What's Out There? RIchard Preston

If you’ve ever been awed by a giant redwood (or sequoia), then you’ve felt a shade of the passion Richard Preston feels for these magnificent trees. Imagine trees so huge and impressive that they merit individual names: Hyperion, the largest on earth, is 379 feet tall (that’s roughly the height of a 32-storey building) and was only discovered in 2006. Imagine trees that can be up to 1000 years old. Imagine a complete ecosystem at the top of the redwood canopy where you find mosses, lichens, or even huckleberry thickets growing in up to 1 meter of soil. Imagine enormous limb linkages that look like flying buttresses in the forest. And yes, imagine sleeping up there in the canopy roped into a tree boat suspended high up in the tree, as Preston and his family have.

This session might have been called "What's Up There", rather than "What's Out There" as we saw the amazing climbing techniques with ropes and pulleys and daring to get to the top of these trees. Preston learned how to climb these extraordinary trees and even took his kids up there with him. He climbed with scientists who are dedicated to studying Redwoods. It’s such a singular ecosystem they wonder if they may find species up there unique to that environment.

Preston is best known as the author of fiction and non fiction biological thrillers, best known of which The Hot Zone, a true story about Ebola virus. His latest book, The Wild Trees, chronicles his love affair with Redwoods. His talk was so engrossing that I definitely want to add that book to my reading list.

What's Out There?

Joshua Klein and his amazing Crow Vending Machine.

Klein has studied crows (as opposed to Crowes, as in my maiden name) for 10 years and considers them to be very intelligent, with a body/brain ratio similar to chimpanzees. They demonstrate their intelligence by activities such as placing peanuts in traffic lanes so that cars can run over them and crack the shells, after which they wait for the light (!) and walk onto the road to retrieve the nut. Even more astonishing, they seem to learn this behaviour from each other.

Klein set out to dramatically illustrate crows' intelligence by teaching them to put coins in a vending machine to get peanuts. The picture shows a couple of the trained crows doing their thing on the vending machine. His hypothesis is that these highly intelligent animals could be trained to perform many tasks – picking up garbage would be just a first example. What’s very powerful is that after training a few of them, the training could be passed around a large number of crows.

What's Out There?

Aaah, now to tell you about the ‘mushroom man’, seen here posed by the most massive conk alive of Bridgeoporus nobilissimus, growing from a old-growth stump in central Oregon. It is possible that only at TED would a man describing his lifelong fascination with, and study of, mushrooms draw a full standing ovation, and be the subject of countless hallway discussions about how he was their favourite speaker.

The bottom line for Paul Stamets is that mushrooms can help save the world. In fact, he has written a book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.

His talk was hard to follow because he spoke quickly, quietly and monotonically, throwing in lots of Latin species names – a real challenge for taking notes. Some of the ways he thinks mushrooms are valuable include:

• Medicines, including flu vaccine
• Disruptive technology in insecticides – he’s used mycelium to eradicate termites from his home
• Mopping up toxic spills where mycelium beat all other approaches at absorbing oil
  

Oh heck, this is really one presentation where maybe you had to be there. You can read more by looking on his web site at http://www.fungi.com/ .

What's Out THere?

Another great question to occupy us at TED.

Brian Cox is incredibly articulate, vivacious (can you use that adjective about a man?) and passionate (yes, I use that word again, but it's just unavoidable when you write about these TED speakers) physicist. He mentioned Rutherford’s statement that all science is either physics or stamp collecting and then went on to tell a tale of the universe as we understand it so far and what we hope to understand in the future, in a way to thrill every bone in your body[1].

• Cox told us how everything in physics boils down to 12 particles and 4 forces.


• He told us how one equation could explain everything in the universe, and how that one equation could fit on a t-shirt, and then acknowledged with a picture that it had to be a big t-shirt and small font. That equation of course explains everything – except gravity!


• He told us about the new particle accelerator and Hadron collider being built in Switzerland. He demonstrated the size by referring to minute humans standing by it with the pride of a grandparent showing off a picture of a beloved (is there any other kind) grandchild.


• He told us how it would be able to accelerate particles to almost the speed of light – 99.999999% (actually I lost track of the number of nines – in any case, we would say it would be really really fast.)


• He told us how this would take us back in time to when the universe was hotter, denser and simpler, to less than 1 billionth of a second after the Big Bang. He told us of physicists’ hope to find the Higgs particle (previously mentioned in the talk by Garret Lisi, the surfer-physicist) which has been postulated but not found.


• He told us how the four forces converge as you go back in time, coming together at the Big Bang, when everything was simpler. The Big Bang took place 13.73B years ago, and at that time the universe was smaller than a single atom and there was only one force. Gravity was the first force to separate from the other forces, and then at one billionth of a second, the Higgs field kicked in – they think. Recreating this moment is what the hadron accelerator is intended to verify.


• He told us that within a few minutes of the Big Bang, the universe was 75% hydrogen and the rest was helium, that at 300M years light emerged and at 400M years stars emerged. But these first generation stars cooked up carbon, oxygen and iron, exploded and collided to create new stars. As he puts it, that’s what hydrogen can do in 13B years!


• He told us that 50 years ago, scientists couldn’t have told this story so far and that the accelerator was going to allow physicists to write the next chapter.
  

Cox is a frequent voice on the media, explaining physics to the masses. His pixie smile, rock-star hairdo, his incredible verve and enthusiasm make him ideal. The audience at TED gave him a 2/3 standing ovation – my own guess is that the rest of the audience was simply stuck to their seats in wonder.

[1] I apologize up front to any physicists who read this and notice the inevitable inaccuracies. I was writing as fast as I could, but it’s hard to keep up with the agile mind and speech of a guy like Cox. I’m reasonably sure I got the general gist of it right.