Roger Ebert, the film critic who guided American movie selections for decades, has died, a family friend revealed to newspapers today. He was 70 years old. This sad news comes just days after Ebert wrote a column in the Chicago Sun-Times, celebrating the 46th anniversary of his column and announcing a “leave of presence.”

“On April 3, 1967, I became the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Some of you have read my reviews and columns and even written to me since that time. Others were introduced to my film criticism through the television show, my books, the website, the film festival, or the Ebert Club and newsletter. However you came to know me, I’m glad you did and thank you for being the best readers any film critic could ask for,” he wrote. “I must slow down now, which is why I’m taking what I like to call ‘a leave of presence.’ What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me.”

The reason: he once again had cancer.

“It really stinks that the cancer has returned and that I have spent too many days in the hospital,” he wrote in this post. “At this point in my life, in addition to writing about movies, I may write about what it’s like to cope with health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you.”

Over the past decade, Ebert had battled both cancer of the thyroid and cancer of the salivary gland. In 2006, he had part of his jaw removed — which left him unable to talk or eat. He told the incredible story of learning to speak again at TED2011. Watch his beautiful talk, “Remaking my voice,” above.

Ebert’s written reviews were syndicated in more than 200 newspapers nationally, and he appeared on television in the shows Sneak Preview, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Ebert & Roeper & the Movies. The first film critic to get his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Ebert will be greatly missed.

Below, some of our favorite photos of this tremendous writer and person.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

]]> http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/04/roger-ebert-beloved-film-critic-dies/feed/ 6 Ebert-3 kateted Ebert-3 Ebert-2 Ebert-4 Ebert-5 Ebert-1 http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/25/hypernatural-intelligence-a-fellows-friday-conversation-with-skylar-tibbits-and-suzanne-lee/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/25/hypernatural-intelligence-a-fellows-friday-conversation-with-skylar-tibbits-and-suzanne-lee/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:35:23 +0000 Karen Eng http://blog.ted.com/?p=68028 ]]> Fashion designer and BioCouture founder Suzanne Lee harnesses the labor of microorganisms to grow clothing. Computational architect Skylar Tibbits — who’s setting up a lab at MIT focused on self-assembly technologies and programmable materials — examines biological systems to develop his methods. We asked them to discuss the directions they’re exploring, and the trends and challenges inherent in working with natural processes to meet humanity’s needs.

Your work seems to reflect a real trend in using technologies inspired by nature — not only in the design, which has happened on and off for centuries, but in the way you produce and fabricate the things you make.

Skylar Tibbits: From my perspective, it is not about inspiration from Nature, and in many cases, we probably shouldn’t take inspiration from nature. Rather, nature is a good example of the systems we are exploring — but there are many non-natural systems that demonstrate similar principles.

My work really started from the architecture side, then got pulled towards computer science when I was at MIT. I took lessons from self-replicating systems, self-regulating, digital information/majority voting, redundancy and some of the fundamental ideas introduced by Turing/Von Neumann, and so on. The link to nature — proteins, cellular replication/DNA — really only came after the fact, when I realized that the systems I was producing were incredibly close to those found in nature.

There is obviously a huge trend at the moment for bio-inspired design and biomimicry, but I believe many of these proposals have fundamentals flaws. Natural systems evolved for very specific reasons, over millions of years, with very specific parameters, scale-lengths, forces, and so on, and the process of translating these phenomena to other scales, function and human desires does not come naturally or directly. We should not simply assume that systems working at nanoscales can easily be translated to large scales. And if we do, why not change the parameters — why would the translation have to be entirely direct?

The second flaw is the tendency to use nature as a source for aesthetic inspiration — the assumption that if it looks like nature then it is or works like nature. Finally, I see our tendency to look past the facts of evolution and why systems have specifically evolved in a particular direction. Many — maybe all — natural systems took some path of evolution where each mutation was built upon the last, and decisions along this journey were arbitrary and extremely specific to its time, place, climate and scale. So natural systems work very well for some things, and in other cases don’t work at all for what we are looking for.

That said, I think there are a number of very interesting developments in science, engineering and design that are not only taking inspiration from nature — they are literally using nature — such as DNA origami (or self-assembly of DNA strands to build 2D and 3D shapes at the nano-scale). Biological processes are far more complex, efficient, precise, adaptive then nearly any manmade process or machine we have today, so it makes perfect sense to use biological processes for what they are good at, or manipulate specific variables within them to achieve something they could never have arrived at themselves. This points to Suzanne’s incredible work with cellulose. The cellulose doesn’t naturally want to build clothing per say, but we can harness its natural abilities with our own knowledge of the process to achieve something higher.

