From New Scientist's Culture Lab blog - by Amanda Gefter, Books & Arts editor
"It's been another mind-boggling day here at TED 2010 in Long Beach, California, where some of the most innovative minds in science and technology have gathered to share their ideas to change the world.
The morning began with Michael Specter, New Yorker writer and author of Denialism (Penguin, 2009), who is disheartened by irrational and dangerous public attitudes towards everything from vaccines to genetically modified foods. What people often don't understand, he said, is the dicey relationship between causation and correlation--even really smart people, like those in the audience at TED.
"How many of you took your Echinacea and antioxidants this morning, even though data shows they do nothing more than make your urine dark?" he asked, as the crowd laughed their admission. "Hey, I get it! You want to pay $20 billion a year for dark urine? I'm with you! Dark! Urine!"
Philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris - known as one of the four horsemen of "new atheism" - offered up a controversial but empowering argument against cultural relativism, claiming that unlike what religious people often claim, science does have something to say about morality.
"When we're talking about values, we're talking about facts," he argued. "Values reduce to facts about conscious experience." His comments resonated well with Specter's earlier complaint: "Everyone is entitled to their opinion," Specter had said, "even their opinion about progress. But you know what you're not entitled to? You're not entitled to your own facts."
Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores (W.W. Norton, 2009), offered a serious yet highly entertaining look at why populations most at risk for HIV--such as sex workers and intravenous drug users--make the health choices that they make, urging us to demand public health policies based on scientific evidence and common sense. She also had a message for Pope Benedict XVI, who last year told African leaders that condom distribution will worsen the AIDS epidemic, presumably because they will inspire people to go out and have more sex.
"I don't know if the Pope watches TED talks online," Pisani said, "but if you do, I've got news for you, Benedict. I carry condoms all the time and I never get laid!" She reached into her pockets and tossed some condoms into the crowd.
Soon after, TED attendees were treated to a surprise talk by Valerie Plame Wilson, the former covert CIA operative who was outed by the Bush administration, who spoke about nuclear proliferation. "There is enough highly enriched uranium in the world to make 100,000 nuclear bombs," she said, and the only solution is to get rid of it all. This provided an interesting inroad to the afternoon's impassioned nuclear energy debate between Stewart Brand and Mark Jacobson.
And the day just got more interesting from there. The fabulously entertaining game designer Jane McGonigal began her talk with this statistic: online game enthusiasts now collectively spend 3 billion hours a week playing in virtual worlds. "Three billion hours a week is not enough to save the world," she said. "To survive the next century, we need to log at least 21 billion hours of game play every week."
McGonigal believes that gamers are "super-empowered hopeful individuals" who believe they can change the world. "The problem is that they believe they can change the virtual world, not the real world," she said. "That's what I'm trying to change. We need to make the real world more like the virtual world." She's trying to do just that by designing multi-player games that tackle real-world challenges like oil shortages and climate change.
David Byrne, frontman from the Talking Heads, discussed his idea that throughout history, the creation of music has been informed by the architecture of the venues in which the music was to be performed--not unlike birds whose songs evolve to best fit their niche environments.
After a moving and venue-appropriate performance by one-man-band Andrew Bird, inventor Nathan Myhrvold told the crowd about his endeavors to tackle the malaria crisis. Everyone has been trying to develop vaccines and distribute mosquito nets, he said, but why not also go after the mosquitoes themselves? In fact, why not shoot them out of thesky with lasers? He then put his pinky finger to his mouth, Dr. Evil style, before demonstrating a prototype of a laser that does exactly that.
And speaking of vaccines, epidemiologist Seth Berkeley is convinced that we are close to making a universal HIV vaccine and a universal flu vaccine thanks to his new approach of retro-vaccinology, a process where you start with the antibodies you want to produce and work backwards to find the right vaccine. New technologies will allow such vaccines to be made in simple E. coli cultures rather than the current cumbersome method of using live chicken eggs. After all, he said, what happens when an avian flu affects chickens?
To wrap up the evening, biologist Mark Roth talked a bit about sea monkeys. As every kid knows, when you order sea monkeys, they arrive in a bag that's been sitting on a shelf for who-knows-how-long, you toss them into some water and suddenly you have little shrimp swimming around. Everyone's amazed by what happens when you put them in the water, Roth said, but what I wanted to know was, what's going on in that bag?
Roth has been working on suspended animation and has achieved some remarkable things, deanimating mammals like mice until their hearts stop and their oxygen consumption hits rock bottom, then bringing them back to life where they are as healthy as ever before. Roth figured out that a winning combination of hydrogen sulfide and extreme cold could do the same for humans, an extremely useful fact to know in an emergency situation like a heart attack. Roth's suspended animation drugs are now in human trials.
One thing that's clear here at TED is that the future is going to look remarkably different from the past, thanks to brilliant minds like these. But forget the future. I just can't wait for day three."
Images: TED/James Duncan Davidson
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Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist 
The next thought experiment came courtesy of French economist and poverty specialist, 
Final thought experiment for the morning came from 
"Now, more than ever, we need to shake things up.
