Kevin Stone: The bio-future of joint replacement
Arthritis and injury grind down millions of joints, but few get the best remedy — real biological tissue. Kevin Stone shows a treatment that could sidestep the high costs and donor shortfall of human-to-human transplants with a novel use of animal tissue.
Susan Shaw: The oil spill’s toxic trade-off
Break down the oil slick, keep it off the shores: that’s grounds for pumping toxic dispersant into the Gulf, say clean-up overseers. Susan Shaw shows evidence it’s sparing some beaches only at devastating cost to the health of the deep sea.
Julian Assange: Why The World Needs WikiLeaks
The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who’s reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED’s Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished — and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.
John Delaney: Wiring an interactive ocean
Oceanographer John Delaney is leading the team that is building an underwater network of high-def cameras and sensors that will turn our ocean into a global interactive lab — sparking an explosion of rich data about the world below.
Laurie Santos: How monkeys mirror human irrationality
Why do we make irrational decisions so predictably? Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in “monkeynomics” shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.
