Joshua Klein studies syntropic species – species that have adapted to coexist with humans. Ever since a cocktail party ten year ago, where a friend was complaining about crows, he’s been fascinated by them, wondering if there’s a way we could coexist with these species in a mutually beneficial fashion.

Crows thrive with human beings – they live everywhere but the Arctic, and rarely more than 5km from humans. “They adapt to live with us, and we try to kill them,” like pigeons and rats. Crows have an intelligence that puts these other species to shame. Confronted with a challenge, they’ll fashion tools to solve it, using their huge brains, which he argues are “proportionate to chimp brains.”

In the video above, crows fashion a piece of wire into a hook to retreive a piece of meat from a tube. This isn’t unknown behavior – in Sweden, crows wait for fishermen to drop lines, then reel them up and eat either fish or the bait. In a student experiment at the University of Washington, students captured crows and put them into cages. The crows followed students for the rest of their careers, and recognized them when they came back to campus years later. Students who study the crows now wear wigs and masks!

In a Tokyo suburb, crows now use cars to crack nuts… then they wait for the lights to change to collect the nuts. Parents are now teaching their young to wait at traffic intersections, and teaching each other this technique. This is a form of cultural learning, something we’re used to seeing in humans.

Klein has been using Skinnerian training to get crows to do something quite absurd – use a vending machine. In early stages, the machine simply provided coins and peanuts. Once the crows got used to it, it gave out only coins – when crows figured out how to knock them into a slot, it gave out peanuts. Eventually, crows figured out how to pick up coins from the ground and get peanuts to come out.

“There are mutually beneficient ways we and crows could live together.” Klein images us working with crows to pick up garbage, or lead search and rescue missions. Chris Anderson brings him back on stage to tell a “crow infidelity story”. Female crows will give an alarm cry, and send their mates out to confront the threat – while distracted, they’ll mate with crows from a neighboring territory, then pretend to sit on the nest innocently when their mates return home.

That level of intelligence seems almost a bit too human…

If Robert Ballard is intense, Paul Stamets is on fire with his passion for fungi. He strides onto stage and announces, “I love a challenge and saving the earth is probably a good one.” He believes we’re in the sixth major extinction taking place on earth, and that if we took a vote of all species, they’d probably vote humans off the planet.

Stamets believes that we can solve major problems through figuring out how to coexist with fungus. He asks us to think about mycelium – it holds soil togehter, holding 30,000 times its mass. It’s a powerful tool for disassembly, turning material into humus and soil. And it mediates nutrient transfer between trees. He shows a picture of these old-growth forests – “on Sunday, this is where I go to church.”

A single cubic foot of earth contains more than eight miles of cell. Using electron microscopy, it’s possible to see the complex network-like structure. This mycelium inhales oxegyn and expels CO2. It can produce antibiotics to fight toxins. Stamets believes that these structures are basically “externalised stomachs and lungs”, possibly “extended neuroligical membranes.”

“Mycelium is earth’s natural internet” – it routes around breaks in the network to channel nutrients and information. “It’s sentient, it knows you are there. It leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps to grab debris you leave behind.” He believes, “the earth invented the computer internet for its own purposes – to help us allocate resources to protect the biosphere.” Mushrooms may be our first species – he makes this argument based on their ability to sequester CO2 and exude oxalyic acid, which can crumble rock and reate soil. “Fungi on other planets is a foregone conclusion, at least in my mind.” A fungus is the largest organism on the planet – a huge net, just one cellwall thick, covering thousands of acres in Oregon. It can produce fruiting bodies so strong they can break through asphalt.

Stamets very quickly offers some amazing “solutions to save the world.” He’s experimented with breaking down hydrocarbon spills using oyster mushrooms. They’re capable of turning hydrocarbons into carbohydrates – complex sugars – and turn a stinking mass into a green berm. He’s commercialized this technology by putting spores into burlap sacks, which can be used in landscape restoration. “These are gateway species” – they can break down toxins and turn them into growing environments. One experiment demonstrates that theyc an reduce coliform bacteria by 10,000 times in less than a week.