Top: Skylar Tibbits shares how self-assembly works. Above: A kimono made of Lee’s microbial cellulose. Photo: BioCouture

Suzanne Lee: Skylar’s quite right — bacteria aren’t desperate to generate dresses! The emergent field of synthetic biology enables us to have the best of both worlds. We can harness the best bits of biological systems to design and build entirely new organisms that better fit our needs. This is not without complex ethical issues, however, and hopefully an internationally agreed and robust ethical code will develop simultaneously with the potential engineering advances.

My work isn’t really inspired by nature. It IS nature. I’m interested in exploiting living organisms to create biodegradable products. In my opinion, the design trend towards biomimicry is about putting the designer ego to one side and accepting that nature has already come up with so many inspirational design solutions. This doesn’t necessarily lead to design looking or feeling “naturalistic” though.

I do agree about the flaws inherent in directly translating from nature and how there can be issues relating to scale — I see this as both limitation AND opportunity. Understanding scale in a biological sense is still a challenge to me as a non-scientist! I find scientists are very happy jumping from discussion of proteins, to bacteria, to fibres to materials – daunting conceptual jumps from the nano to the macro scale.

How do your approaches differ?

Skylar: Our work comes from from different starting points and it’s applied at different scales. I am not working directly with natural processes, although I have started a few collaborations with molecular designers recently, working on DNA origami, that may prove to be fruitful in the coming months. I mainly look toward the natural processes as a resource manual, comparatively looking at how those processes work and how my designed/engineered processes function. How does DNA store discrete information, how is it so good at self-regulating and error correction, how do proteins store their assembly information? None of this is meant to be translated 1:1. Rather, it becomes another model or example where it happens and we can learn from it.

I have a lot of experience working with physical/building-scale materials (plastics, wood, metal, casting, “bricks” etc) — and these inherently become the material palette I work with. However, I try to focus on these “dead” materials and embed information directly into them to offer more “active” characteristics (usually without motors or electronics). I’m trying to discover how much information can they store, how can they replicate inherently, how can they move and assemble themselves, and so on. None of these properties are necessarily found within the materials themselves. Rather, it’s a different way of looking at the materials and at the way we build things.

Suzanne’s work came from a completely different direction and uses far different “materials” and applications, thus leading to the different aesthetic output.

Suzanne: I’ve personally come full circle from loving techno/sci-fi aesthetics and being excited by material innovations that build “smart” complexity into systems and surfaces to embracing nature’s “smart.” I’m now driven by the entire product life-cycle using renewable resources or ideally local waste streams to create biodegradable materials. By harnessing a living organism to manufacture for you the resulting material or product needn’t look “biological” or “organic.” But it does offer opportunities to build in biological functionality.

What issues around working with natural systems do you discuss between yourselves? What do you have in common, and what else are you thinking about and investigating together?

Suzanne: We both struggle with new notions of manufacturing processes and time. We share an interest in being “hands off” — allowing structures to self-generate, Sky by designing this into architecture so that they are “compelled” to organize, and my own work with living organisms that simply require the presence of nutrient to create material forms.

With each approach, the time it takes for construction may be longer OR shorter than a “traditional” method, challenging existing limits and opportunities. I’m always asked how long it takes to grow a garment (answer: approximately three weeks) — as though this were the only barrier to mass adoption. But it makes little sense to contrast this with the supply chain lead times for a comparable “conventional” garment because that never factors in the time it takes to obtain the fibre in the first place — cotton plant to t-shirt? petroleum to nylon jacket? grazing animal to leather handbag? For example, in a fermented process, product can be simultaneously formed as fibre is spun and dyed — multiple production stages condensed into one. A more useful comparison would include factors such as resource consumption, carbon footprint, end of use, and so on.

Skylar: I think an interesting point to discuss would be the scale of the application and how far we can push biological/natural processes outside of their comfort zone. Suzanne and I have talked a lot about how far could you push a biological process to the scale of a building. For example, could you produce cellulose or other materials to grow to extremely large-scales? How long would it take, how do you build a scaffolding etc). And how can you “seed” it’s growth, working hand-in-hand, giving it constraints, waiting for the reaction, giving further constraints?

