Posts Tagged ‘life’

Jill Tarter: Why the search for alien intelligence matters (TED Prize winner!)

The SETI Institute’s Jill Tarter makes her TED Prize wish: to accelerate our search for cosmic company. Using a growing array of radio telescopes, she and her team listen for patterns that may be a sign of intelligence elsewhere in the universe.

Link to this talk

David Merrill: Siftables, the toy blocks that think

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables - cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?
link to this TED talk / Devid Merrill’s Siftables project / Devid Merrill at MIT Media [...]

History of the Internet

“History of the internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.

Voice-over by Steve Taylor http://voice-pool.com
You can get more information on this [...]

Steven Strogatz: How things in nature tend to sync up

Mathematician Steven Strogatz shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit — when no one’s giving orders. The powerful tendency extends into the realm of objects, too.

Andy Hobsbawm: Do the green thing

Andy Hobsbawm shares a fresh ad campaign about going green — and some of the fringe benefits.

Garrett Lisi: A beautiful new theory of everything

Physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi presents a controversial new model of the universe that — just maybe — answers all the big questions. If nothing else, it’s the most beautiful 8-dimensional model of elementary particles and forces you’ve ever seen.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Biochemist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says we can train our minds in habits of well-being, to generate a true sense of serenity and fulfillment.

Marvin Minsky: Health, population and the human mind

Marvin Minsky’s arch, eclectic, charmingly offhand talk on health, overpopulation and the human mind is packed with subtlety: wit, wisdom and just an ounce of wily, is-he-joking? advice. Marvin Minsky is one of the great pioneers of artificial intelligence — and using computing metaphors to understand the human mind. His contributions to mathematics, robotics and [...]

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

Paul Rothemund: The astonishing promise of DNA folding

In 2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of his specialty, DNA folding. Now he lays out in clear, adundant detail the immense promise of this field — to create tiny machines that assemble themselves.