Some of the fungi he’s studying with support from the Deparment of Homeland Security’s “bioshield” program prove to be highly effective against bacteria. One is incredibly effective agains the flu virus, thousands of times more effective than our best vaccines. “We should save old growth forests as a matter of national defense.”

When Stamets discoered that insects were pulling down his house, he began researching entamopathogenic fungi – fungi that kill insects. By tricking ants into eating despored fungus, he found a way to infect a carpenter ant colony with a toxic fungus. Ants took it to the queen, which killed off the population of carpenter ants, whose dead bodies ended up growing the new fungi.

Some of his most ambitious ideas include impregnating cardboard boxes with fungi and seeds, so that they can be turned into “life boxes”, capable of growing gardens of beans, onions and fungus. He believes he’ll be able to produce fungal sugars – econol – using mycelium as an intermedium, which will produce fuels from fungus far more efficiently than cellulotic ethanol.

Robert Ballard has a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He’d realy like to know why we look up and not down. “Our country has two exploration programs,” – NASA and NOAA – “Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?”

The ocean covers 72% of the planet and we haven’t explored much of it. He shows a map of the ocean floor and declres, “this is not a map.” There are areas on the map where we don’t have mountains literally because we’ve never been there and have never measured the territory. “We know more about the surface of Mars than about the structures under the sea.”

Ballard has been exploring the sea for 49 years, and has gone on 121 expeditions. He talks about “the old days”, where one needed to go to the ocean floor in tiny subs. “On a good day, there were four or five people on the bottom of the earth.” This sort of exploration found amazing things – it revolutionized the field of plate tectonics by exploring the mid-ocean ridge, which covers 23% percent of the ocean’s surface. “We made it to the moon before we discovered the largest mountain range in the world.”

Much of the world’s oceans are more than 12,000 meters deep, too far for light to reach. In the absence of photosynthesis, we assumed we would see no life, because there are no plants to support animals. There are, though – amazing thermophilic organisms that survive by chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis. Ballard looked closely at volcanic features under the sea and discovered an interesting problem – missing heat. The water near volcanic features wasn’t as hot as it should be. The missing heat turns out to be released through vents that pipe out water at 650 F, hot enough to melt lead. These vents create amazing plumes of copper, zinc, silver, lead and gold. “It doesn’t make sense that the Easter Bunny would only leave the good stuff on land.”

Now deep-sea exploration focuses on robotic search. This allows much more exploration, as well as exploration in environments that humans can’t encounter. There are plumes undersea with ph11 – Drano, basically – that support life we can barely imagine.

The deep sea is also “the largest museum on earth” – he shows us amazing shipwrecks, preserved by hydrogen sulfide. We know these ships are the right ones because they sometimes are so well preserved that you can read their names on their bows.

Ballard now has an amazing new ship, the Okeonos Explorer – it’s explicitly chartered to “go where no one has gone before.” It will explore the US seas, especially the “Western Territorial Trust”, our Pacific territories. “We don’t know what we’ll find, so run it like a nuclear sub, or a hospital”, with teams working 24/7 connected to the ship via the internet, running on Internet 2, connected by 10 gigabits of bandwidth. Those researchers can drive the subs… and so can children who work with them. “I would not let an adult drive my robot – you don’t have enough gaming experience with videogames.” In the process, we can help turn students into scientists.

“Why are we not looking at moving at onto the sea? Why are we not trying to colonize our own planet?”

Dr. Brian Cox has been described as a “rock star physicist”. He’s a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the school of physics and astronomy at the University of Manchester. But he mostly spends his time working on the Large Hadron Collider, where he’s one of the scientists behind the Atlas particle detector.

The collider is an amazingly huge machine – 27km in circumference, built by 10,000 physicists and engineers from over 80 countries. It’s designed to carry out an experiment that might be incredibly dangerous – banging two streams of hydrogen nuclei together at 99.99999% of the speed of light. They’ll collide inside enormous detectors, which will do their best to track what might have happened a tiny fraction of a secon after the big bang.