Suzanne: Firstly you can engineer an organism to produce the attributes you desire (when to biodegrade), then arrange these into a particular structure (fibre alignment) and finally engineer the overarching parameters to respond to external stimuli (water resistance).

Aesthetically and practically, I’m not sure either of us has arrived at something that we suggest is perfected or finished. To date I’ve embraced the natural aesthetics that emerge from the process as it helps to explain a narrative (this is in stark contrast to how we normally approach fashion: fashion relishes artifice). Ultimately it’s not what I’m striving for, but for now it serves an illustrative purpose.

Regarding scale, I would argue that we both come from backgrounds which use the human body as starting point for considering scale: Vitruvian, Corbusier’s Modulor, Fibonacci, golden section, and so on. That’s why I struggle with suddenly zooming into the nanoscale! For me the challenge is to understand how by mastering what is happening at the nanoscale we might design the ideal macro qualities.

What interests me about what Skylar is doing is how he might bring biological attributes to large-scale structures, this may be with steel, wood or plastics. But I’m also intrigued to know if (biologically) living systems could play a role. We have no idea what new hybrid materials/fabrication techniques will emerge in future — rampant mutant algae that turn to concrete? It’s exciting to think the solutions could be located somewhere within the space between our respective work. I think we are entering a dynamic new era for design where, with scientific collaboration, we can explore all manner of material and manufacturing innovations.

Growing microbial cellulose. Photo: BioCouture

Chiral Self-Assembly: Autodesk Univ., Las Vegas 2012. Photo: SJET

Skylar: I totally agree — biological attributes at large-scales is extremely interesting. There is certainly a lot of work going into gradient density materials and adaptable performance in materials or building systems. An opportunity might be to utilize natural processes for their ability to respond to passive sources of energy, their natural tendency to “adapt,” and for their internal ability to have “desire.” Man-made systems lack the ability to have “desire,” this gets into the theories of artificial intelligence — and how can a system make decisions internally without external programs or command. How can a system write its own code, or where does the initial genetic code come from?

Natural systems obviously have this built in — the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms.

DNA origami is one of the only examples where we are forced to use a process of self-assembly simply because there is no other way to build at that scale. If we want to build structures at extremely small scale-lengths, then we need to work within their arena, on their terms. DNA is an amazing building material because it has rather “simple” units and interconnections, it has a language or interface for design, i.e., programmability, and it has a process where it can transform based on energy.

I think that we will soon see applications that are extremely similar to DNA origami but at very large scales. Instances where we currently cannot build what we want simply because we don’t have the right materials or machines/processes — these are perfect applications for new types of methods in assembly and new processes for design. This is where collaborations between designers and natural systems can have powerful applications/implications.

Why the drive to look to to nature to innovate manufacturing processes in the first place? Why now?

Skylar: There are two possibilities: Are we at a place where we’ve pushed the limits of material properties to extreme possibilities and dexterity, developed wonderfully innovative solutions for fabricating these new materials and even beginning to find automated processes for assembly — yet the ever changing demands of society, economies, climates, technology and scale (large or small) are requiring adaptability at such dramatic scales and paces that our current modes of production don’t cut it, forcing us to find infused processes of Frankenstein bio-adaptive and manmade processes? Or are we just looking for new modes of inspiration, toolsets and mediums, and the natural tendency is to look at our biological counterparts for dialogue?

Suzanne: I think there’s both push and pull taking place. If we look to the history of design, radical innovation mostly occurs where ground-breaking materials or manufacturing techniques are introduced. Human creativity is constantly pursuing the new. At the same time, we do indeed face so many environmental, economic and societal challenges that current resource inefficiency and wastage has become obscene, driving the need for change. In both our work we also seem to be proposing very limited human intervention. We haven’t really discussed what this means for the workforce. Our workers seem to be robots, autonomous structures and biological organisms, but that’s a whole other discussion!

Shea Hembrey is 100 artists in one. At TED2011, he shared how he staged an international biennial containing works from 100 artists … all of whom he invented himself.

The talk has spun into his first New York gallery exhibit, featuring work he made—this time as himself. The exhibit is called “Dark Matters,” and it’s on view at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery through October 20.

“When I spoke at TED in Long Beach in 2011, Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz were in the audience and their son, Bryce, now represents my work,” Hembrey tells the TED Blog.

