TED news in brief: Esther Perel on female libido, an update on Henry Markram’s supercomputer brain, and more
Kate Torgovnick May
Below, take a look at some of the TED speakers and Fellows who are cropping up in the news this week.
Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship
Lybrido, a drug to treat women with low libido, is in clinical trials and could be presented to the FDA for review as early as this summer. In The New York Times Magazine‘s look at this new drug, TED speaker Esther Perel is asked about the conundrum of desire for women in long-term relationships. “Many couples confuse love with merging,” she says. “This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires distance.” Watch Perel’s talk “The secret to desire” »
Henry Markram: A brain in a supercomputer
The new Wired takes a detailed look at Henry Markram’s years-long campaign to build a supercomputer replica of the human brain — a plan he shared early on at TEDGlobal, in fact. The piece begins, “Even by the standards of the TED Conference, Henry Markram’s 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that—if it panned out—would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade.” And it gets weirder. Watch his 2009 talk »
CERN physicists share with the TED-Ed blog what it was like to have their words — and sometimes their personas — animated in five TED-Ed videos that boil down concepts in particle physics into understandable terms. Watch these five animated lessons »
Rose George: Let's talk crap. Seriously.
Related to Rose George’s talk, “Let’s talk crap. Seriously”: On Monday, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India, 184 couples wed in a mass ceremony — before which the husband-to-be had to prove he had a toilet or would build one within the month. As a reward, The Wall Street Journal reports, “the state covers the costs of the wedding and gifts for the groom’s family, which are traditionally provided by the bride’s parents.” Watch George’s talk »
Finally, fashion website Refinery 29 admits that Meg Jay’s talk “Why 30 is not the new 20” got their “entire office buzzing.” Watch the talk »
