Can we use our brains to directly control machines — without requiring a body as the middleman? Miguel Nicolelis talks through an astonishing experiment, in which a clever monkey in the US learns to control a monkey avatar, and then a robot arm in Japan, purely with its thoughts. The research has big implications for quadraplegic people — and maybe for all of us. (Filmed at TEDMED 2012.)
Soy Lecithin has been lingering around our food supply for over a century. It is an ingredient in literally hundreds of processed foods, and also sold as an over the counter health food supplement. Scientists claim it benefits our cardiovascular health, metabolism, memory, cognitive function, liver function, and even physical and athletic performance However, most people don’t realize [...]
We all want to be happy. But how, exactly, do you go about it? More stuff or less? More choice or less? The answers — from psychologists, journalists, Buddhist monks — may surprise you.
Curated by TED
Sơn Đoòng cave (hang Sơn Đoòng, “Mountain River cave” in Vietnamese) is a cave in Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park, Bố Trạch district, Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam. Currently the biggest cave in the world, the cave is located near the Laos-Vietnam bordere. It has a large fast-flowing underground river inside.
The Peacock spider or Gliding spider (Maratus volans) is a species of jumping spider.
These mysterious grass-and-mud structures are home to a species called sociable weaver birds. In the southern Kalahari, these birds using telephone poles as the structural anchors for their nests.
3Doodler is the world’s first and only 3D printing pen that can draw in the air. It’s the 3D printing pen you can hold in your hand.
A new image from ESO’s VISTA telescope captures a celestial landscape of glowing clouds of gas and tendrils of dust surrounding hot young stars. This infrared view reveals the stellar nursery known as NGC 6357 in a surprising new light. It was taken as part of a VISTA survey that is currently scanning the Milky Way in a bid to map our galaxy’s structure and explain how it formed.
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has detected a cool layer in the atmosphere of Alpha Centauri A, the first time this has been seen in a star beyond our own Sun. The finding is not only important for understanding the Sun’s activity, but could also help in the quest to discover proto-planetary systems around other stars. [...]
On Earth, scientists can observe weather patterns, and more importantly can predict them, through the use of tens of thousands of weather observatories scattered around the globe. Up in the space surrounding Earth — a space that seethes with its own space weather made of speeding charged particles and constantly changing magnetic fields that can impact satellites – there are only a handful of spacecraft to watch for solar and magnetic storms. The number of observatories has been growing over the last six years, however. Today these spacecraft have begun to provide the first multipoint measurements to better understand space weather events as they move through space, something impossible to track with a single spacecraft.
