Last week, Google hosted a gathering called “Solve for X,” which brought together entrepreneurs, innovators and scientists interested in finding technological solutions to the world’s greatest problems. These solutions weren’t small in scope. No, they were all “moonshots,” ideas that live in the “gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; they are 10x improvement, not 10%.” And these moonshot ideas were all presented in TED-style talks that now live on the WeSolveForX website and the WeSolveforX YouTube Channel.
Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin kicked off the event and framed the project, paving the way for Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child, to dream big and ask: Can emerging technologies empower children to learn to read on their own? Imagine how that would change the educational problems besetting the developing world? (Watch above.) Or how about this big thought from Adrien Treuille, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, who imagines a day when knowledge creation won’t be driven by universities and corporations, but rather by loose groups of individuals taking advantage of the internet and big data. That talk appears right below.
With the largest solar storm since 2005 lighting up the night skies this week after a pair of solar flares sent streams of charged particles hurtling toward the earth, prophets of doom have been lighting up the Internet.
Bob Thiel, a self-described “Church History and End Times Examiner” and author of 2012 and the Rise of the Secret Sect, wrote yesterday: “Worse solar flares will ultimately happen after the ‘Great Tribulation’ begins (Revelation 16: 8–9), and one or more that affect satellites and electricity could happen even today.” Hmm. Interesting.
Although very serious questions do exist about the readiness of our electric power grid and satellite infrastructure to withstand a major solar storm like the one in 1859 that shorted out telegraph wires and caused aurorae so bright a crew of gold miners in Colorado reportedly got out of bed in the middle of the night to cook breakfast, the current increase in solar activity is part of a regular 11-year cycle and poses no special risk, according to NASA heliophysicist Alex Young. (See the video above.) And anyway, Young says, the peak isn’t expected to hit until 2014, well after the Mayan calendar has run its course.
Cambridge, Massachusetts is one of the world’s great intellectual crossroads. With Harvard University at one end of town and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the other, many of the most influential thinkers of our time either work there or visit. That gave César Hidalgo an idea.
Hidalgo is a professor at M.I.T., where he studies the relationship between physics, network science and economic development. Building on his own interdisciplinary curiosity, Hidalgo thought it would be interesting to share a little of Cambridge’s intellectual wealth with the outside world, so in October he and the M.I.T. Media Lab launched a series of informal Web interviews called Cambridge Nights: Conversations About a Life in Science.
Cambridge Nights is a little like The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, if Leno talked about things like fractal geometry in the metabolic theory of ecology. That’s the subject of the discussion above featuring the renowned physicist Geoffrey West, professor and past president of the Santa Fe Institute, who gives a fascinating account of the universal scaling laws that pervade all life, from single-celled organisms and complex species to whole ecosystems.
What sets Cambridge Nights apart from other Web forums, like BigThink, is that guests are under no pressure to compress or “popularize” their ideas. “We invite them because we want to hear what they have to say, and we want to give them the time to say it comfortably,” writes Hidalgo. “There are many high-speed formats out there. Cambridge Nights is an alternative where thoughts can be developed and reflected upon without the need to rush.”
In the first season, Hidalgo talks with six scholars from fields spanning the natural and social sciences, including physicist and network scientist Albert-László Barabási, biologist Marc Vidal and international development expert Lant Pritchett. A number of guests are already lined up for Season Two, including experimental psychologist Steven Pinker.
To view all six videos from Season One, and to learn more about the project, visit the Cambridge Nights website.
Two weeks ago, we featured Harvard Thinks Green, a series of six TED-style lectures presented by Harvard experts, each focusing on the environment and strategies for reversing climate change. One thing Harvard Thinks Green didn’t offer was a primer on climate change itself, a good scientific explanation of the underlying problem. Enter Global Warming (YouTube), a 23-lecture course presented by David Archer, a professor in the Department of The Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. The first half of the class explains climate physics and how the climate works; the second half shows how human activity and ever-increasing carbon levels disrupt the equilibrium of the environment, creating a very uncertain future for generations to come. The first, short lecture above outlines the scope of the class.