The exhibit focuses on his fascination for the past 20 years: dark matter.

“For nearly two decades, I have continually pondered dark matter and dark energy—which together account for over 95% of the cosmos,” Hembrey says in the gallery materials. “The question of these mysteries has repeatedly surfaced in my imagery over the years.”

Below, watch Shea’s wonderful TEDTalk and see some of the pieces from his new show.

And here, some of the works from Hembrey’s new exhibit:

When Eyes Are Closed—Dark Rain, 2012, acrylic on board, 36 x 48 inches.

This close-up is from a piece in the series What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed. Hembrey explains in the gallery materials, “When I first heard about dark matter, the first visual I immediately connected to this mystery was what I see when my eyes are closed: that mercurial, unfixed, shifting darkness.”

Raft, 2012, guinea feathers, redbud sticks, lead, amethyst, chrysocolla, vanadinite, azurite, malachite, fluorite, quartz, selenite, nickel, calcite, garnet, citrine, turquoise, mica, tourmaline, topaz, and silk thread, 13 x 21.5 x 21.5 inches.

This work is also one of Hembrey’s Universal Portraits, which he calls “simple sculptures that are lyrical models of the cosmos.”

Radius, 2012, wheat straw, wood, foam, plastic, paper, screws, and acrylic paint, 83.75 x 83.75 x 27 inches.

Hembrey says of his series Strewn, “Made of straw, [it] contemplates the ever-present well of dark energy.

Brick (celestial), 2012, burnt cork, pins, nails, moonstones, one piece of thread, ink, and acrylic paint, 5 x 12 x 8.5 inches.

Another of Hembrey’s Universal Portraits.

To read much more about Shea Hembrey, visit his website. And to find out information on his exhibit, head to the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery site.

With summer dwindling to its last few days, it’s time to put away the beach reads and get the mind back in gear with heartier fare. Why not start with some of the amazing books written by recent TED speakers? Here, some picks.

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Retells the tale of a forgetful writer’s journey to becoming U.S. Memory champion, exploring the singular importance of memory in our lives along the way. Watch Joshua’s talk >>

Wired for Culture by Mark Pagel
For the past 80,000 years, culture has played an integral role in shaping the lives humans lead. Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel explains the evolutionary processes that are so ingrained into our culture, and explores its effects on life today. Watch Mark’s talk >>

Quiet by Susan Cain
A look into the life and contributions of introverts in a society that favors loud and bold personalities, and how our current value system may be stifling their innovation and leadership. Watch Susan’s talk >>

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
We may be living in the most peaceful time in human history. Steven Pinker explores the root causes of this surprising and hotly debated claim, and the implications it has for average citizens and military personnel. Watch Steven’s talk >>

That is All by John Hodgman 
The last installment of Hodgman’s trilogy of fictitious trivia, wrapping up his history of made-up facts just in time for the 2012 apocalypse. Watch John’s talk >>

Batman: Death by Design by Chip Kidd
Graphic novel imaginings of foul play during the architectural boom and bust in Gotham City. Watch Chip’s talk >>

And below, Bruno Giussani — TED’s European Director — picks five essential books from TEDGlobal 2012 speakers.

Stealth of Nations by Rob Neuwirth
If you haven’t read this book yet, you may be ignoring a massive and essential portion of the functioning of the real global economy. It’s mandatory reading for anyone thinking or acting globally.

The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura Snyder
The previously untold story of four men who met at Cambridge University in the early 19th century and brought about a revolution in science, in the process inventing the word “scientist.”

Hybrid Reality by Parag and Ayesha Khanna
A rapid yet deep excursion in the emerging reality of fading boundaries and increasing human-technology hybridization. (Parag Khanna was a guest host at TEDGlobal.)

World 3.0 by Pankaj Ghemawat
Despite the popularity of the idea in recent years, the world is actually not “flat”, and this data-rich book persuasively proves it. Ghemawat has the data to back it up.

Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang
A rare and eye-opening exploration of the lives of Chinese migrant assembly line workers — those who populate the “factory of the world” — told from their own perspective.

Last summer, we stumbled onto an early version of Collusion — because we’d read that the developer, Atul Varma, was inspired to build it by Eli Pariser‘s book The Filter Bubble. And we had to know more. Varma was kind enough to talk with us, and here is what he said:

So … tell me how Eli Pariser’s book inspired you to build Collusion.

