Michael Metcalfe shares a shocking idea at TED@StateStreet: printing money to ensure we meet our goals for global aid.

“What corporate management team doesn’t say that they’re open to innovation?” says Michael Metcalfe, the senior managing director of State Street, the financial institution based in Boston.

In November, Metcalfe saw his company do something concrete about building a culture of openness among employees and sharing ideas across the organization. He found himself onstage in front of 350 of his colleagues at TED@StateStreet, delivering a talk on a daring idea: Governments should print money for aid to other nations. His talk, “We need money for aid, so let’s print it,” was published today on TED.com.

Michael Metcalfe: We need money for aid. So let’s print it.

Metcalfe was one of 12 State Street employees, from all levels of the company, who delivered talks at TED@StateStreet, one of our TED Institute events, a TED-curated program that unlocks good ideas from inside our partner organizations. At TED@StateStreet, themed “Forces of Change,” graphic designer Joe Kowan serenaded the audience and shared his foolproof method for beating stage fright. State Street’s chief analytics officer, Roger Stein, talked about mitigating risk in unexpected situations in his talk, “A bold new way to fund drug research.” And information security manager David Grady brought to life the corporate epidemic of overcrowded meetings with a wry sense of humor — and shared what can be done about it.

Building a culture of innovation is an important aspiration, especially given a recent Gallup poll that found that two-thirds of employees feel dispirited and disengaged at work. While stale attempts to boost employee engagement can leave people feeling cynical, authentic ones can reinvigorate a sense of mission in the workplace.

Alison Quirk, State Street’s Chief Human Resources Officer who also spoke at TED@StateStreet, lays it out this way: “We think about employee engagement in two ways: rational commitment and emotional commitment.” If someone feels like the company is good for their career, they are rationally committed. But emotionally committed employees feel that their work contributes to a shared higher purpose. These employees are more likely to pursue new ideas and they tend to be more productive. Their intellectual buzz attracts more talent to the company.

State Street wants to attract intellectually curious employees, because customers want to trust the person who takes care of their money. As Scott Fitzgerald, an audience member who works in client relations, says, “The value of something like TED@StateStreet is that we’re a people business. [Our clients] deal with our folks on a regular basis. To see State Street investing in their people like that is very positive.”

At the end of TED@StateStreet, Quirk says, she felt a new sense of appreciation for her colleagues: “This is just a cross-section of State Street,” she says. “These are just examples of the kinds of things that people are thinking about that are genius, that are funny, that are so obvious that I wish someone would do something about it.”

Kowan, whose talk earned him a standing ovation, says that beyond what he learned about delivering a great presentation, his talk “has given me a conversation starter with people in the company who I might not have talked to before, from executives to lower levels.”

State Street hopes that conversations like these – between departments and across organization levels – will lead to fresh thinking. After all, a company is more than just 29,0000 employees; it’s thousands of people with individual stories to tell.

Read more about the TED Institute »

Watch all the talks from TED@StateStreet »

At the latest TED@BCG event at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, a diverse range of speakers took on the theme “to boldly transform.” Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

The future is built by those who see opportunities for change and act on them. At TED@BCG — the latest TED Institute event, held on May 18, 2016, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris — speakers explored what it means to transform boldly. In three sessions of talks, curated and hosted by TED’s Editorial Director, Helen Walters, speakers shared insights about the future of our relationship with nature, the changing makeup of our organizations, the evolving interconnectedness of our economies and more, challenging preconceived notions and embracing change as the only constant.

After opening remarks from Rich Lesser, BCG’s president and CEO, the talks in Session 1 challenged us to look around to see how we might create change here and now, in our workplaces, teams and lives.

Develop a relationship with your curiosity. Not everyone has a friendly rapport with the question mark. Culture critic Laura Fox believes that to become intimately acquainted with knowledge, we must become comfortable with the words, “I don’t know.” By expressing ignorance and confronting our fear of judgement, she says, we can catalyze the painful, gritty task of admitting inexperience into growth — both personally and intellectually.

Want to get ahead? Be paranoid. Lars Fæste helps CEOs transform their businesses, and over the years, he’s noticed something troubling: Managers tend to settle with success instead of aggressively looking for ways to transform. With today’s unprecedented rate of change, transformation is the key to staying ahead of competition and volatile market trends. In other words, If it ain’t broke, fix it. “The paranoid, they thrive. Transformation is a necessity, not an option. Either you do it, or it will be done to you.”

Light made by bacteria. Designer Sandra Rey invites us to look to nature to find unique solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. As an example, she describes her own effort to change the way we produce light by using one of nature’s own superpowers: bioluminescence. Using DNA sequences ordered from DNA banks, Rey is developing a technology to create biological lamps by coding genes for bioluminescence in E.coli bacteria. These lamps could not only change the source of our light, says Rey, they could change the entire paradigm of light: how we produce it, buy it, distribute it, how we use it, and how we regulate it.