Cox reminds us that there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That amazing explosion of matter came from a universe that was much hotter, denser and simpler as we move back in time, going back to a big bang event where all matter emerged. We know of 16 basic building blocks of reality – 12 particles and four force carriers – quarks and leptons organized in three generations of matter, and the photons, gluons, Z bosons, and W bosons that carry the four fundamental forces. “It’s amazing we’ve discovered any of them given how tiny they are.”

He quotes Ernest Rutherford as saying, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” Rutherford didn’t mean to be rude to other scientists, Cox argues, but then again, he was from New Zealand. Unless you can explain how reality happens, you’re just categorizing what’s out there. He offers “the standard equation”, a huge pile of terms that explains physics as we currently know it. The problem with this equation, he tells us, is that we’ve got a term called “H” – the Higgs particle – which we’ve not yet discovered, but need to have to make the math work

When Cox and others were trying to get the large hadron collider funded, Margaret Thatcher told them, “If you can explain in language a politican can understand, you can have the money.” He offered this explanation – imagine a cocktail party. People are evenly distributed through the room. When someone unpopular comes through, no one blocks their path. But when someone exciting comes in, people flock to them and impede their progress. That cocktail party is the Higgs field – the people are Higgs bosons. That attraction to particles gives mass – “things are heavy because they end up interacting with the Higgs field.”

Cox is betting that the LHC will discover the Higgs Boson. And he’s interested in the possibility that we may see evidence for supersymmetry. He explains that, under the standard model, there’s very close to a single temperature point where the fundamental forces are equally powerful. A more complex model, with a set of SUSY particles, which might represent dark matter and dark energy, promises to unite all forces in a single model. “I would put money on discovering these new particles.”

He offers a rapid history of the universe, from the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, rapid expansion to a point where light could penetrate the universe 300 million years in, suns, galaxies and planets created from hydrogen and helium cooked into bigger elements. He moves on to evolution, the rise of humanity, and putting a man on the moon. “This creation story come from nothing more than all the laws of physics and a few atoms.”

Tod Machover of MIT’s Media Lab has been pushing the boundaries of music for years. Now he’s pushing the boundaries of who can perform music and how.

Machover tells us that we benefit more from making music than from just listening to it. “Letting your baby listen to Mozart doesn’t help.” The goal is “active music” – getting everyone involved in the middle of musical experience.

Early experiments led Machover to build “hyperinstruments”, a cello that allowed Yoyo Ma to control a whole orchestra based on his gestures. But his deeper interests are in creating instruments that could work for anyone. One of the results of his research is Guitar Hero, which came out of his work on The Brain Opera, a project designed to let a group of people perform an opera together. “If you make the right interface, people are excited about being part of a piece of music.”

A new major work that Machover is working on is called “Death and the Powers” – it will be performed almost entirely by robots – the main theme is of a man who’s decided to survive his death by preserving himself as a lirbary of books. The entire stage will become the main character – the chandelier is a huge robotic instrument made of plucked and strummed piano strings. There’s a greek chorus of robots on stage, and motorized bookshelves that symbolize the main character. It will premiere in Monaco in 2009.

Machover tells us that “music is transformative – it can change your life more than almost anything.” Some of his new work focuses on bringing music to children through a project called Toy Symphony. These new instruments include products like “beat bugs”, which allow people to pass rhythyms to one another. They can compose using “Hyperscore”, an application that lets anyone use lines and colors to make sophisticated music… and which can export this music into musical notation.

Now he’s focused on music, mind and health. He notes that “music is the last thing Altzheimers patients lose.” He now works with patients in the Tewksbury hospital, and has discovered that “everyone wants to work on musical activities. It brings the hospital together as a musical community.” He’s trying to create “personal instruments” that allow people who wouldn’t normally be able to perform to make music and express themselves, because “music shows who you really are.”

We meet Dan Ellsey, a 34-year old patient at Tewksbery Hospital who is severely disabled by cerebral palsy. With the help of Hyperscore and a system built by one of Machover’s PhD students, Ellsey is able to perform one of his compositions, “Eagle Song”, on the TED stage, using a system of gestures captuted by a camera. It’s a beautiful piece and an amazing moment on stage.