At the point I started building it, I’d just read a few chapters of the book, and I was fascinated with all the stuff he was talking about with data collection companies. I wanted to visualize it better myself, and make it easier for kids to understand–internet literacy is a major goal of my main project, Hackasaurus. I knew a lot about add-on development, so I built it as a Firefox add-on.

The original version of the add-on didn’t visualize known data collection companies differently from other sites. All the dots were gray, and I didn’t have any more information than, “Oh, there’s a site called DoubleClick.net that all 4 of those websites you just visited seem to be sending cookie-laden network requests to.”

That’s the point at which I went out there to find more information about the particular sites that I noticed were tracking me.

After the first iteration, I found out about PrivacyChoice and got their tracker list. Now when you mouseover, you know how some of the dots are colored red? Those are the data tracking companies. I’m able to tell by looking at PrivacyChoice’s tracker list and correlating domain names with the data tracking companies that own them.

Now that you can see this tracking data in graphic form — what’s your favorite thing to do with this tool? How do you suggest people play with it?

This is something I’d like to make a bit easier, but this is how I use it: I make a browser window and place it on the left side so I can see it while I’m browsing around the web. I have the other browser window that has a bunch of tabs in it on the right side of my screen, and basically I just start using the web. And I notice this massive graph building up on the left side of my screen. Some of my coworkers, they’ve left it on for weeks at a time, and they show me the graph, and it is … it is just utterly scary.

What’s a site that surprised you?

One of the ones that was most surprising to me was VirginAmerica.com. One of the most unusual things about it — on the graph, it appears to make a single request to DoubleClick, which then makes requests to like 20 different data collection companies or something crazy. When you watch it in graph form, it looks like … there’s that kind of flower that, when you blow on it, there’s all of these wispy things that fly out of it — a dandelion. It’s pretty, but it’s also kind of scary.

And the other thing that just blew me away was, when I was making the tutorial that appears on that page when you don’t have the add-on installed, when you see the demo that takes you to IMDb, and the New York Times and the Huffington Post? Those were just five random websites that I selected, it definitely wasn’t premeditated on my part like, “I bet these are full of trackers.” So it just blew me away that DoubleClick actually tracked me in all of them, in all five of them. Another company, Scorecard Research, tracked me on four of the five.

I always knew that if a site had Google Ads on it or something, that I might be tracked across the sites, but I didn’t know it was nearly as pervasive as the add-on revealed it to be.

Yes, TED.com uses DoubleClick; it seems to be the industry standard.

Yeah, I didn’t even know that Google owned DoubleClick. I learned that, I think, from Eli’s book. You know, I use Gmail, now I use Google+ a bit. Google was already such a big part of my life — finding out that they know a lot more about me that I had assumed that they did is a bit unsettling.

I finished reading The Filter Bubble a few days ago. At the end, there are a lot of calls to action that he makes toward the end of the book that I’d really like to see my organization, Mozilla, proactively try to do something about.

Some of my colleagues like the idea of collusion and are exploring whether or not a tool like this could be beneficial for Firefox user

What Firefox used to do, back in 2.0 or something, you could tell it to alert you whenever a site you visited wanted to use cookies. But it became such a barrage of requests that we actually took that feature out of the browser. It was just an unusable user interface — you were constantly being pummeled with these requests about whether you’d let a cookie through. And so now we’re looking at doing something along the lines of this kind of visualization, where it lets you be aware and lets you manage privacy settings in a much more easy-to-understand way.

Managing privacy is an interesting piece of this problem.

One of my coworkers thought it would be really neat to gamify the add-on and make it so that you could click on one of the nodes to zap it, to make it so that your browser didn’t communicate with that site anymore, or didn’t send cookies along when it did communicate with it. Making the visualization into a user interface that lets you actively block and unblock things that you didn’t want tracking you. I think that we’ll try experimenting in a few of those directions.

A number of people I’ve talked to, as soon as they see this they’re like, “I have to get TrackerBlock.”

But what I find interesting is: I made this add-on, but I don’t actually use any of those blockers. [laughs.] I don’t see a huge benefit to myself in actually blocking them from tracking me, really. What’s more unsettling to me is that these companies are tracking me without asking or even telling me. It’s not so much that I don’t want them tracking me, it’s more about the violation of trust that that they’re tracking me without my consent.

What are the next steps now that we know?

What I would really love to see Eli’s book and this add-on and these kinds of conversations do — I’d really love to see it lead to a different way to monetize the web.

