TED and TEDTalks

If you are not familiar with TED, I highly recommend you surf their web site. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an organization that defines its mission as "ideas worth spreading". See the WikiPedia article for an overview.

TEDTalks are by invited speakers at their annual conference. TED posts new talks on their web site at the rate of about five per week. Not surprisingly, you can get an updated list via TED's RSS Feed.

Not all TEDTalks are on science or technology, but when they have one, it's usually a doozie, Al Gore's talk notwithstanding. One example is Paul Rothemund's talk at TED2007, held in February, 2008. The talk title is "The Immense Promise of DNA folding." Watch the video. Watch it twice; Rothemund (CalTech) talks so fast that he is hard to follow. No doubt inspired by the 18-minute limit on TedTalks, though they often run almost to 25 minutes. Or maybe it's my personal aversion to learning through lecture; I much prefer to read it.

Rothemund calls his technique DNA folding or scaffolded DNA origami. Scaffolded because the resulting DNA is a structure composed of individual DNA strands. Like the smiley faces.
Surf TED.COM! Well worth a few hours or even a few hundred hours of your time. For a quick introduction, watch the Top 10 TEDTalks video. Or watch Clifford Stoll On Everything for the sheer joy of it.