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TED News in Brief: The Nobel Prize gives a shoutout to TED-Ed, Diana Nyad swims for 48 hours straight

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Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights:

Hours after announcing that the 2013 Prize in Physics had been awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles,” the Nobel Prize tweeted out a video that explains the Higgs boson. It was none other than the TEDxCERN and TED-Ed collaboration, “The Higgs Field, Explained.”

Paul Stamets, aka the TED speaker who gave you 6 ways mushrooms can save the world, gets “unbound” in the latest issue of Omni Reboot.

Less than a month after becoming the only person to swim from Florida to Cuba without a shark cage, Diana Nyad (watch her talk) is attempting to swim for 48 hours straight on the streets of New York to raise money for victims of Hurricane Sandy. To this end, a two-lane pool has been installed in Herald Square, reports NBC. Joining Nyad in it? Ryan Lochte and Richard Simmons (who’s of course wearing a crystal-studded bathing suit).

TED Prize winner JR opens his first stateside museum exhibition, at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The museum is wrapped in one of JR’s images, and visitors are invited to paste up their Inside Out portraits in the lobby.

Paul Scheer, star of the parody series NTSF:SD:SUV::, has a few ideas worth spreading in this video he cooked up for Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco website. One of the most pressing: The troublesome trend of honey mustard as a condiment on chicken fingers.

Meanwhile, College Humor explores what would happen if TED speakers were high

Michael Dickinson (watch his talk) is featured in a New York Times “Profiles in Science” piece—with video. “To hear Michael Dickinson tell it, there is nothing in the world quite as wonderful as a fruit fly,” the story begins…

David Byrne (watch his TED Talk on architecture and music) muses on what New York City has become, and what it should be, in The Guardian. The present and future of cities has been something we’ve been thinking a lot about too. Check out our cities topic page, with profiles of metropolises around the globe »

Wildlife photographer Carolyn Joubert (watch her talk) is one of 11 photographers in the exhibit “Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment” opening Oct. 10 at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C. Go now, especially since the Smithsonian Museums are closed thanks to the continued government shutdown. The exhibit runs in DC until March 2014, when it starts a three-year, multi-city tour.

Game designer Will Wright previewed his world-building game Spore at TED2008; but while Spore was not exactly a flop upon release later that year, it never quite set the world on fire. Soren Johnson, who helped build the game, wonders why in his Designer Notes — and offers a few thoughts. (Takeaway: “find the fun.”)