Announcer ted talks science and wonder was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. Please welcome your host, baratunde thurston. [applause] welcome to the town hall theatre in new york city. I am so excited to be hosting ted talks live brought to you by pbs here tonight. Now, one of the reasons im excited is because of tonights theme, science and wonder. Your minds are going to be blown tonight, and with it being a ted audience, that means there are several neuroscientists here to repair any damage that is done by those blown minds. These talks in this program, theyre about magic and the making of magic, and i cant think of a more magicmaking company than pixar. We have with us tonight the director of photography and lighting for pixar, and, yeah, she is as cool as that job title sounds, so please give a warm ted welcome to danielle feinberg. [applause] when i was 7 years old, some wellmeaning adult asked me what i wanted to be when i grow up. Proudly, i said, an artist. No you dont. You cant make a living at that, he said. My little 7yearold picasso dreams were crushed, but i gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, but i could never quite let go of that dream of being an artist. I have always loved math, science, and, later, code. I love programming so much, i studied Computer Science in college. In my junior year, my Computer Graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. It was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. As i watched those films, i fell in love, i was transfixed. That is what i want to do with my life. The idea that all the math, science, and code i had been learning could come together to create these worlds, characters, and stories that i connected with was pure magic for me. Just two years later, i started working at the place that made those films, pixar animation studios. It was here i learned about the process of making the films. To create the films, we build a 3dimensional world inside the computer, so we start with a line that makes a face that makes a character or a tree and rocks that eventually become a forest, and because its a 3dimensional world, we can move our camera around in it. I was fascinated, but then i got my first taste of lighting. Theres this moment in lighting that made me fall totally in love with it, and its the moment where we go from this. To this. Its the moment where all the pieces come together and the world comes to life, as if its an actual place that exists. This moment never gets old, especially for that little 7yearold girl that wanted to be an artist. As i learned about lighting, i learned how to use lighting to tell the story, how to set the time of day, how to create the mood, how to guide the audiences eye, how to make a character look appealing or show up in a busy set. Did you see walle in there . There he is. You can see we can create any world we want inside the computer. We have complete artistic freedom. While this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom can create chaos, implausible worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience, so to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. We have science and the world we know as a backbone to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. Finding nemo is a great example of this. Most of the movie takes place underwater, but how do you make something look underwater . In Early Research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage and recreated it in the computer, and then we broke it back down to figure out which elements make up the underwater look. One of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water, so we coded up a light that mimics this physics first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. Objects close to the eye have their full rich colors. As light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths. In this scene, you can see two important elements. The first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. The second is the caustics. These are the ribbons of light like you might see on the bottom of a pool that are created when the sunlight bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the waters surface. In this scene, you can see the fog beams. These give us color depth cues, but they also orient us to which way is up in shots where we cant see the water surface. The other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics, so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle magical sparkle to the underwater. You can see how we use science, the physics of water, light, and movement to tether that artistic freedom, but were not beholden to it. We considered each element and decided which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to help tell the story or set the mood. So we realized early on with color we had a lot of leeway. This is a fairly traditional underwater look. Here we can push it very green in Sydney Harbour to suite the sad mood of whats happening. In this scene, we need to see deep into the ocean so we understand what the east australian current is that the turtles are diving into and going on this rollercoaster ride. So we push the visibility of the water well past anything that you would see in real life, because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world, were trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story. We use science to get something wonderful, and we use storytelling and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. Theres a beauty in these unexpected moments. The jellyfish scene in finding nemo was one of those moments for me. There are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. This was one of those scenes. The director had a vision for it based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the south pacific. As the scene floundered, the reviews with the director turned away from the normal look and feel conversation and into far more questions about numbers and percentages. That scientific tether was strangling the scene. But even with all the frustration, i knew it could still be beautiful. When it came in to lighting, i dug in. As i worked to balance the pinks and the blues, those