Originally presented at UChicago in Fall 2009, Archer’s course was geared to non-science majors and taught in conjunction with his textbook, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, which happens to be available on Amazon here. Global Warming (YouTube) is now listed in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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The dream of flight fired the imagination of Leonard da Vinci in the early sixteenth century. In designing his famous flying machines, the painter, sculptor, architect, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist — ah heck, let’s just call him a Renaissance man — closely studied the mechanics of birds in flight, noting the elegant ways in which they turn and glide. Centuries later the Wright Brothers got us off the ground, but never with equal grace. It has taken a long time, but finally engineers at the German company, Festo, have found a way to mechanically reproduce the beauty of birds in flight. They call their robot the SmartBird, and they showed it off last year at TED.
It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annual question to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2012 edition asks the question, “What is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?” And the replies — 190 in total — feature thoughts by Sherry Turkle, Robert Sapolsky, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett, plus the ones excerpted below. If you’re willing to venture down the rabbit hole, you can access the complete collection of responses here.
Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars [that we are all stardust] to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?
Kevin Kelly, Wired co-founderhere and don’t miss Susskind’s complete physics lectures here].
Leonard Susskind, Physics Professor, Stanford.
[T]here is one elegant and deep statement (which, alas, is not quite an “explanation”) … that I find very useful as well as beautifully simple.
I refer to the well-known lines Lord Acton wrote in a letter from Naples in 1887 to the effect that: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” At least one philosopher of science has written that on this sentence an entire science of human beings could be built.
I find that the sentence offers the basis for explaining how a failed painter like Adolph Hitler and a failed seminarian like Joseph Stalin could end up with the blood of millions on their hands; or how the Chinese emperors, the Roman popes, or the French aristocracy failed to resist the allure of power. When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption. [More here].
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Psychologist
You can dive into the full collection at Edge.org. The photo above was taken by Marco Bellucci.
On December 8th, six “all-star environmental professors” came together at an event called “Harvard Thinks Green” and presented short, TED-style talks about the environment and strategies for reversing climate change. The event started with James McCarthy (Professor of Biological Oceanography) asking the question (see above), “Is it too late to avoid serious impacts of climate change?” A good question to ask given that 2010 witnessed the biggest annual jump in global carbon emissions—5.9%. This set the stage for Richard Lazarus (Professor of Law) to discuss ways that our political system could become more responsive to the crisis. (Did you know that Barack Obama only mentioned climate change once in public last year? Just once?) And then Rebecca Henderson (Co-Director of the Business and Environment Initiative) tries to make the difficult case that money-making and saving the world can go hand-in-hand — that capitalism can become environmentally sustainable. You can watch the remaining talks online here, or on iTunes here.
Scientific discovery is an engine of economic and military power, and America has long prided itself on its leadership in research. But as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson points out in this video, there are some dark clouds on the horizon.
When you look at the trendline, Tyson says, scientific research in America is clearly in a state of decline compared to other regions, like Asia and Western Europe. “As everyone else understands the value of innovative investments in science and technology in ways that we do not,” says Tyson, “we slowly fade.”
The maps Tyson uses are from Worldmapper.org. The one that he says represents change from “2000 to 2010” actually depicts growth in scientific research from 1990 to 2001. Danny Dorling, professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield and part of the team that created Worldmapper, confirmed Tyson’s error but said, “I think Neil’s got it roughly right. He should just have said ‘this is the trend to 2001 and it is not just likely it has continued, but it has probably accelerated.’ ”
Tyson’s comments are from a talk he gave in May at the University of Washington entitled, “Adventures of an Astrophysicist.” For a closer look at the maps he uses, see below.
The color-coded world map above can be used for reference when studying the maps below.
The map above represents territory sizes in proportion to the number of papers published in 2001 that were written by scientists living there. The number of scientific papers published by researchers living in America was more than three times greater than the number published in the second-highest-publishing country, Japan. For more information, including per capita data, see Worldmapper’s PDF poster.
The map above represents the growth in scientific research between 1990 and 2001. Territory sizes are proportional to the increase in scientific papers by authors working in those countries in 2001 compared to 1990. If there was no increase during that period, the country has no area on the map.
Despite the fact that the United States had the most published research in 2001 and a net increase in research betwen 1990 and 2001, its size is smaller on the map because of a significantly greater growth rate by countries like Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, China and Germany. Although the data behind the maps are now a decade old, Dorling suggests that a current map might look similar. “If I had to guess,” he said, “it would look worse for the USA given the massive cuts in funding in California to some of the major state Universities there.”
You can find more on this map, including a printable PDF poster with per capita data by country, along with information on the sources and methodology behind its creation, by visiting Worldmapper.
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