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Early this year another TED conference was held… so that means there’s a lot of new and interesting talks being uploaded to the TED website. Here’s a few personal highlights to start with…

Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes

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Why thinking about distant things can make us more creative, or …

The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others? One answer is psychological distance.

I think this is about blocking your immediate reality to make room for abstract, creative thought. Something a lot of us are already very adept at…

An Easy Way to Increase Creativity @ Scientific American.

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

5 Years After: Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results.

The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population. On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was “frightening”.

Read more common sense here.

David Attenborough brings yet another important and resounding message to us pretentious primates.

In this programme, David Attenborough asks three key questions: how, and why, did Darwin come up with his theory of evolution? Why do we think he was right? And why is it more important now than ever before?

David starts his journey in Darwin’s home at Down House in Kent, where Darwin worried and puzzled over the origins of life. David goes back to his roots in Leicestershire, where he hunted for fossils as a child, and where another schoolboy unearthed a significant find in the 1950s. And he revisits Cambridge University, where both he and Darwin studied, and where many years later the DNA double helix was discovered, providing the foundations for genetics.

At the end of his journey in the Natural History Museum in London, David concludes that Darwin’s great insight revolutionised the way in which we see the world. We now understand why there are so many different species, and why they are distributed in the way they are. But above all, Darwin has shown us that we are not set apart from the natural world, and do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and processes, as are all other animals on earth to which, indeed, we are related.

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, pt. 1

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At Serious Play 2008, astrophysicist George Smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos — with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids — got built this way.

“I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof.” That is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families he met while researching the fractal patterns he’d noticed in villages across the continent.

Watch the video at Ted.com or below.

October 21st, 1965
3:45 A.M. – Telephone rings

“Hello, Dr. Richard Feynman? May I congratulate you on the Nobel Prize.”
- “Look, this is a heck of an hour–”
“But aren’t you pleased to hear that you’ve won the Prize?”
- “I could have found out later this morning.”
“Well, how do you feel now that you know that you’ve won it?”
- “Look, some other time…”

And so Richard P. Feynman, Ph.D., FRS, and Richard Chase Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, first sleepily learned that he was an awardee of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.

(source)