caustics dancing on the bells of the jellyfish, the undulating fog beams, something promising started to appear. One morning i came in, and i got excited, checking of the previous nights work, and then i showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. And soon, i was showing the jellyfish to the director in a dark room full of about 50 people. So i gave my intro, and i showed the jellyfish scene, and the director was silent for an uncomfortably long time, just long enough for me to think, oh, no. This is doomed. And then he started clapping, and the production designer started clapping, and then the whole room was clapping. This is the moment in lighting that i live for when all the pieces come together to create a world that we can believe in. We used math, science, and code to create these amazing worlds. We use storytelling and art to bring them to life. This interweaving of science and art elevates the world to a place of wonder with soul, a place we can believe in, where the things you imagine become real, in a world where suddenly a girl realizes not only is she is a scientist, but shes an artist. Thank you. [applause] radiolab has some of the best science stories in recent memory, and its no surprise that the team that puts them together is as talented as they are curious and eclectic. We are lucky to have one of them here with us tonight. He is the director of research, holds a ph. D. In the history of science, and has something very special to share with all of us tonight. Please provide a warm welcome to latif nasser. [applause] so this is a story about how we know what we know. Its a story about this woman, natalia rybczynski. Shes a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff, or in her own words rybczynski yeah, i had someone who called me dr. Dead things. And i think she is particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the Arctic Circle in the Remote Canadian tundra. In 2006, she was at a dig site called the fyles leaf bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the Magnetic North pole. Rybczynski its not going to sound very exciting because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your gps and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil. And at some point she noticed something. Rybczynski rusty, kind of rustcolored, about the size of the palm of my hand. It was just lying on the surface. Nasser and at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because thats the sort of thing people had found at the fyles leaf bed before, prehistoric plant parts, but that night, uh, back at camp. Rybczynski when i get out the hand lens, maybe im looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesnt quite look like this has tree rings. It looks really like bone. Huh. So over the next 4 years, she went to that spot over and over and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, and she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Rybczynski its broken up into so many little tiny pieces. Im trying to use sand and putty, and its, like its not looking good. So finally we had a 3d surface scanner. It turns out what she had was a tibia, a leg bone, and more specifically, a tibia from a cloven hoofed mammal. Rybczynski the size of this thing, it was huge, just a really big animal. So what animal could it be . Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in colorado, and they had an idea. Rybczynski we took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell. It smelled like singed flesh, a smell that natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab. Collagen. Collagen is what gives structure to your bones, and usually it breaks down after so many years, but in this case, the arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it. Then a year or two later, natalia was at a conference in bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named mike buckley was demoing this new process that he called collagen fingerprinting. So she shipped him a fragment, uh, fedex. Rybczynski i mean, you know, you want to track it. [laughs] its kind of important. Nasser and he processed it and compared it to 37 known and modern day mammal species, and he found a match. Uh, it turns out that the 3. 5millionyearold bone that natalia had dug out of the high arctic belonged to. A camel. [laughter] rybczynski im thinking what . Thats amazing, right, if its true. The size of the bone that they found was such that it meant that this camel was 30 larger than modern day camels, so, uh, this camel would have been about 9 feet tall, weighed around a ton. Natalia had found a giant arctic camel. [laughter] so how on earth would one of these guys end up in the high arctic . Well, scientists have known for a long time that camels are actually originally american. [guitar playing beginning of star spangled banner] yeah, so they started here. For 40 of the 45 million years the camels had been around, you could only find them in north america. And then about 3 to 7 million years ago, one branch of camels went down to south america, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over to the bering land bridge into asia and africa, and then around the end of the last ice age, north american camels went extinct. Scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesnt fully explain how natalia found one so far north. How is it that one of these saharan superstars survived these arctic conditions . So natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer, and its kind of brilliant. What if those broad feet were not meant to tromp over sand, but to tromp over snow, like a pair of snowshoes . What if that hump which huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat was there to help the camel get through that 6monthlong winter when food was scarce, and then only later, long after it crossed over that land bridge, did it retrofit those winter features for a hot dessert environment . Like, the hump may be useful in hotter climates because having all your fat in one place, like a, you know, fat backpack, means that you dont have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body, so it helps heat dissipate easier. Its this crazy idea that what