Geoffrey West The surprising math of cities and corporations

Around America, if we just look back now, there is plenty of wonderful things going on.

Finally, oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures.

The amazing truth is that fracking has succeeded where Kyoto and carbon taxes have failed.

Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies.

So here we see, for example, a sponge spicule, two bits of coral here, that's a sea urchin spine. Really some amazing stuff.

In essence, what we've done is we've studied the science, we've looked at the behavior, we've seen over 2,000 kills by these amazing animals.

Since 2014, some media outlets have covered the amazing archaeological treasures that were emerging from the mountains of removed soil in the working area

We began to introduce that in our explorations, and we continued to make phenomenal discoveries with our new robotic technologies. Again, looking for something else, moving from one part of the mid ocean ridge to another.

This amazing data allows us to drill down and see what this drug is for 1,500 people on this drug, I think. Yes.

There are a lot of surprising innovations coming from South Africa, says David Kaplan, an economist at the University of Cape Town who specializes in tracking technological change.

Southeast Asia is famous for exotic destinations like Phuket and Bali and modern cities like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, but its religious landmarks are also recognized for their architectural beauty and global cultural significance.

And we'll begin to be able to do as Cody does, and actually be in touch with these incredible models, these elders that have been here far, far longer than we have.

But the amazing news was that because they had stood up, these women, and because they had been willing to risk their security, it began a discussion that not only happened in Uganda, but all of Africa.

At EG'08, Adam Savage talks about his fascination with the dodo bird, and how it led him on a strange and surprising double quest. It's an entertaining adventure through the mind of a creative obsessive.

In the spectacular large scale projects he's famous for , Olafur Eliasson creates art from a palette of space, distance, color and light. This idea packed talk begins with an experiment in the nature of perception.

There is plenty of beautiful things going on. There are angels around America doing great things in schools farm to school set ups, garden set ups, education there are amazing people doing this already.

There is also a surprising phenomenon that favors everyone prices of technology based capital assets imported by Latin America have been falling throughout the past decade.

In this TED archive video from 1998, paralympic sprinter Aimee Mullins talks about her record setting career as a runner, and about the amazing carbon fiber prosthetic legs that helped her cross the finish line.

So a lot has happened in the last 40 years, and what I learned when I came to the Galapagos is the importance of wild places, wild things, certainly wildlife, and the amazing qualities that penguins have.

There are heroes in name and then there are heroes in legend who will live on through the ages. The late Harold La Borde was the latter. For those who knew him and others who grew up in the shadow of his incredible adventures, his passing is a deeply sorrowful occurrence.

The amazing Pathfinder mission that went in '97, and the MER Rover missions that are on Mars as we speak now and the European Space Agency's Mars Express, has taught us a number of amazing things.

What all these have in common is these materials are structured at the nanoscale, and they have a DNA sequence that codes for a protein sequence that gives them the blueprint to be able to build these really wonderful structures.

And these chimpanzees, living their complex social lives in the wild, have helped more than anything else to make us realize we are part of, and not separated from, the amazing animals with whom we share the planet.

So with everybody making so much amazing stuff and actually understanding what it was they were working on, I was really interested in trying to make a collaborative project where people were working together to build something.

And when I was speaking to him, you know, I thought, like I'm speaking to you now, right, but sort of in the middle of my questions, my excited questions, because the more I got to know him and his system, the more exciting this whole idea became.

Well, the striking patterns of human social networks, their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place, and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure.

France is a marvelously paradoxical country, so the search for novelty, if not modernity, could lead to the reinvention of the Fourth Republic, a parliamentary regime characterized by its weaknesses and instability.

Well, it's probably microscopic, and it's never easy to study microscopic things, although the amazing tools that we now have to do that allow us to study things in much greater depth, at much smaller scales than ever before.

For the last 12 years, Carter Emmart has been coordinating the efforts of scientists, artists and programmers to build a complete 3D visualization of our known universe. He demos this stunning tour and explains how it's being shared with facilities around the world.

Lewis Pugh talks about his record breaking swim across the North Pole. He braved the icy waters to highlight the melting icecap. Watch for astonishing footage and some blunt commentary on the realities of supercold water swims.

One of the most impressive things about what some, perhaps 10, of the speakers have been talking about is the realization, as you listen to them carefully, that they're not saying Well, this is what we should do this is what I would like you to do.

We could make a very long list, but obviously Nelson Mandela, emerging from 17 years of hard physical labor, 23 years of imprisonment, with this amazing ability to forgive, so that he could lead his nation out the evil regime of apartheid without a bloodbath.

Strange landscapes, scorching heat and mad crocodiles await scientists seeking clues to evolution's genius. Paleontologist Paul Sereno talks about his surprising encounters with prehistory and a new way to help students join the adventure.

And if you put them together in different combinations just like printing in a sense, like how a magazine color is printed and put them under certain forces, which is orbiting them or passing them back and forth or drawing with them, these amazing things started appearing.

There are a lot of surprising innovations coming from South Africa, says David Kaplan, an economist at the University of Cape Town who specializes in tracking technological change. But the gap between esoteric knowledge and economic applications remains large.

There's clearly sedimentary rocks all over the place one of the landers is sitting in the middle of an ancient seabed, and there are these amazing structures called blueberries, which are these little, rocky concretions that we are busy making biologically in my lab right now.

The amazing truth is that fracking has succeeded where Kyoto and carbon taxes have failed. As shown in a study by the Breakthrough Institute, fracking was built on substantial government investment in technological innovation for three decades.

Indeed, the unprecedented amazing photographs of recent space missions beamed across television screens around the world have once again rekindled in our hearts and minds the wonder of space exploration and strengthened popular resolve to keep the pristine world of space a peaceful arena for all humankind for all time.

Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia. But a moral concern with transplants led her to look further, and to ask Could we be transplanting cells, not whole organs? At the INK Conference, she talks through her new research, discovering healing cells in some surprising places.

But all the talk of wondrous returns could spur what psychologists call wishful thinking bias, leading people to believe that their personal accounts will be so valuable in the future that outside saving is unnecessary.

The thing that was always striking to me was that we as people could have so many really amazing ideas about things we'd like to do, but are so often unable, in the real world, to actually do those things to actually cobble together the materials and go through the actual execution phase of building something that you imagine from a design perspective.