Amy Tan wrote an essay when she was eleven titled, “From Nothing Comes Something”. She got a B-. Her talk, on her creative process, is essentially an attempt to figure out how her remarkable literary creations come from the nothingness of imagination.

Inspired by TED’s focus on science and equations, plus the admonition from TED to “rehearse, but act spontaneous”, she offers her own set of theories for how she creates, including the equation:

W (we) = {I – U}

Her balanced set of quarks, ala Garrett Lisi, are “nature, nurture and nightmares.” She wonders whether some writers are “iinnately equipped with muselike effect.” Are they getting material from past lives? From their depression or psychosis? (She had temporal lobe seizures during the writing of her last book.) Do writers feel dislocated, like they are “wrongful births”? Tan shows us an elementary school picture, where she’s a single Asian face in an all African-American classroom – “Why was I not black like everyone else?” She refers to childhood traumas – in her case, the pressure to become a surgeon or a pianist.

There was real trauma in her childhood. When she was 14, her father and brother both developed brain tumors. Her mother kept looking for causes – the fates, bad feng shui, curses from her dead mother. Tan didn’t look for causes – she looks for laws of the universe. These laws are a bit different from those offered by physicists. Her uncertainty principle involves thinking, “I am not original anymore, I am a fraud.” She offers a string theory – “Creative people are multidimensional. There are 11 levels of anxiety.”

She tells us about a story she read, as a commentary on Iraq. “An ancient Chinese legend says, ‘If you save a man from drowning, you are responsible for him for life’.” This story was used to justify staying in Iraq for hundreds of years. She tells us that Chinese buddhist fishermen are reluctant to kill anything… so fishermen simply try to save fish from drowning, collecting the day’s catch in the process. Her mother, she tells us, told her the proverb about a drowning man and responsibility, but told it as a cautionary tale – “don’t get involved or you become responsible.”

Tan believes in serendipity – she discovers that she sometimes knows things she wasn’t supposed to know – an ancestor who died of an opium overdose, which she was able to write as a suicide. That turned out to be the real story behind the story. She talks about discovering an ominous village on a trip, that she knew would become the setting for a future book. There she discovered a man who balances stacks of rocks without adhesive. She asked him how he does this work, and he replied, “With everything there’s a place of balance,” which is what she sees as the theme of her work.

At the end of a long, funny and rambling talk, she reveals her muse, unzipping a handbag and letting loose her small dog. June Cohen helps her put the dog back into the bag and announces, “Amy Tan is a gifted writer, a soulful thinker, and a standup comic.”

Ever wonder how origami artists create those amazing models of complex animals? Robert Lang can help you out. He’s a mathematician who’s been one of the pioneers in modern origami. His talk is titled “from flapping birds to space telescopes”. His point is that origami, which dates from before the 1700s in Japan, is no longer just about child’s play – it “has become a form of sculpture that involves folding.”

The key pioneer who made this happen was the Japanese folder Akira Yoshizawa, who not only created many new creations but invented a common language to describe origami. The more recent innovations have been based on math, and on learning from the past. Lang tells us, “the secret to productivity is letting dead people to your work for you” – if you can, find problems that someone else has solved.

At its root, every origami figure is a crease pattern. These figures follow some basic mathematical laws:
- They are two-color maps
- At any interior vertex, the number of mountains minus valleys equals 2
- When you look at the angles around a fold, the odd angles all add up to 180 degrees, as do all the even angles
- A sheet can never penetrate a fold

From those four laws, you can create any piece of origami. And you can build computer models to figure out how to create figures. To create a creature with many parts, you move from an idea, to a tree (a stick figure), a basic model and then the finished design. The hard part is getting from that stick figure to the model – it requires careful analysis to figure out how to create flaps in a model. It turns out that flaps need to be made from circles – they can be on corners, sides or the middle of a piece of paper, but creating flaps becomes the process of packing circles into a flat sheet. Using this principle, Lang has written a piece of software called “treemaker” which will turn a basic sketch into a crease pattern.