seems like proof of the camels quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its high arctic past. For me, its a story about us, about how we see the world and about how that changes. So i was trained as a historian, and ive learned that actually a lot of scientists are historians, too. They make sense of the past. Rybczynski we make up stories, and we stick with it, like the camel and the desert, right . I mean, that thats a great story. Its totally adapted for that, clearly it always lived there, you know. Nasser but in this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd dr. Seusslooking creature looks the way it does, andand for me, it completely upended the way i think of the camel. Itit went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment to being like this this world traveler thatthat just happens to be in the sahara and could end up virtually anywhere. [applause] this is azury. Uh, youre lucky because shes actually on a break from her regular gig at the radio city music hall. [laughter] and thats not even a joke. Um, iall of a sudden i have the feeling that no one is going to listen to single word i say because im standing next to a camel. Um, but azury is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. It requires our willingness to readjust, toto reimagine. [laughter] because at any moment at any place, were all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew. Thank you very much. [applause] so that happened. [laughter] were going to bring you our first film from the evening, and this film by Denise Zmekhol and max salomon is about a bridge to the future. Laarman think about what a spider does. A spider starts from nothing, and it starts weaving its web. If you dont know how a spider came to be able to make a spider web, its like magic, but its basically evolution at work. It was programmed by evolution, and we can do exactly the same with a robot. Im joris laarman. I wouldnt consider myself just a designer; im more of a conceptual thinker. We are, at the moment, at the beginning of a new technological revolution, something that is as big as the industrial revolution. This robot is our spider, and now all we have to figure out is how to breathe life into that thing. Its a form of hacking. We started couple of years ago when i had the crazy idea to strap a welding gun to a robot, and we could print like drawing in midair. The way a spider weaves with a silk thread, a robot weaves with metal. By inserting smart software, it starts to become smart, it starts to think. It starts to teach itself how to print. Its going to be a totally adaptive autonomous system. We know a little bit about what the robots able to do, enough to say we are going to build a bridge. In design history, bridges are usually the most complicated things people can make, sort of the edge of what a civilization was capable of in terms of technology. The bridge is highly challenging. Thats the reason why nobody did it before. But if it works, there is a huge world of opportunity to dive into. In the future, the world will be built by robots like this one. By experimenting over and over again, you get better at it. If youre good at it, and you develop it to perfection, it looks like magic, but its evolution at work. [applause] thurston coming up, we have a talented individual. You look at his wikipedia page, hes got enough accomplishments to cover an entire graduating class. Please give it up for juan enriquez. [applause] so theres an actor called dustin hoffman, and years ago he made this movie, which some of you may have heard of, called the graduate, and theres two key scenes in that movie. The first one is a seduction scene. Im not going to talk about that tonight. [laughter] the second scene is where hes taken out by the old guy to the pool, and as a Young College graduate, the old guy basically says one word. Its plastics. And the only problem with that is, it was completely the wrong advice. [laughter] so Silicon Valley was just being built in 1967 when this movie is released, so had the graduate heard the right one word, maybe he would have ended up on stage, maybe with these two. [laughter] so as youre thinking of that, what word of advice would you give people . I think the answer would be lifecode. Lifecode is the various ways we have of programming life, so instead of programming computers, were using things to program viruses or retroviruses or proteins or dna or rna or plants or animals or a whole series of creatures. And as youre thinking about this incredible ability to make life do what you want it to do, what its programmed to do, what you end up doing is you end up taking what weve been doing for thousands of years, which is breeding, changing, mixing, matching all kinds of life forms, and we accelerate it, and this is not something new. The difference today, to pick a completely politically neutral term, is. [laughter] were beginning to practice intelligent design, and that means that instead of doing this at random and seeing what happens over generations, were inserting specific genes, were inserting specific proteins, and were changing lifecode for very deliberate purposes, and that allows us to accelerate how this stuff happens. Let me just give you one example. Some of you occasionally might think about sex. [laughter] and we kind of take it for granted how weve changed sex, and whats happened with sex over time is normally sex equals baby, eventually, but in todays world, sex plus pill equals no baby. [laughter] and again, we think thats perfectly normal and natural, but that has not been the case for most of human history, and its not the case for animals, and what it does is it gives us control, so sex becomes separate from conception. Then weve been playing with stuff thats a little bit more advanced like art, not in the sense of painting and sculpture but in the sense of assisted reproductive technologies. Assisted reproductive technologies are things like in vitro fertilization, and when you do in vitro fertilization, what youre doing is youre separating sex, conception, baby, so youve separated the baby from the body from the act. Think about twins. So you can freeze sperm, you can freeze eggs, you can