1. Janine Benyus is a writer who has authored six books on biomimicry, the practice of using nature's solutions to solve problems humans face. In this video and another from 2007 she talks about the power of biomimicry and describes how a bird's shape was used to make trains faster and quieter, how the structure of a shark's skin can prevent bacteria from adhering to surfaces in hospitals, how the edge of a whale's fin can make wind turbines more efficient, and much more. The examples are so fascinating they would be interesting if they were being read by a computer -- Benyus' obvious passion for her work makes her videos that much more enjoyable. 

2. Don't understand dark matter? I don't really either, but Stanford physicist Patricia Burchat has gotten me as close as I may ever get. In her talk she describes physicists' basic ideas about what dark matter and dark energy are, how we know they exist and what we're doing to learn more about them. Her slides make visualizing these difficult concepts easier, and she even describes an experiment you can do at home. 

3. Depression is on the rise in our world while happiness stays constant, and Nancy Etcoff describes the major aspects of happiness from science's point of view. The Harvard psychologist talks about what stimuli make us happy, how our brains work and what happiness does for us. It's a wide-ranging talk that sacrifices depth in favor of breadth but the result is a great overview of a huge field in under 20 minutes. 

4. Jane Goodall is among the most well-known scientists alive today but don't think I'm including this video just because she's a famous female scientist. If you've never watched a 68-year old woman imitate a chimpanzee greeting call than watch at least until the 4-minute mark. I promise you'll want to keep watching after that as she talks about what makes us different from apes -- a very "wuzzy" line, she says. She also describes the worsening situation for apes and other animals in Africa and why she left the field to become an advocate for preservation. 

5. Did you know that female ants can keep laying eggs for twenty years after they've mated? I was wowed by this and other facts of ant life revealed in this talk by ant expert Deborah Gordon. She studies how ants in colonies accomplish coordinated tasks without any direction, and talks about how she does her research and what she has discovered. If like me you spent time crouched over ant hills as a kid I'm sure you'll be fascinated by how much Gordon has to say. I'm given hope by the revelation that at any time about half the ants in a colony aren't doing any work at all. There may be a place for me in our society after all. 

6. Medicine is an area of science that most if not all of us have directly benefitted from. Catherine Mohr covers the history and charts the future of surgery in her talk, from trepanning (that's cutting holes in a patient's skull) to robots that can make surgery more precise and less invasive. I should warn you of a few things: her slides and videos are graphic, she's not a great speaker and she works for the company whose robots she is lauding. Despite all that, watching a doctor crouched over a monitor while two robot hands stitch up a wound is really a pretty cool thing to see. I'd recommend this especially for readers thinking about going to medical school, because I imagine technology like this will only become more widespread. 

7. When Nalini Nadkarni starts talking about ants in the first few minutes of her lecture you might think that I've tricked you with more ant propaganda, but even though this ecologist has an ant species named after her this video is about rainforest canopies. She has plenty of pictures, videos and stories about this amazing ecosystem but this talk is more about her role as an activist for rainforest preservation. If you haven't heard of Treetop Barbie then you should probably watch this. She has also brought artists, dancers and musicians to the Costa Rican rainforest to help spread the word, and she brought moss from the rainforest to American prisons where inmates cultivated and studied them to see if we could stop harvesting them from their natural environment. 

8. I can't help getting excited about space, and there's not much more exciting in our solar system right now than Saturn's moons. The leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini-Huygens mission is Carolyn Porco, and her talk describes some of the incredible results that have come back from the Cassini spacecraft which has explored Saturn and its moons and the Huygens probe that landed on the surface of Titan, the largest moon. She shows pictures liquid hydrocarbon streams, rivers, and lakes on Titan's surface, large deserts at its equator, and ice volcanoes on another moon, Enceladus. She has another TED video as well which goes into more detail about Enceladus and some recent findings there. 

9. This last video comes from another science writer, Margaret Wertheim, who with her twin sister started a project to crochet a coral reef. The endeavor turns out to have as much to do with mathematics as it with marine biology, because the frilly shapes they crochet are examples of hyperbolic surfaces. These shapes, cousins of the planes and spheres with which most are more familiar, were thought to be nearly impossible to model until a female mathematician in 1997 crocheted one. Hyperbolic shapes are found all over nature, including in coral, sea slugs and lettuce. Her project blends art and mathematics, and -- best of all -- 99 percent of their reef was made by women. 

Image of Jane Goodall from TEDTalk (plus all TEDTalks) courtesy of TED under the Creative Commons license "Attribution -- NonCommercial -- NonDerivative."

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William April 13, 2012 66.226.57.37	Thanks for this informative post :)

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