Some of the techniques used by modern origami designers are now proving useful to engineers, including aerospace engineers. Koryo Miura used an origami folding pattern to design a solar array that powered a Japanese space telescope that flew in 1995. Lang has worked with NASA on the foldable lens for a telescope, trying to figure out how to fold a 100 meter lens to a size that could be launched into space. The answer is an “umbrella pattern” that folds a circle into a compact cylinder. There’s a new heart stent designed with the fold patter we’ve all used to make little origami boxes – it allows the stent to travel through an artery, then expand to keep a vessel open. Origami, ultimately, may help save your life.

Yves Béhar is an unusual sort of designer – his goal is not to make bad products prettier, but to create new, beautiful products from scratch. His work includes the Leaf Lamp and the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop.

Behar is Swiss, with a Turkish father, and he tells us that his earliest memories involve looking at scenes on the carpets from his father’s homeland. Warriors kill mythical monsters, there are battle scenes and love scenes. He tells us, “objects tell stories.”

As a teenager, he tried to combine two things he loved, skiing and sailing. His creation was incredibly fast and very dangerous, allowing him to skid around on frozen lakes. “I realized I had to go to design school – look at those graphics!”

Design school and his early career led him to ask hard questions of the people he works with: “What’s this caps lock – do people really use it?” It led him to believe that “advertising is a price companies pay for being unoriginal.”

To be truly original, you can’t just “work on the skins” – you need to design from the inside out. This philosophy has led him to build

- A watch for Mini Cooper, which changes orientation when you move your arm
- A light fixture that changes in shape based on movements on a tablet
- The Leaf Lamp, which can be adjusted in terms of brightness and coloration of light

We look at length at the Jawbone headset, a beautiful bluetooth headset which looks like a piece of abstract art. It was designed by a team, in a single room, which included people building the circuit boards as well as the outer design. It has some amazing functionality, filtering out ambient noise and focusing only on your voice. And it’s very pretty: “If it isn’t beautiful, it doesn’t belong on your face.”

We see some very clever and fun projects, like Y water – it’s a drink designed to be better for kids than soda, and it has a bottle that can be connected almost like legos. Behar prefers projects that are value driven, like this one, and like OLPC. Negroponte seduced him to work on the project with his passionate vision that “design would be why kids were going to love the product”… and by promising him to remove the caps lock and number lock key. He reminds us that building OLPC required thinking from the inside out, and fighting with suppliers and the industry to see waht was possible.

Behar lent his nephew a prototype of the OLPC – it was painful to take it back after an afternoon. His nephew ended up building his own OLPC from paper and carboard.

His most recent project involved figuring out how to distribute 36 million condoms in New York City. The answer – a beautiful, functional dispenser, and a lively commercial with the tagline, “Get some!”

Behar urges us to design using our values – “together maybe we can change the world.”

Good morning from Blogger’s Alley at the TED conference. I’m here today with Michael Parekh, Mark Frauenfelder and Bruno Giussani. We’re some of the few people in our seats before there’s anyone on the stage – on the third day, we’ve all figured out that this is an endurance sport, and we’re all mainlining free coffee and snack food from Google, trying to keep up.

Jay Walker takes the stage briefly. He’s got an astounding library, which he calls “The Library of the Imagination”, and he’s been showing amazing items from it before some sessions. The item today is the library itself, an amazing MC-Escherlike maze of shelves, walkways and collections. Evidently, some lucky TED attendee wins a tour in one of the contests later this week.

Someone who’s familiar with dazzling people on the screen is John Knoll. Not only is he an award-wining special effects specialist, he’s also one of the original developers of Photoshop. He offers us an amazing class in the techniques used to create special effects in modern movies and their relationship to much older techniques.

You use special effects, he tells us, when you want to shoot something that doesn’t exist, that’s too expensive to film (a huge mansion that doesn’t exist, too dangerous to let an actor perform, or simply not possible – we see a group of men overwhelmed by thousands of giant rodents. To see the contrast between current techniques, he shows us excerpts from the classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and his work on the three Pirates of the Caribbean films.

