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TED News in Brief: A quadcopter cam, love from Will Smith, and more

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The past few weeks have seen some extraordinary TED-relevant news items, both happy and sad. Below are some highlights.

This year’s TEDGlobal included a new simulcast event, TEDxVilniusLive, which featured a livestream of the conference, a TEDxYouShare audience session, and a Maker Fair that showed off plenty of innovative local work. Lithuania’s youngest quadcopter constructor, Matas Jankauskas, had one of his quads take some beautiful footage of the event.

Last week, TED Fellow Jae Rhim Lee was granted a special jury award for her mushroom burial suit in Designboom’s “Design for Death” competition. (The other winners are deeply worth checking out too.) Watch her beautiful, bizarre and compelling TED Talk.

TED speaker Brené Brown spoke recently with Business Insider Australia about how to face criticism head-on, even when others are recommending that it’s better not to read your online comments. Watch her 2010 breakout talk at TEDxHouston.

The wide range of TED Talks about what and how we eat prompted FoodTank to create a list of 24 talks “that will save the food system.” After you’ve taken a look, you can also head to our playlists “The joy of eating,” “Plantastic” and “What’s wrong with what we eat?

In a New York Magazine interview with Will and Jaden Smith, Jaden reports that his father is something of a TED addict – and always has a few “ideas worth spreading” as a parent.

Explorer and TED speaker Ben Saunders is preparing to lead a two-person expedition traveling on foot the 1,800-mile return journey to the South Pole from the Coast of Antarctica – completing the trek attempted by Captain Robert Scott from 1910-1913, and aptly titled the Scott Expedition. Watch “Ben Saunders skis to the North Pole,” the story of his earlier adventures on the other side of the globe.

In Peter Singer’s recent TED Talk, “The why and how of effective altruism,” he suggests that the best way to give more may simply be to make more – by taking a high-earning job in finance. The Washington Post published a piece about a young man who’s doing just that.

The Amsterdam-based company Fairphone is on its way to creating the fair trade smartphone that Bandi Mbubi called for in his powerful talk, “Demand a fair trade cell phone.” The phone isn’t 100 percent fair trade yet, but it’s working toward the goal. Read the report from TEDxAmsterdam.

Belinda Luscombe of Time sat down with Sir Ken Robinson to discuss his TED fame (watch the most viewed TED Talk of all time), his new book, Finding Your Element, and, of course, what we need in education today.

In sadder news, the recent attack on a Red Cross compound in Afghanistan made us think of Alberto Cairo’s moving TED Talk, “There are no scraps of men,” about the orthopedic clinic in Afghanistan where he provided mental and physical healing through the most dangerous and difficult of times.