Michio Kaku | Can We Download Our Brains?

via bigthink.com

Michio Kaku is a futurist, popularizer of science, and theoretical physicist, as well as a bestselling author and the host of two radio programs. He is the co-founder of string field theory (a branch of string theory), and continues Einstein’s search to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into one unified theory. He holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics and a joint appointment at City College of New York and the Graduate Center of C.U.N.Y. He is also a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Kaku launched his Big Think blog, "Dr. Kaku's Universe," in March 2010.

Nicholas Carr on 3 Techs That Changed Our Brains and Neuroscience of Internet Addiction

via bigthink.com

Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," which is "widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement," according the Christian Science Monitor. His earlier book, "Does IT Matter?," published in 2004, "lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis," said The New York Times. His new book is "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

Carr has also written for many periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Financial Times, Die Zeit, The Futurist, and Advertising Age, and has been a columnist for The Guardian and The Industry Standard. His much-discussed essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," which appeared as the cover story of the Atlantic Monthly's Ideas issue in the summer of 2008, has been collected in three popular anthologies. Carr has written a personal blog, Rough Type, since 2005. He is a member of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's editorial board of advisors and is on the steering board of the World Economic Forum's cloud computing project.

Carr holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American literature and language, from Harvard University.

Live on TED.com tomorrow: Ask IBM insiders about Watson, the Jeopardy computer

IBM’s language-savvy computer Watson has been dominating against humans on the game show Jeopardy! for the past two nights, and makes his final appearance this evening. And tomorrow, live on TED.com, IBM is hosting an insider’s conversation about Watson with Watson’s principal investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley, and Columbia professor of clinical medicine Dr. Herbert Chase, hosted by Man v. Machine author Stephen Baker.

The big question: Now that Watson has succeeded on a game show, the team is digging in to develop real-world products based on this exciting technology. They’ll be asking: What’s next?

And you can ask these panelists a question too: Between now and 10am EST tomorrow, tweet your questions, and tag them #askwatson or #ibmwatson to have your tweet considered by the panel. Then watch live to see if they answer.

Tune in for the live webcast on TED.com tomorrow, Feb. 17, at 11:30am EST.

via blog.ted.com

Biologist Stuart Firestein on Smell, Taste and Memory

via bigthink.com

Dr. Stuart Firestein is the Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences. His colleagues and he study the vertebrate olfactory receptor neuron as a model for investigating general principles and mechanisms of "signal transduction" — the ways in which chemicals, such as neurotransmitters, hormones, and peptides with membrane receptors, exert their influence in the brain and nervous system. He hypothesizes that the olfactory neuron is uniquely suited for these studies since it is designed specifically for the detection and discrimination of a wide variety of small organic molecules, i.e. odors.

The Requisite End Of Year Lists And Review 2010

• Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed into Google this year, Zeitgeist captures the spirit of 2010. 

• Heart-breaking, revealing, and beautiful, the year in images by The Big Picture, part I, II, and III.

• Popular Science's The Most Amazing Science Images of 2010.

• Ideas of the Year: The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Popular Science's 100 Innovations of the Year.

• Making Ideas Happen: The 99% Most Popular Tips, Interviews & Think Pieces.

• Retweet, double-dip recession, vuvuzela, and top kill are just a few words of the year.

• Top Ten Most Retweeted Tweets of 2010. Top Ten Twitter Trends of 2010.

• 2010 Memology: Facebook's Top Status Trends of the Year.

• New York Magazine's The Year In Culture.

• Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers.

• Creative Review's Top Ten Blog Stories 2010.

• The Bygone Bureau's Best New Blogs of 2010.

• Science: The Breakthroughs of 2010 and Insights of the Decade.

• The Millions continues its tradition of measuring The Year in Reading.

• Top Ten New Yorker Stories of 2010.

• A space chimp, a good-smelling man and a World Cup anthem are among The Campaigns Creativity Loved.

• BBH Labs' presents The State of the Web 2010.

