Category Archives: TED talks
15 year-old develops effective, cheap test for pancreatic cancer [TED Audition]
Wow. Here’s Jack Andraka’s TED Audition for a talk on his work developing a carbon nanotube and antibody-based test for pancreatic cancer.
Jack won the 2012 Gordon E. Moore Award ($75,000) at the Intel International* Science and Engineering Fair for the same work:
Read more about him, his work and the work he built it on here on Forbes.com.
*Yup – you can have a go too.
E.O. Wilson’s Letter to Young Scientists [TED Talk]
This is a great motivational address to young scientists the world over. Living legend EO Wilson gives his words of advice to the problem-solvers of tomorrow: you guys.
“The thirst for knowledge is in our genes; it was put there by our distant ancestors and it’s never going to be quenched.”
EO Wilson
Learning Science by Doing Science | Frank Noschese at TEDxNYED
This is the way we’ve been going in Physics class, and here is why:
Atmosphere & Pollution Resources
These are for the Grade 10 Environmental Science students. More are on the topic page, here.
Habitable Planet chapters
Joshua Foer: Feats of Memory [TED]: Just in time for exams!
Serendipitously timed in the TED Twitter Stream, here is a talk by Joshua Foer* on feats of memory that anyone can do. In his research for this, science-writer Foer ‘accidentally’ won the US Memory Championship. If you really like his talk, he also has a book: “Moonwalking with Einstein: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything.”
IBDP Biology is quite the memory challenge in itself, so take a break from your review for 20 minutes and see what you can pick up!
“Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries and iPhones, by not paying attention? […] You have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember”
Have a go at the memory palace technique here. Remember – the more outlandish the image, the better.
………o0O0o………
*He’s also the brother of Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and one of my favourites, Eating Animals.
The Missing Link to Renewable Energy? Donald Sadoway at TED2012
“We need to think big, we need to think cheap… Let’s invent to the price point of the electricity market. If you want to make something dirt cheap – make it out of dirt. Preferably dirt which is locally sourced!”
This is an entertaining and erudite TED Talk from MIT’s Materials Engineer Donald Sadoway which outlines our current problem of grid-level electricity storage, describes how batteries work and goes on to explain where we could go with molten metal batteries. He describes his passion as science and service to society, which is a great sentiment.
This is a good link to our units on Chemistry, Physics and Environmental Science and would make a fine starting point for a One World project. How can science positively impact the world?
So is the Earth full or is abundance our future? #TED2012
TED 2012 is underway and they have been posting some of the talks to their website. Here is a pair of talks which showcase different views of where we are in the world right now – each of them linking to our units on Environmental Science. You can also follow them on the Guardian’s liveblog.
In the first, Paul Gilding states that “The Earth is full,” but that it takes times of real crisis for us to create solutions and climb out of the hole we have dug for ourselves.
In this one, Peter Diamandis argues that we are living in a time of abundance and that human ingenuity will get us out of our problems.
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EDIT – 4th March
These talks which have also been published are relevant to the issues we are studying in class. Have fun watching them!
Daniel Pauly: The ocean’s shifting baseline
Paul Snelgrove: A census of the ocean
Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney [TED Talk]
With links to stem cells, genetic engineering and biotechnology, homeostasis and the kidney, the current science outlined in this TED Talk by Anthony Atala is amazing. It includes a demonstration of a real kidney being printed and a student who has an engineered bladder and now lives a normal life. Wow.
With huge numbers of people waiting for kidney transplants, is this the future of transplant medicine?
Thinking of kidneys, the Guardian has a link to an AP article: Mystery illness kills thousands in South America.
i-Biology 