So what’s it like to discover a rare galaxy? Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil speaks about her singular experiences during Fellows Session 1 at TED2018 – The Age of Amazement, April 10 – 14, 2018, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED
Forget those mingy and miserly folk who hoard their best for the last — TED believes in starting off strong. Kicking off TED2018 is Session 1 of the TED Fellows, who count among their ranks artists, activists, scientists, researchers, conservationists, thinkers and changemakers of all kinds. The Fellows program now total 453 individuals from 96 different countries. In this session, the 10 newest and 4 Senior Fellows came to the stage in the VCC Community Theater.
TED Senior Fellow Joshua Roman begins the session with his original composition “Riding Light.” It’s a tossup as to what is more compelling. His music, which ranges from challenging to melodic to rhythmic? Or his bright argyle socks? Answer: All of the above! (Session attendees check off “listen to shoeless cellist” from their bucket list.)
Our planet’s last wild places: breathtaking and at risk. We humans are fundamentally connected to and dependent on the natural world, but our stewardship of it has been, frankly speaking, lousy. Four years ago, it was declared that half of the planet’s wildlife had disappeared in just 40 years. “We urgently need to create safe spaces for these wild animals,” says explorer and conservation biologist Steve Boyes, a TED Senior Fellow. In 2014, Boyes and his colleagues launched an effort to map out southern Africa’s Okavango Delta, the largest undeveloped river basin in the world. Navigating territorial hippos and incendiary landmines in dugout canoes, they explored all of the Okavango River’s major tributaries. With a team of scientists, they’ve conducted detailed surveys of the 4,000 miles of what’s called the Okavango-Zambezi Water Tower and they’re currently working to establish a government system to preserve it. Boyes urges us all to act now — not a few months from now or a few years from now — to preserve the earth’s remaining wild spaces. “Preserving wilderness is far more than simply protecting ecosystems that clean the water we drink and create the air we breathe,” he says. “Preserving wilderness protects our basic human right to be wild, our basic human right to explore.”
In a puzzling galaxy far, far away … As far as we know, the universe houses more than one trillion galaxies, most of which are spirals like our own Milky Way. However, there are other types of galaxies and scientists are still trying to grasp how they form and evolve. Hoag-type galaxies — symmetrical circular rings with nothing visibly connecting them — were believed to be the most uncommon until University of Arizona astrophysicist Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil and her team discovered the rarest celestial event they’d ever seen. Now named Burçin’s Galaxy, it was first thought to be a Hoag-type galaxy until close study revealed it to have an outer ring and a reddish second inner ring. “There is no known mechanism that can explain the existence of an inner ring in such a peculiar system,” Mutlu-Pakdil says. “Discovery of such rare galaxies tells us that we still have a lot to learn, and we should keep looking deeper and deeper in space and search for the unknown.” (Okay, a new item to add to bucket list: “discover a galaxy and have it named after you.”)
Promoting civilian-centered security. Nearly two decades have passed since 9/11, and in its wake, countless policies have been written and implemented, ostensibly designed to bolster security. But have the policies actually made us more secure? No, according to international security researcher Benedetta Berti, a TED Senior Fellow. Too often, officials have viewed global security as a zero-sum game and that the only way to become safer is by compromising on human values and rights. “This narrative is flawed and, worse, counter-productive,” says Berti, fueling a never-ending cycle of conflict, trauma and radicalization. The alternative proposed by Berti: shift away from a primarily military approach and toward a sustainable focus on protecting civilians and building lasting peace. For example, she explains,“the generational impact of having millions of Syrian children growing up out of school and knowing only war and conflict is more dangerous to stability than all of ISIS’s weapons combined.” By shielding everyone from violence and ensuring that their lives can be lived in dignity, Berta says we can succeed in creating a stable future for all.
