were present less than one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Why do so? Particle physicists are ambitious, and the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything is made of and why it sticks together.
Way back in the early times of the universe, things — we believe — were very simple. It’s made of 12 particles of matters (quarks, protons, gluons, neutrinos, electrons). These particles has been discovered in the last century. The first one, the electron, in 1897. One of the greatest achievements of the XX century is the "standard model", which is a beautiful mathematical equation that explains the universe. Except that there are several "H" in there, which stands for the Higgs particle, that hasn’t been observed yet. It’s a theoretical particle, a prediction for the existence of one. What the Higgs does, it gives mass to the fundamental particles (refer to my earlier post for more). The whole universe is full of Higgs fields. That’s what the LHC is been built to search for. It can also discover other things, including possibly giving evidence to a theory called supersymmetry that suggests that the forces of nature unified together back at the Big Bang.

Particle physics and cosmology has given us a beautiful narrative, almost a creation story, from where the universe started 13.7 billion years ago. (Brian does a two-minutes "history of the universe" based on the image above). The artifacts that surround us are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years — and the right laws of physics. If you believe this story, our civilization has emerged purely as the creation of the laws of physics.

Over the last 49 years ocean explorer Robert Ballard has made more than 120 deep-sea expeditions, developing and using cutting-edge technologies to find shipwrecks and unearth their lost histories — including the Titanic and the Bismarck.

"The US has two exploration programs: NASA, tasked with exploring the space, and NOAA, the national oceanic administration. If you compare NASA’s budget, it’s 1600 times bigger than NOAA’s. Why are we ignoring the oceans, 72% of our planet? Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more ships down there during Captain Cook era than now. I’ve built several submarine vehicles. On a good day we may have 4 or 5 human beings at the average height of the Earth. In 1975 we went down 9000 thousand feet into the ocean floor, the eternal darkness where you don’t have photosynthesis, therefore no plant life, and little animal life — or so we thought. We discovered that there are tens of thousands of active volcanoes. We discovered a profusion of life that should not exist. Giant tube worms. Large clam beds. Then we started creating robots for accelerating the exploration. And we could find incredible limestone formation, upside-down pools, etc. Recently, diving off in the Gulf of Mexico, we found pools of water, volcanoes of methane, flows of lava. There is more than natural history under the oceans, there are shipwrecks: we realized that the deep see is the largest museum on Earth, ships that sank transporting fabulous artifacts. Fortunately we’ve been able to convince the US Congress and we could get a NOAA ship, and its mission is to go where NOAA has not gone yet, the islands in the Pacific that are under US control — we have maps of Venus but not of the ocean in that regions. The beauty of all this, is that we can disseminate it to children. Through the Jason Project, every year over 1 million students are connected to explorers and scientists, participating live in explorations. We want to create the classes of tomorrow. tech that allows people to follow along as he explores the seas

Andreas Heinecke, a human rights activist from Germany who focuses on overcoming cultural and communication barriers, talks about "Dialogue in the Dark”, an exhibition where participants experience darkness and blind people teach them how to see.

Mycologist Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms could an intergalactic colonizing species. Well, almost. He believes that fungi, and particularly the mycelium (the vegetative part of mushrooms) contains solutions for some of the Earth’s environmental and health-related problems. For instant, fungi produce strong antibiotics; they can be used against flu viruses; mycelium can be used to naturally "clean up" petroleum-saturated soils; revamp pesticides; and generating ethanol (he has patented many of these mushroom-related technologies). Preserving the genome of fungis is absolutely crucial for human health.

Animal behaviorist Joshua Klein is a biological hacker (he also hacks computers), and he talks about crows.
Some species are hyperadaptive to the conditions created by humans — think at rats becoming immune to the poisons we produce. Crows aren thriving. They’re found everywhere on the planet except for the Poles. Crows are intelligent, their brains are proportional in the same way that chimpanzee’s are. He shows a crow that tries to pull something out of a glass, and can’t, so it bends a stick into a crook. Another showing a crow "using" passing cars to crack nuts (putting the nut on the road and waiting for a car to drive over it). Moreover, it turns out that after a while the crows started teaching each-other and imitating each-other how to do these things.
Exploiting the fact that crows are attracted to shiny things, Josh built a machine that trains crows in several stages to pick up lost change and deposit it in a slot in return for peanuts (photo right). The device tests the intelligence of the birds, and Josh wonders whether "they could for example be trained to pick up garbage after sports events" of similar things — the idea being that "we could find useful tasks for these fast-multiplying animals, instead of trying to limit or exterminate them".

Richard Preston is one of the few humans to have climbed Hyperion, a nearly 115-meter-tall redwood tree that is the tallest thing living on Earth. Discovered in 2006, it is located in a remote area of the Redwood National Park in California (the exact location has not been disclosed to protect the tree’s ecosystem). He is the author of "The wild trees", about the still-not-well-known forests of the American Northwest.
The north coast of California has rainforests. Sequoias (photo left) are the tallest organisms on Earth, these are trees that could stand out in midtown Manhattan. The oldest living redwoods are perhaps 2500 years old, roughly the age of the Parthenon. In the 1970s to the early 1990s, most of that forest has been cut down in bursts of logging. Now about 4% of the original rainforest remains — and it’s still under-explored. About 30 feet (10 meters) is the diameter of a big redwood, articulating itself upwards into space for over 330 feet (110 meters). This species moves at "redwood time". To us they seem to be immobile, but they continue to move, to develop. Preston began climbing these threes with his children, sleeping there, discovering a whole ecology in their branches (Preston calls it "canopy soil") with growing complexity, flying buttresses (redwoods grow back into themselves to strengthen the crown of the tree), a fractal-like capacity to reiterate (to repeat their shape again and again), but also deadly parasites that are killing off trees and possibly a whole ecosystem of Eastern hemlocks in the Northwest.
What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? They can tell us about human time, the flickering and the shortness of it.

Immersion Presents uses telepresence — satellite feeds and web links — to bring young kids into live research environments. In Monterey Bay, kids can explore one of the planet’s most spectacular biodiversity hotspots, with 100-foot-tall kelp forests, whales, sea otters and a diversity of life found in few other places on earth. The idea (as with the JASON Project, Robert Ballard’s project with National Geographic) is to connect kids with real scientists, and help them truly know the wonders of the planet.