• Kinetic type animations became even more mainstream in 2010, used in opening title sequences, to teach typography, in a NSFW music video, and our favorite, to retell The Gettysburg Address:


• Time's Top 10 Everything of 2010.

• ReadWriteWeb's Top Trends of 2010: Privacy.

• Brand New takes a look at the best and worst identities of 2010, MTV, Gap, Aol, they are all there.

• The Dieline's Top 100 Package Designs of 2010.

• My Modern Met's Top 12 Banksy Pieces of 2010.

• The Year In Media Errors And Corrections.

• Flavorpill's Most Fascinating People of 2010.


• YouTube, with its ability to catapult someone from obscurity into infamy, launched new music careers, helped change what an advertising campaign is, took over the Guggenheim, and served as the depository of raw ingredients for a multitude of remixes and mashups.

• The Best Viral Videos Of 2010: A Retrospective by Videogum.



• Mashable's 10 Most Innovative Viral Ads of 2010.

• The Best Cover Songs of 2010.

• Paste Magazine compiled the best 25 music videos of the year. However this year, thanks to new technologies and the influence of the social layer, the music video was reborn as something that you engage with and not just watch: Sour/Mirror connected to your Twitter and Facebook stream; You Make Me Feel changed based on your local weather; Killing Me let users tell the world what was, well, killing them, via the hashtag #killingme; We Dance To The Beat let you create your own version of a video via an audio visual beat machine; Soy Tu Aire, has painterly mouse action; but the most surprising and exciting music video (should they really be called videos when they are this engaging?) was the perfect experimental mix of technology, artistry and innovation in the poignant and absolutely personal The Wilderness Downtown.

• Many websites transitioned from Flash to HTML5 giving it a lot of momentum. Due largely to iOS devices not supporting Flash, and now even the Macbook Air ships without support for it, 2010 was the year when HTML5 began to make its presence known.

• In addition to all the advancements of the digital world, there is still extraordinary print work being produced and FPO compiles The Best of 2010.

• Macworld's The Year For Creatives.

• One Club's Best of the Digital Decade.

• 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web.

• How Online Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2010.

• We agree with Frank Chimero, The Elements of Math and BBC's A History Of The World in 100 Objects, are two of the best things on the web in 2010.

• Most Contagious 2010.

• Data Visualization & Infographics: With so much data coming at us from all directions we need help making sense of it all. There are the 10 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year, Journalism In The Age Of Data and of course the Jedi master of data Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes:


• Zombies, Sci-Fi and Alice: Wired.com’s Best Video Interviews of 2010

• The Best NASA Photographs of 2010.

• Decker's Top Ten Best (And Worst) Communicators of 2010.

• Forbes' The Year's Most Creative Advertising Ideas.

• Angry Birds: We resisted as much as we could. We refused to download the game, but in a moment of weakness and 'encouraged' by friends, we got it. And like everyone else got addicted to this simple and clever game. In 2010 Angry Birds catapulted itself into millions of mobile devices and became this generation's Pacman. What started as a game on the iPhone is now a huge industry with hard-to-find merchandise, a movie deal and even a bank.

• 20 things that became obsolete this decade.

• The New Yorker's Theater High Points.

• 2010: The Year The Internet Went To War.

• Discover's Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of the Year.

• And just when you thought there was nothing new to be discovered: National Geographic's Top Weirdest New Animals.

• Vanity Fair's The Top Ten Worst Top Ten Lists of 2010.

• Made By Many's Best of 2010/Trends for 2011.

• Harvard Business Review's Six Social Media Trends for 2011.

• Trendwatching's 11 Crucial Consumer Trends of 2011.

• 10 Disruptive Trends That Will Shape Our World in 2011.

• Fast Company's 2011 Consumer Internet Predictions.

• Ten Crowdsourcing Trends for 2011.

• Mashable's 10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011.

• Pantone has a decidedly rosy outlook for 2011.



• And lastly, Ringing The New Year With A Drink For Each Time Zone.