TED 2008 update and TED Prize live broadcast tomorrow
Dr. Roy Gould, an astrophysicist from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, and Curtis Wong, principal researcher of Microsoft’s Next Media Research group, kicked it off with a demonstration of the visually delightful World Wide Telescope. It's a virtual telescope that uses real images taken by the Hubble and other telescopes, knitted together seamlessly. You can create tours of the universe and share them with your pals. It'll launch online this spring at worldwidetelescope.org. Visit it now to watch a couple of short videos about it.
Next up was Stanford particle physicist Patricia Burchat who explained that the known universe appears to contain 70% dark energy, 26% dark matter, and only 4% ordinary matter. It's hard to detect particles of dark energy -- its signature in lab tests is "missing energy" -- but it has a power effect: it's making the universe expand faster all the time.
Our hobo and mole-man-expert friend John Hodgman was next, recounting four utterly unconvincing accounts of his encounters with aliens. The audience was roaring.
University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward, author of Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future proceeded to scare the bejesus out of everyone with tales of climate-changed mass extinctions through history and how little time we have left until humanity gets wiped out by a supervolcano, an asteroid, or rising CO2 levels. He also reported that a highly toxic gas, hydrogen sulfide, which is in undersea sediments, and which occasionally leaks into the atmosphere and causes massive species wipeouts, might have a future as an emergency medical treatment because it can be used to nearly stop mammalian metabolism without killing. He said it's a "blessing and a curse."
Thankfully, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar followed to tell us that we can all feel better if we remember to breathe, and then Kaki King played guitar.
Tomorrow, the TED Prize session will be broadcast live at 5pm PST. The winners of the TED Prize get $100,000 and are granted a wish to change the world. You can watch the prize session here: Link
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Awesome! I just commented on your previous post, this TED news is coming fast tonight, lotsa great info!
I will stay tuned!
Oh yeah, does anyone have any system requirements or specs on this world wide telescope, it looks pretty remarkable but them again so is google earth and google sky etc. so what is the deal with it not being available to the public is this only because of the resources required to run it or what?
Since when did anybody detect anything even vaguely related to dark matter or dark energy in a lab?
Last I heard it was all vague speculation, the cosmologists waggling eyebrows at the string theorists, and no true scientist to be seen for miles around.
I'd like to thank you BoingBoingers for turning me on to the TED talks. I'm utterly hooked on them. I've been putting friends on to them, including faculty at a teaching university who have, in turn, been showing TED talks to their classes of science education students.
These are fun. These are eye-opening. And these are chewy!
Thanks Mark & Everybody.
WWtelescope sounds exactly like the Google SKy feature....or is that just me?
"" I missed the morning speakers at TED this year. ""
Ouch! That's about a $750 lie-in, no? Hope the bed was nice :)
#3
Wait, cosmologists aren't 'true' scientists?
Hawking will be disappointed.
no video of john hodgman's talk? booo!
This actually sounds a lot like Sienna Software's Starry Night Pro, which is a piece of software I've used for years and love to pieces.