Heroic Tale in the Antarctic

TED loves to bring tales of heroic achievements to us. This year it was the story of two Canadians who, just in December, were the first to reach the South Pole on snowshoes (rather than skis). Ray Zahab told us about the 1,100 mile journey of 33 days, 23 hours, 55 minutes, ascending from sea level to 10,000 feet, pulling 160-pound sleds in 40 below weather. No wonder they burned 8,500 calories a day. The team blogged every day, using solar energy to power their communications.

This is not the first extraordinary journey for Zahab - he had previously completed a 111-day run across the Sahara. And not the last - he intends to go to the North Pole next year, an increasingly difficult feat with the reduction in Arctic ice.

Zahab said that before he started running five years ago, he was a pack-a-day smoker, encouragement to anyone who wanted to make a big life change.

Arthur Benjamin

A couple of years ago at TED, ArthuR Benjamin, a math professor at Harvard Mudd College, astonished us with his feats of 'mathemagic' involving almost unbelievable high-speed math calculations. I highly recommend his talk at TED.com.

This year, Benjamin gave a brief and passionate plea for more useful math education. Make statistics the pinnacle of math education, not calculus. Statistics is far more useful in daily lives and would help people make better decisions about all kinds of things. A really good point.

Bacteria and communication

Bacteria are simple, single-celled organisms, with a single strand of DNA. It's easy to assume that they couldn't possibly communicate. Bonnie Bassler, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton, begs to differ.

Her research has shown that bacteria can communicate, through 'quorum sensing', which assesses the density of bacteria in the neighbourhood.

She told a fascinating story of the complex symbiosis between noctural squid and bacteria which live in a cavity inside the squid. In the daytime, the squid flushes the bacteria. However, at night, as they return to the cavity, the bacteria 'sense a quorum' and being to luminesce. The squid has sensors on its back which sense the level of light above it. The squid opens the shutter on this cavity just enough to let out light to match the level of light above, so that the squid does not cast a shadow. What an astonishing, complex system to assist its hunting.

More relevant to humans is the fact that disease-causing bacteria release their toxins only when they 'sense a quorum'. So, if we could discover their method of communicating and interrupt it, we could prevent many diseases.

Bassler has done just that. Bacteria molecules are very similar, with the left hand side the same in all bacteria and the right hand side specific to each bacteria species. Enzymes which recognize the left hand side of the molecule thus constitute a 'universal Esperanto' for all bacteria, while an enzyme recognizing the right hand side represents an intra-species language.

Bassler's hope is to deepen understanding of this language and thus generate treatments for bacterial diseases, particularly relevant in a world where many kinds of bacteria have evolved to be resistant to current antibiotics.

Bassler ended her talk with a picture of the young researchers on her team, who actually do the hard slogging for these discoveries. She expressed her pleasure at working with such great students, particularly as they stay the same age as she gets older and older! A lovely sentiment to end a fascinating talk.

Elizabeth Gilbert -- Nurturing Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of surprise bestseller Eay Pray Love, dazzled with an eloquent, fluent, graceful talk. It didn't appear to be memorized, and yet the most perfect prose just flowed from her mouth.

She admitted to fear that Eat, Pray, Love might be the best thing she would ever write, dooming her later works (and life) to being described as 'after' her big success. She felt discouraged by that notion and feared falling into the unhappiness so typical of artists and writers.

Then she reset her frame. The Greeks and Romans considered not that people were geniuses, but that genius came to them. When Gilbert thought of things that way, she felt released. Her big success was not just hers, and her failures were likewise not just hers. If she 'shows up for work', it's the job of her muse to deliver the inspiration.

This talk is already up at TED.com and I recommend it highly to you:
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html