Because right now, tracking is the only way a site can make a living off the content that they produce. With the exception of these paywalls that newspapers are putting up, there isn’t any easy way to build a website and actually make a living off it, even though you’re clearly delivering value to your users. Like with the TED site, clearly you’re doing a service by making these talks and putting them up on the web. Why is it that sites like this can only be financially supported by doing data collection? It just seems like there should be a better way.

Right now, some smaller sites that need the revenue — you know AdBlock Plus? These smaller sites will detect if you have that add-on installed and serve you a message like, “Can you please disable your ad blocker for just this site? It’s the only way we can keep this site up.” It would be great to make it easy for a website creator to be transparent and say, “You can look for free, or you can see the site without ads and tracking for a small amount.”

What I really want to see is not so much everyone picking up a tracker blocking add-on, because that would really cripple the web if everyone did that. The whole business model that powers most websites would just be gone. I would rather see it lead to an entirely different business model for the web where these sites that deliver really good content can still make money, users still get content, and user privacy is preserved.

Read more on the official Google Blog >>

(This year’s countdown begins Dec. 24 at 2am Eastern.)

Watch Antonio Damasio’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.

Watch Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche’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.

How can something as simple as a smile be so deceptively complex? That’s the mystery and magic explored in Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act, a new TED Book by Ron Gutman about the sensation and science of the smile. From the broad beaming grin of a toddler to the oily smirk of a used car salesman, smiles convey an enormous range and depth of emotions. Grins also have radically varied meanings in different cultures, as the author learned during his many worldwide trips to explore the complicated but ubiquitous act of smiling.  We recently spoke with Gutman about his book.

Why is smiling so important? 

Smiling is central to what makes us human.  We’re the only species that smiles, and we do it from birth.  It has an immense impact on how we feel, because smiling triggers our biological pleasure receptors. It also positively impacts how others see and perceive us, and can be a powerful way to improve social situations. Best of all, smiling is important because it’s natural, always available, and easy.

How long have people been researching the act of smiling?

In the book I mention a French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, whose research in the mid 1800′s was focused on the different types of facial expressions, including smiles. Duchenne created an extensive catalogue of smiles and other facial expressions, but found one in an entirely different class from all the others. He called it the “genuine” smile—the smile that arrives spontaneously and reflects pure delight.  Duchenne also inspired Charles Darwin to conduct research into smiling. Darwin detailed the early smiling behavior of his own children and wrote the facial feedback response theory, which noted that facial expression intensified emotion, and the suppression of facial expression lessened emotional response.

You’ve traveled the world quite a bit talking about this. Have  you discovered cultural differences in relation to smiling?

When you are in a new place, where you don’t speak the language and don’t have a knowledge of the cultures and customs, you’re left with what’s universal and what transcends the things that make us different. Smiling is one of those great unifiers. Still, it’s still subject to regional norms.  Different cultures are more or less accepting of smiles in different situations.  For example, in the United States, smiling at strangers is commonplace.  In some other countries, however, smiling at a stranger might arouse suspicion.  But, generally, we’re all likely to smile for the same reasons: we’re happy.

Does a smile have to be real to be effective? The nervous counterfeit smile of Miss America, for instance, seems to go a long way. 

Smiles are highly effective in activating the reward mechanisms of our brains, so even forced smiles, the so-called “social” smile, can be effective at communicating. But they don’t offer the truly great effects that genuine smiles.  The full spectrum of the benefits of smiling are found in real, genuine, big smiles.  These are the ones that make us feel great inside, and make others around us smile. They make us look not just friendly in the eyes of others, but also competent.  As studies examining the health and well-being benefits of smiles show, the real benefits are reserved for real smiles.

Can someone smile too much? I’m thinking of the creepy smirk of a used-car salesman. 

There’s no such a thing as too much genuine smiling.  The beautiful thing about smiles is that we are hardwired to detect smiles that are genuine and smiles that aren’t.  We know that we can trust genuine smiles, but we don’t have the same feelings about fake smiles. There’s a bunch of research that I’m mentioning in the book that shows how we detect the authenticity of  smiles, and they’re mostly based on mimicking the smiler to experience the same feelings and emotions she/he does. So smile much, smile often, and smile genuinely.

Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act is part of the TED Books series, which is available for the Kindle and Nook as well as on Apple’s iBookstore.

Watch Damon Horowitz’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.