Daphney Singo is a nuclear scientist from Africa. When she met Nelson Mandela and told him she was a nuclear scientist, he didn't want tpo talk to her anymore :-) As her mother always said to her: "Education is the husband that will never let you down, my child."

Check in on previous TED prize winners: Jill Tarter and Frank Drake, in their search for extraterrestrial activity, are working on utilizing the sun as a the giant telescope needed to observe planets that are hundreds of light years away. The two most pressing questions that Drake can answer right now: 1. can we hide our efforts from other intelligence out there? No. We already sent signals to every star within the range of 50 light years, they are probably watching our TV right now. 2. Why haven't they visited yet? Because it is expensive for everyone. …

Dan Barber has known many fish in his life. But he loved only two. The first one was a love affair that lasted several months, it was a sustainably farmed fish of fantastic taste and beauty. With 90% of  the global fish population having collapsed due to overfishing, sustainably farmed fish is the best, maybe the only option. Dan fell out nof love with this fish when he discovered that the sustainable protein the fish were fed at the fish farm was made of chicken. What's sustainable about feeding fish with chicken? The second love affair was true …

What if everyone would make their credit card statements public? What blippy does: it shows all purchases you made with your credit card, where you bought, how much you spent, etc. - applying the rules of social networking and sharing. This financial transparency can not only be used to socialize, but for much more, i.e. donation transparency and also administration (no more expense reports!) No one knows where the world is heading with this, but this is the direction. Maybe twitter isn't so five minutes ago, maybe it's just the beginning... ?

Where are we in the universe? The digital universe has been built and is being continued at the Museum of Natural History, it's the basis for the space show there. Carte is taking us on a tour from the earth to outside our solar system to the afterglow of the big bang to before time and back in to show us the atmosphere of the earth, and even tuesday's snow. What the world needs now is to understand us in this larger sense of the context of the universe

Because spiders have such a bad rep, here are some facts about spiders that will maybe change perception. Spiders are diverse: There are 40,000 species of spiders.versus 400 primates. And spiders are an old species as well, they've been around for 380 million years. All spiders make silk, but there are many kinds for many different purposes, and individual spiders can make different types of silk, as multiple fibers are made in the spider's spinneret (like a soda machine at Taco Bell's). The stretchiest silk fiber is used for making the web, so prey doesn't bounce right off …

Imagine... you had a gift about the size of a golf ball. It will blow your mind, redefine who you are, inspire you, make you happy forever. You will be beautiful, inspired, motivated and free. Price: $55,000. WhatisitWhatisitWhatisit??? Stacy Kramer received a brain tumor. She's fine now. It has changed her life. Forever.

Angiogenesis, the process of generating blood vessels in one's body. Blood vessels adapt to their environment and usage. In adults, blood vessels usually do not grow, but the body can regulate blood vessels at all times (grow, shrink). There's over 70 common diseases in the world  that relate to angiogenesis. One of them is cancer. All cancers start out as harmless microscopic tumors. Without a blood supply, these cancers will never become dangerous (cancers without disease). If humans could block angiogenesis wherever there's a cancer, we could eliminate cancer. The approach is to treat cancer by cutting off …

Belief is the natural state of things, as our inner belief engine tries to seek patterns and make connections. Disbelief is uncomfortable. Patternicity: The tendency to find meaningful patterns where they exist and also where they don't exist. Patternicity comes with types of errors: Type 1: the false positive finds a patterns where there is none, the false negative disregards a pattern even if there is one. Type 2 errors are more dangerous, and the determination between these errors is difficult. The inner pattern detector can easily be fooled by: 1. Cognitive priming - the …

David Cameron, introduced as the future prime minister of Great Britain, asks: If we are broke (public dept $ 32 trillion and rising...) how can we make things better without spending money? As money is only one factor to happiness, we have a great opportunity of changing society on scales other than money. power to the people: We are moving towards the post-bureaucratic era (from local power to central power to power to the people), enabled by sinking cost of communication, information and publication through the internet. Government services have to adapt by utilizing the channels of the …