Empowering and educating people to stop fake news. “Fake news is not only bad for journalism,” says Ukrainian editor Olga Yurkova, “It’s a threat for democracy and society.” In 2014, she and a group of journalists launched a website called StopFake.org, which investigates and exposes biased, inaccurate reporting. Since its launch, StopFake has taught more than 10,000 people how to spot fake news and trained fact-checkers around the world. There are two easy ways we can all make sure we’re not reading (or sharing) untruth, according to Yurkova. First, be skeptical when you come across a story that is exceptionally dramatic, captivating or clickbait-y; the truth is often not that exciting. Second, don’t simply accept what you read; double-check the facts by consulting other sites and Googling names, addresses and authors. After all, “our society depends on trust — trust in our institutions, in science; trust in our leaders; trust in our news outlets.” Yurkova says. “And it’s on us to find a way to rebuild trust because fake news destroys it.”
Designing for equity and justice. Discrimination, racism, sexism and even poverty don’t just happen by chance, says Antionette Carroll, a St. Louis-based social entrepreneur. They tend to be supported by systems that were created by people in order to exclude others. “Designers such as myself have started to realize that if these different forms of oppression are by design, then they can be redesigned,” adds Carroll. After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and the ensuing unrest, Carroll established the Creative Reaction Lab to attempt to dismantle systems of inequality. Her nonprofit trains black and Latino youths to be what she calls “equity designers”: individuals who are embedded in the community that they want to change and who use existing resources and good design practices to transform it. For example, they recently explored how the absence of public transportation has affected the lives of lower-income Black community members in St. Louis. Carroll asks, “How do we design a world that provides people with the resources and opportunities needed for them to be their best — and authentic — selves without judgement and hate?” We can’t wait to see what she comes up with.
The human price of cheap migrant labor. Think about any news footage you’ve ever seen of immigration discussions in government bodies around the world, and then ask yourself: which of the parties involved is not the room? “What often is missing in the global debate over refugees, migrants and immigrants — voices of the disenfranchised,” says investigative journalist Yasin Kakande. He chronicled the injustices and inequalities inflicted upon the African migrant labor force in the Middle East until his muckracking writing caused him to be forced out of Dubai and deported to his native Uganda. Unable to give his talk on the TED2018 stage in Vancouver due to his asylum application status with the US, Kakande delivered an impassioned message via video urging open discussion between migrants and political leaders. He calls for the drum beat for justice and opportunity to never cease. As he declares, “a hashtag, an op-ed, or an online petition — all admirable for at least acknowledging the problem — nevertheless is still impotent until it is delivered so consistently, so loudly and by such voluminous numbers that the penetrating disinfectant of bright sunshine compels the problem to be confronted and resolved once and for all.”
Signaling the immune system to assist healing. What if you could take a pill that enabled you heal like Wolverine? Kaitlyn Sadtler, a tissue engineer and immunologist at MIT, is striving to make such super-healing a reality. “Just like vaccines instruct our body to fight disease, we could instead instruct our immune system to build tissues and more quickly heal wounds,” she says. When looking at materials used to regrow muscle, Sadtler and her team found a large number of immune cells at the site of muscle injury. Helper T cells, one particular type of immune cell they discovered, turn out to be critical for wound healing and promoting muscle cell regrowth without nasty complications like scar and fat tissue. Now Sadtler is trying to devise materials or scaffolds that could give our bodies the signals to generate new tissue by changing our immune response. When a scaffold is placed in the body, the body’s immune system modifies the local environment of cells and proteins and affects how and what new cells are generated. As a result, different kind of scaffolds could initiate different immune responses, enabling researchers to conduct what Sadtler calls “an orchestra” of different wound-healing signals. With this kind of technology, she hypothesizes, “in the future, we could see a scar-proof bandaid, moldable muscle fiber, or even a wound-healing vaccine.”
Alleviating the energy burden. Nearly every month, millions of people in the US face an impossible choice: pay for energy, or go without medicine or food. While the average American spends 3 percent of their income on energy, low-income and rural populations may spend as much as 30 percent. With her nonprofit Renewable Energy Transition Initiative (RETI), North Carolina sustainability expert DeAndrea Salvador is working to prevent individuals from having to choose between necessities. RETI is engaging in a multi-pronged strategy to address the home-energy affordability gap in North Carolina: connecting neighborhoods to community solar power; spearheading community-led research and installation programs to make homes more energy-efficient; and working with elected officials to advocate for more equitable energy pricing. Salvador is determined yet optimistic: “I know high energy burdens are a tremendous barrier to overcome, but through relationships with communities and technology, we have the paths to overcome them.”