To establish time and place in 20,000 Leagues, artists used matte paintings, detailed paintings on glass that were in the foreground, in front of the action. This gives a very detailed, but static picture. Knoll explains that mattes are used today, but they’re layers of flat mattes, each with a bit of texture. This allows a camera to zoom through the space, looking like 3D, but it’s actually “two and a half D”. These mattes are now behind the action, not in front.

To shoot ships at sea, the classic technique is shooting models in a tank. Knoll tells us that studio tanks are quite small – about three feet deep, with ships abut 20 feet long. To make Pirates of the Caribbean, the art directors used one real ship, repainted to look like a pirate vessel, and two sets floating on barges. The problem with models is droplet size – water spray looks huge agains the side of a model. So Pirates films use lots of real water in the foreground around model boats. This involved sending out “wake boats” with the real boat – we see wonderful footage of a pirate ship and two boring-looking motor boats.

Creatures can be a huge problem – we see a tentacled monster in 20,000 Leagues that looks terribly unrealistic. Walt Disney saw the dailies of the creature and demanded a change – the director reshot the scene at night, making it more dramatic and less unreal-looking. Knoll makes it clear that he never wants to challenge the director’s vision – he simply wants to make things happen.

This can get pretty involved. To shoot two ships swirling in a malestrom, he created a huge computational model of a whirpool,then bent it down into a funnel, added hydrodynamics models to create wakes and then put ships into the foreground. It’s an amazing amount of work to create a very memorable image.

The TED Prize winner I was most moved by last year was photojournalist James Natchwey. He wished for TED’s help in getting access to tell a story, and ways to share the story doing digital technology. There’s a team of TED people looking for creative ways to tell the story – immersive environments, projections on the side of buildings, Reuters’ digital screen in Times Square. But we don’t hear what the story is – just that it’s very scary, and that governments are afraid that Natchwey will tell it. As Chris Anderson reminds us, not all these wishes get completed in three months.

The final prize winner this year is Karen Armstrong, an author who’s focused on the connections between the world’s religions. She comes by the work honestly – she became a nun as a young woman, then left the convent to become an English literature scholar. “Through a series of catastrophes, I found myself in television” – she claims this isn’t an uncommon trajectory. And despite her interest in staying far away from religion, she found herself making controversial programming on religion in the UK.

As she began producing these programs, she discovered that she was encountering Judaism and Islam for the first time and was fascinated by the relationships between these faiths. And some of the things she learned were surprising. “Belief, which we make such a fuss about today, is only a recent religious enthusiasm. It
surfaced in the west in the 17th century.” The credo isn’t a statement of belief, originally but a statement of engagement. Religion, she tells us, is not about believing but about behaving differently.

Specifically, religion is about compassion. “Compassion brings us to nirvana, to God’s mind. When we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of the world, and put another there.” By putting aside the ego, we make it possible to see the divine. She quotes the Hebrew sage Hilel, who explains all of Judaism in two sentences: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is Torah – go and study it.” Beyond that basic injuntion, all else is commentary.

We’re living, she tells us, in “a world where religion has been hijacked, where terrorists recite Koranic verses to justify their activities.” We’re surrounded by “Christians endlessly judging others, using scripture to put others down.” Around the world, people use religion to oppress, not empower others. She tells us, “You cannot confine your compassion to your own group.” Real compassion means having concern for everybody, and honoring the stranger.

Armstrong believes that there’s a huge hunger for visions that bring people together in a compassionate way. She recently spoke in Pakistan and was met with huge crowds of people anxious to hear a friendly western voice, and anxious to hear the ways in which religion was failing people. The situation we face is a serious one, she tells us. “Any ideology that doesn’t promote global understanding is failing the test of time.”

Her wish is a simple one: “That you would help with the creation, launch and propogation of a charter for compassion crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers of the Abrahamic faiths.. based on the fundamental principle of the golden rule.” She sees this as a simple document, put together by leaders like Bishop Desmond Tutu, perhaps launched through the UN, and circulated through the entire world, helping make religion a source of peace in the world.