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TED's June Cohen reports via Twitter on the World Science Festival session "Greengenuity", where she's hearing from the screen designer for One Laptop per Child (the "$100 laptop"):

The OLPC gal is asked about the new ...
... touchscreen-driven design (from the wonderful Yves Behar)
An "oohhh" goes thru the crowd when she explains how the mesh network works, letting each laptop act as a relay point
She points out another advantage of it: the keyboards become software and not hardware, allowing for multiple languages

Now over to ecovative design
They do nature-based, low-tech, bio-tech solutions
Oh this is very cool. They get mushroom cells to absorb another type of material, and grow in a brick shape...
Instant organic styrofoam replacement!

Check out June's Twitter feed for more updates!

TED's Matthew Trost reports from this Saturday session of the World Science Festival:

Nobel Prize winner and cell biologist Paul Nurse moderates a discussion between the leader of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, physician and geneticist James Evans, and sociologist Nikolas Rose after an introductory piece of context by Misha Angrist, who recently had his genome sequenced and analyzed by private genotyping firms and is writing a book on it.

+ Francis Collins offered some explanation on the basics of genomics, namely what a genome is and what it does. He classifies the genome as basically an "instruction book." The human instruction book, printed on regular paper in a regular font size, would be as tall as the Washington Monument.

+ Drawing from Angrist's thoughts on trying to find some predictive value in what he learned from having his genome sequenced, James Evans puts forward a discussion on Alzheimer's -- the possibility of predicting one's own risk. He asks whether knowing one's chances is valuable, or whether it just needlessly damages people emotionally if they find out they're at high risk. He says there has to be a way of managing the public desire for the information with the possible personal consequences of getting it. He stresses: genomic "risk" stretches across one's whole lifetime.

+ Collins shares the results of a study in which one group was told their risk of Alzheimer's. Even if they had a high probability, it didn't ruin their lives. Instead, it helped them think more about preparing for the possibility.

+ Nikolas Rose objects to the definition of the genome as an "instruction book." He wants to "dethrone" genomics. He says "genomic metaphysics" has been creeping into science and public understanding. This is a misinterpretation of genetics. Genes are not the "source of who I am." There are lots of environmental factors that must be taken into account as well.

+ Everybody agrees that the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act that George W. Bush signed into law several days ago is a good thing.

+ Angrist weighs in: Genomics is not something we can "put back." He reiterates the need to manage it and teach people about the complexities.

+ Paul Nurse offers a philosophical question: what about determinism? Collins isn't impressed by questions on determinism. It's been an open question since long before genomics. James Evans, meanwhile, isn't convinced we have free will. The group agrees that changing the justice system based on the question won't work. Courts aren't standing for deterministic arguments as a criminal defense.

+ Collins: after all, half of all people in this audience have a genotype that makes them genetically predisposed by sixteen-fold more than the other half to commit crimes like murder. Those are the people with a Y chromosome -- males!

Photographer Robert Leslie shares more images from this weekend's World Science Festival in New York:

Vilayanur Ramachandran and Ray Kurzweil speaking on Humanity Now/Humanity Next on Thursday night:

TED's media director June Cohen, who's reporting from the WSF via Twitter:

More pics of the incredibly fun-to-watch Vilayanur Ramachandran:

Photographer Robert Leslie is shooting at this weekend's World Science Festival in New York. He shares these images of some TEDTalks favorites who are speaking at the festival:

The World Science Festival's co-founder, physicist Brian Greene:

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, talking about the next stages of humanity:

Inventor Saul Griffith, holding a few of the Potenco pull-cord generators that power the One Laptop per Child's XO Laptop:

Look for more images and reports throughout the weekend.

In this country, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has designated 23 species as endangered or threatened. Butterflies play a key role in plant reproduction, transporting pollen from flower to flower. They provide food for birds and other insects.

From Not Exactly Rocket Science, here's a thoughtful report on a new fMRI technique that -- 70 percent of the time, anyway -- can tell what noun a person is thinking of:

Tom Mitchell and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University [used] a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualise the brain activity of nine volunteers, as they concentrated on 60 different nouns. This 'training set' consisted of five words from each of 12 categories, such as animals, body parts, tools and vehicles.

The technique Mitchell's team used is of interest to word nerds:

Mitchell analysed how these words are used with the help of a "text corpus", a massive set of texts containing over a trillion words. A text corpus reflects how words are typically used in the English language. Linguists have used these tools to show that a word's meaning is captured to some extent by other words and phrases that it frequently appears next to.

With the corpus, Mitchell worked out how often the 60 nouns occur next to 25 verbs, including "see", "hear", "taste", "enter" and "drive". All of them are related to sensation and movement because other studies have suggested that objects are encoded in the brain in terms of how you sense them and what you can do with them.

View the word analysis behind the study >>
Read the abstract of the paper "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns" >>
Read the full blog post from Not Exactly Rocket Science >>

Meanwhile, in the latest Wired, psychiatrist Daniel Carlat looks at other fMRI "mind-reading" applications that purport to find psychological states -- like love, lying and OCD.

Around the world right now, one billion people are trapped in poverty by a simple piece of bad luck: being born in a poor country. What makes countries chronically poor? How can we help raise living standards for the "bottom billion" who live there? Economist Paul Collier lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor -- and makes a compelling case that we must. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 16:55.)

Watch Paul Collier's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Read more about Paul Collier on TED.com.

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If you've seen Wade Davis's unforgettable 2004 TED Talk -- where he evokes the magic of the world's cultural diversity, and speaks so eloquently about the alarming rate with which cultures and languages are dying -- then you might find this photo as heart-stopping as I did.

It's so surreal, I thought at first it must be a hoax. But Reuters just picked the story up, and I'm going to assume they did my fact-checking for me. The photo shows members of one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes, who were spotted and photographed from the air in a remote corner of the Amazon rainforest near the Brazil-Peru border.

Survival International, an advocacy group for tribal people, released the photos on their website and quotes Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior, who works for the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department: "We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist ...This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence."

"What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilized' ones, treat the world," Meirelles said.

Apparently, more than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, with half living in Brazil or Peru. Extraordinary.

TED's own June Cohen is Twittering from the World Science Festival's session "Illuminating Genius: Unlocking Creativity." From her feed:

Bill Jones makes this lovely statement that he believed creative breakthroughs happen between people, when people work collaboratively ...

There's something invisible that happens between people, he says.

Side note: I believe, but cannot prove, that that statement is true in many, many ways

Read more notes from this event here >>

All through this weekend, the TED staff will be blogging and Twittering from select events at the World Science Festival. Send us your reports as well, to contact@ted.com!

Pessimists, mark your calendars: July 17-20 comes the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference at the University of Oxford. The conference aims to open dialogue about the greatest threats to human survival now and into the future. It is curated by the Future of Humanity Institute, whose director is TEDster Nick Bostrom. Among the discussion topics:

+ Advances in nanotechnology leading to radically enhanced intelligences, environmental degradation and social disruption

+ Helpful breakthroughs in biotechnology being mismanaged, leading to the production of biological weapons

+ Objects from outer space colliding with Earth, causing horrendous damage on a continental or global scale

+ Cosmic expansion, entropy and the subsequent darkness that may envelop our universe over trillions of years

At TED in 2005, Bostrom outlined some of humanity's biggest problems -- including death ("most humans who have ever lived have died") and total extinction -- and pointed out that most of such risks are neglected in serious discussion. He recently published a paper in MIT's Technology Review arguing that finding extraterrestrial life would not augur well for humanity.

(Announcement via Accelerating Future.)