Humans and glaciers belong together. After witnessing the awe-inspiring Northern Lights from a hole in an Icelandic glacier, glaciologist M Jackson realized the ways in which glacier landscapes profoundly impact people. “Where there are glaciers, there are people, and the two have been influencing each other for the entirety of human history,” she explains. “But today, we know so little about people and ice because in science we have continuously separated the two.” The field of glaciology tends to take an exclusively scientific approach that focuses on measuring and predicting the recession of earth’s 440,000 glaciers, and as a result, individuals and communities are left out. Instead, Jackson advocates for taking a more inclusive, big-picture approach to studying glaciers. She says, “If we want to understand what is happening our world today, to us and this planet we live on, as our ice is melting, we need to start looking for the whole picture.” The changing landscape of glaciers is already impacting communities around the world from Iceland to Pakistan. She concludes that, “When we look at people and ice together through different times, and scales, and geographies, we start to see immense glacier diversity influencing immense human diversity. We start to get a whole new picture of our history, our adaptability, and our future”.
The invisibility of our oldest adults. Although aging is an inevitable condition, senior citizens are often overlooked and forgotten in our communities. Los Angeles-based photojournalist Isadora Kosofsky, who specializes in her deeply immersive work, spent four years in the lives of Jeanie, Will and Adina. The trio are a senior-citizen threesome or “throuple,” bringing to light a relationship that was borne from the participants’ need to shield themselves from the loneliness of aging. She realizes that her subjects are off-putting to some viewers, but she believes the emotions she’s spotlighting are as universal as aging. “Beyond challenging sociocultural norms about the elderly, the trio sheds light on a fear of remoteness,” says Kosofksy. It’s a feeling we can recognize from another confusing time in our lives: adolescence. No matter our age, we crave purpose and a sense of belonging, and perhaps the discomfort of a senior “throuple” lies in the the fact that it serves as a reminder to us all: “We may never reach the fantasy we have envisioned for ourselves,” she says.
Bringing transparency to air pollution. How often do you think about the air you’re breathing? Probably not enough, says Paris-based environmental tech entrepreneur Romain Lacombe. Air pollution is an insidious killer, causing as many as 7 million premature deaths around the world a year and costing the world economy up to $5 trillion. In the US, more people die from car exhaust than from car accidents. While urban monitoring stations provide accurate high-level pictures of air quality, the fact that pollutant levels change hour by hour and street to street makes them not so useful. Data is needed to help people figure out when and where to travel and which open spaces to play with their kids in. To this end, Lacombe and his startup Plume Labs have developed Flow, a wearable sensor that measures what you’re breathing, from nitrogen dioxide to particulate matter. A companion app makes the data actionable, tracking where and when you’re exposed to pollutants and allowing you to make informed decisions to avoid them. Lacombe’s hopes for the device are not restricted to an individual scale, however. In summer 2017, 100 volunteers used Flow to map air quality in 20 percent of central London. But what if we could map air quality around the world? From updated clean air policies to comprehensive environmental databases,a crowdsourced live-map of global air quality opens up endless possibilities. His intent, Lacombe says, is to build not just a device but also a community, one that’s empowered to make healthy choices.
A new vision for humanitarian aid. War-devastated communities around the world are being failed by a broken aid system. Local Syrian organizations deliver 75 percent of the humanitarian work, yet they receive less than 1 percent of the available aid budget, which goes to international NGOs instead. “Local humanitarians are the beacons of light in the darkness of war,” says Syrian-born anesthesiologist Rola Hallam, yet they have little of the equipment and resources they need to save lives. Through her start-up CanDo, Hallam is helping first responders in Syria by identifying trusted and effective nonprofit providers, helping them develop and grow, and connecting them with crowdfunding. One such campaign achieved a global first: the first-ever crowdfunded hospital. Since it opened a year ago, the aptly-named Hope Hospital has treated more than 15,000 children. “We need to support the people who are not only saving lives now”,” says Hallam. “They’re also the ones who are “stitching their wounded communities back together.”
Closing the session is “Blinky Bill” Sellanga with his original upbeat music, and the attendees exit dancing.
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