This week, Sir Ken Robinson was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal by the UK’s RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). At the ceremony, he gave a lecture on education and creativity — followed by a lively Q&A where he made several new and bold suggestions. You can download audio […]
The Methuselah Foundation and TED speaker Aubrey de Grey (watch his TEDGLOBAL 2005 speech) will host next week in Los Angeles “Aging: The Disease, The Cure, The Implications”, a symposium featuring world-renowned scientists and advocates of stem cell and regenerative medicine research. The symposium will highlight the scientific prospects for using regenerative medicine to eliminate […]
Jonathan Feinberg, a sometime collaborator of artist Golan Levin (watch Levin’s TEDTalk), has given the world an addictive new web toy. Wordle turns any block of text into a word cloud — like a tag cloud but prettier. It’s hard to stop using it once you start. TEDTalks transcripts produce these handsome results: ABOVE: Erin […]
WIRED‘s Thomas Goetz fumes about a development in the world of genetic testing: California health regulators have demanded that several genetic testing start-ups halt operations until they prove they meet quality and reliability standards. Goetz writes, To my mind, genetic information is a new sort of personal information that the state and even the physician […]
Photo: Eames Demetrios via flickr We’re excited about the US Postal Service’s brand-new Charles and Ray Eames stamps, issued for the first time yesterday. You can order a sheet of 16 stamps, each with a different Eames design, and each with a face value of 42 cents, online from the USPS. Not sure if you […]
AfriGadget, the fascinating blog that rounds up inventions and hacks from around the African continent, was just named one of Time magazine’s 50 best websites of the year. Founded by TED Fellow Erik Hersman (also one of the brains behind Ushahidi), AfriGadget is a vital — and inspiring — look at creativity and engineering brilliance […]
TED.com picked up three Webbies on Tuesday night at the 2008 Webby Awards ceremony in New York City. Which means that June Cohen (left), Director of TED Media, got 15 words total to thank the academy and our millions of viewers. Her first five-word speech: “Millions watching lectures? Who knew?” TED.com’s awards: Best Podcast; Best […]
Cross the Wii hacking of Johnny Lee with the creativity tools of Tod Machover, and you get Digital Wheel Art — a wheelchair that uses a hacked Wii Remote to help disabled people make paintings. As Gizmodo reports, inventor YoungHyun Chung showed off the device at the Maker Faire in NYC last night. Watch the […]
The TED.com staff’s favorite psychology research blog, the BPS Research Digest, reports on a study on forgiveness from the University of Sussex and the New School for Social Research. The study examines how groups which have committed atrocious acts against one another come to break the cycle of resentment and forgive. [The researchers] surveyed 180 […]
Casson at the TEDPrize.org blog (get the RSS feed) points us toward this cover story in the May/June Boston Review: “Is It Africa’s Turn?” Reacting to recent economic data from Africa — showing some growth and progress across the continent — economist Edward Miguel writes: “Economic growth rates are at historic highs and democratization appears […]
TED’s Matthew Trost reports from the World Science Festival‘s Sunday-evening session “90 Is the New 50: The Science of Longevity“: Faith Salie moderated this panel of four scientists (and one singer) on the science of longevity and the nature of aging. Gerontology pioneer Robert Butler, embryologist Renee Reijo Pera, Harvard associate professor of biology David […]
TED’s Matthew Trost reports from the World Science Festival‘s Sunday-afternoon session “Looking for the Laws of Life“: John Hockenberry moderated this discussion on how life works, what its prerequisites are and where else we might find it in the universe. Featuring synthetic biology expert Steven Benner, researcher and astrobiologist Maggie Turnbull and cosmologist-astrobiologist-physicist-author Paul Davies. […]
Photo of Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, acknowledging Jim Gates and Stephon Alexander at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, as part of the World Science Festival, NYC. From entropybound‘s flickr set (and check out his blog). TED’s Marla Mitchnick reports from the Saturday night blockbuster “Music and the Brain,” held at the Abyssinian Baptist Church and […]
TED’s June Cohen reports via Twitter on the World Science Festival session “Greengenuity“, where she’s hearing from the screen designer for One Laptop per Child (the “$100 laptop”): The OLPC gal is asked about the new … … touchscreen-driven design (from the wonderful Yves Behar) An “oohhh” goes thru the crowd when she explains how […]
TED’s Matthew Trost reports from this Saturday session of the World Science Festival: Nobel Prize winner and cell biologist Paul Nurse moderates a discussion between the leader of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, physician and geneticist James Evans, and sociologist Nikolas Rose after an introductory piece of context by Misha Angrist, who recently had […]
From Not Exactly Rocket Science, here’s a thoughtful report on a new fMRI technique that — 70 percent of the time, anyway — can tell what noun a person is thinking of: Tom Mitchell and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University [used] a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualise the brain activity of […]