Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week. First, happy (late) World Poetry Day! Celebrate the occasion with 8 talks from spoken-word poets.

Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate
Just when you thought Vijay Kumar’s robots that fly and cooperate were creepy enough, he and his team have developed a drone that can pick up objects at high speed using a bird-like claw. [The Verge]

A piece by Ed Yong takes an in-depth look at new findings on the mechanics of swarming, a phenomenon that has baffled scientists. Awesome quote: “Cannibalism, not cooperation, was aligning the swarm.” [Wired]

Beautiful photos from Christo’s “Big Air Package” — which is being called the “largest indoor sculpture in history” — being installed at the Gasometer Oberhausen, due to premiere in December 2013. [This is colossal]

Ed Boyden: A light switch for neurons
Congrats to Ed Boyden, who was named one of the winners of the 2013 Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize earlier this week for his work on optogenetics. Watch Boyden’s 2011 talk, about using fiber-optic implants to control specific neurons in the brain. [MIT news]

What is it like growing up in a futurist household? Veronique Greenwood’s mother, a technology consultant, was touting the rise of mobile social networking years before the iPhone had come out and before Facebook had a “Like” button; she had pens printed with the slogan “Remember when we could only hear each other?” a decade before Skype. [Aeon magazine]

Stewart Brand: The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?

More Ed Yong? Yes. Yong takes a look at the pros and cons of de-extinction (a big topic in these parts after Stewart Brand’s TED2013 talk). [National Geographic]

Congratulations to TED Fellow Durreen Shahnaz, whose company, Impact Investment Exchange, has been nominated for the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Award.

Timo Arnall’s thoughtful critique of the growing trend to encourage “invisible” interaction design. [Elastic space]

Jehane Noujaim wishes for a global day of film

More congrats are in order, to 2006 TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim, who just completed a Kickstarter to raise money for postproduction on her Sundance Award-winning documentary The Square. [Kickstarter] Read more about The Square.

A father overhears his son talking about coming out of the closet to his mother and him, then leaves him this note. [Twitter] More details from Gawker.

A cute hello from the Axosoft TED Live event from TED2013. Watch for some tasty-looking carrots. [YouTube]

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.

Watch Vijay Kumar’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.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Welcome to Autonomous Agile Aerial Robots i.e. flying robots that can move like anything. Vijay Kumar, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, makes robots related to unmanned airplanes. But those are big and heavy and aren’t autonomous — they need humans to pilot them.

The robots he works with are tiny. He shows one built like a cross, with four rotors, each on an end of the cross pointed straight up. Independent control of the rotors, in all directions plus yaw, gives exquisite control.

The advantage of being small is tremendous: The smaller a robot, the quicker it can turn and maneuver. The result is amazing. He shows four videos of the robots doing flips, pirouettes, and rolls.

These robots are far more than novelties. They can be first responders in disasters. They can help with construction, or cooporate with other robots to move large objects. They can also do search and rescue — or mapping nuclear radiation levels after a nuclear accident.

Dynamics of the quadrotor is defined by mathematics in twelve-dimensional space. But there is a mathematical trick to make it tractable — and it can be done in a fraction of a second, even with moving obstacles. The result is breathtaking — a flying robot dodging moving Hula hoops in a scene that, if it were in a movie we’d all assume it took months to plan and film, but it being done in real-time.

Kumar takes inspiration from nature in many ways. Tiny desert ants can move giant objects (say, a section of a fig) by grouping and moving the fig collectively. Kumar and his team have built programs for the quadrotor that mimic that behavior, and allows teams of them to build extraordinarily complex objects together.

But there’s one last application: a video of the autonomous robots that Kumar’s students Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev created in the last three days, made exclusively for TED2012. It has to be seen to be believed, but we’ll just say this: The James Bond theme song.