The TED community has news to share. Read on for highlights. The rarest animal on Earth, spotted once again. Peter Ward hadn’t seen his “old friend,” the Allonautilus scrobiculatus, since 1984. But he recognized its hairy, slimy, golden shell instantly. Ward wrote about his rediscovery of this creature — alongside its more-common relative, the nautilus, […]
Asteroid strikes get all the coverage, but “Medea Hypothesis” author Peter Ward argues that most of Earth’s mass extinctions were caused by lowly bacteria. The culprit, a poison called hydrogen sulfide, may have an interesting application in medicine. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 19:42.) Watch Peter Ward’s talk on TED.com, where you […]
Peter Ward spoke at TED2008 about Earth’s mass extinctions (watch for his TEDTalk later this month). You probably know about one of these events, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65 million years ago that ended the age of dinosaurs. In today’s Boston Globe, Ward talks with writer Drake Bennett about the other four extinctions — and about […]
(Running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Second session.) The second session of TED2008 asks "What is our place in the universe?" and it cogently opens with a sneak preview of an amazing piece of technology under development at Microsoft: the World Wide Telescope, a powerful new web-based tool for exploring the universe […]