Lucianne Walkowicz: Look Up For a Change
Lucianne Walkowicz, a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow, studies the inscrutable faces of the stars for clues to the inner workings of their hearts. She got her taste for astronomy as an undergrad at Johns Hopkins, testing detectors for the Hubble Space Telescope's new camera (installed in 2002). She also learned to love the dark stellar denizens of our galaxy, the red dwarfs, which became the topic of her PhD dissertation at University of Washington.
In her TEDxPhoenix 11.11.11 TEDxTalk, Lucianne explains the importance of preserving our dark night sky from the perils of light pollution and other lesser-known factors. In Lucianne's eyes, "Our night sky is a natural resource, it's like a park you can visit without ever having to travel there. But like any natural resource, if we don't protect it, if we don't preserve it and treasure it, it will slip away from us and be gone."
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Diana Nyad set long-distance swim records that are still unbroken. Thirty years later, at 60, she attempted her longest swim yet, from Cuba to Florida. In this funny, powerful talk at TEDMED, she talks about how to prepare mentally to achieve an extreme dream, and asks: What will YOU do with your wild, precious life?
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Image-maker Alexander Tsiaras shares a powerful medical visualization, showing human development from conception to birth and beyond. (Some graphic images.)
Geoffrey West: The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations
Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.
Dyan deNapoli: The Great Penguin Rescue
A personal story, a collective triumph: Dyan deNapoli tells the story of the world's largest volunteer animal rescue, which saved more than 40,000 penguins after an oil spill off the coast of South Africa. How does a job this big get done? Penguin by penguin by penguin ...