Sandra Rey wants to use bioluminescence to change the way we light our homes and cities. Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

The fourth manufacturing revolution. Imagine a world where you can buy a custom-made product that’s exactly what you want, with the features you need, the design you prefer, at the same price as a product that’s been mass-produced. According to industrial systems thinker Olivier Scalabre, a revolution in manufacturing will soon make that possible. Scalabre predicts that new convergences of industry and technology will boost worldwide productivity by a third — and will make consumer proximity the most important factor in manufacturing. “If we play it right,” Scalabre says, “we’ll see sustainable growth in all of our economies.”

Why we must safeguard interconnectivity. The 2008 global financial crisis left much of the world reeling — markets went under, millions of jobs were lost and economic security was deeply compromised — in only a few days. IMF economist Min Zhu urges us to open our eyes to the effects of globalization, and the idea that a country’s size does not equate to economic influence; a small blow in one country can cause lasting damage worldwide. Zhu asks that we protect international financial security by working to understand the complex world around us.

Hallucinatory art, created by a neural net. Can computers create art? Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a principal scientist at Google, where he works with deep neural nets for machine perception and distributed learning. Agüera y Arcas breaks down the equation of perception, showing how computers have learned to recognize images through an iterative process. But when you turn the equation around, asking the computer to generate an image using the same neural network built to recognize them, the results are spectacular, hallucinatory collages that defy categorization. “Perception and creativity are connected,” Agüera y Arcas says. “Anything able to do perceptive acts is able to create.”

What happens when computers learn to do art? Google’s principal scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas showed the TED@BCG audience how computers that were created to recognize images can also now create art. Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

In Session 2, speakers recognized that it isn’t enough to just acknowledge and anticipate the changes coming our way, but that we have to face them head on.

An Arab woman’s advice for fellow professionals. The poor, oppressed Arab woman — this tired and derogatory yet popular narrative doesn’t discourage Leila Hoteit. Instead, she uses it as fuel to prove that professional Arab women like her are their own role models, pushing boundaries every day while balancing more responsibilities than their male counterparts. Tracing her career as an engineer, advocate and mother in Abu Dhabi, she shares three lessons: Convert other people’s negative judgment into motivation, actively manage your life to leave work at work — and support fellow women instead of blindly competing against them.

Tracing her career as an engineer, advocate and mother, BCG partner and managing director Leila Hoteit shared three inspirational lessons for professional women. “Success is the best revenge,” she says. Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

A DNA revolution. Using DNA, we can create new medicines or make sure our food is safe to eat, but DNA technology has been confined to the ivory tower, until now. “We are living in the era of personal DNA technology,” says Sebastian Kraves, a molecular neurobiologist committed to bringing DNA analysis to the masses. From a truffle farmer analyzing his mushrooms to make sure they are not knockoffs to a virologist mapping the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Kraves shares examples of individuals using personal DNA technology to ask questions and solve problems in diverse fields and environments. “Revolutions don’t go backwards,” he says, and this one is “spreading faster than our imagination.”

Who says change needs to be hard? When transforming your organization, put people first. Change expert Jim Hemerling lays out 5 simple rules to convert company reorganization into an empowering, energizing task: inspire through purpose, go all in, enable people to succeed, instill a culture of continual learning and lead through inclusivity. By following these steps, he suggests, adapting your business to reflect today’s constantly-evolving market will feel invigorating rather than exhausting.

Dark and delicate, chaotic rumble. Classical pianist Naufal Mukumi centered Session 2 with a selection of pieces by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Opening with a dark and delicate melody, he slowly progressed to a chaotic rumble, expertly creating an elegant surrealist tone. Mukumi’s performance was a perfect, soothing intermission for an exciting session.

Naufal Mukumi performs a selection of works by Alexander Scriabin at TED@BCG. Photo: Richard Hadley / TED

The corporate immune system. “Where better to turn for advice than nature — that’s been in the business of life and death longer than any company,” asks BCG’s own Martin Reeves. In his second turn on the TED@BCG stage, Reeves identifies six features — redundancy, diversity, modularity, adaptation, prudence, embeddedness — that underpin natural systems, giving them resiliency and endurance. Applying these principles can mean the difference between life or death for a company too. But in order to think more biologically, we need to change our business mindset and focus less on goals, analysis, efficiency and short-term returns. We need to ask ourselves not only “how good is our game?” but “how long will that game last?”

The future of money. There’s no reason why a coin or a dollar bill needs to have value, except that we’ve decided that it should, says Neha Narula, director of research at the Digital Currency Initiative, a part of the MIT Media Lab. Money is really about the relationships we have with each other; it’s a collective story about value by society, a collective fiction. Analog money, like cash, and digital money, like credit cards, both have some built-in impediments that slow them down (like needing to print or mint hard cash). Now, with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Stellar, we’re moving towards a time of programmable money, where anyone can securely pay anyone else without signing up for a bank, asking permission, doing a conversion or worrying about money getting stuck. “Programmable money democratizes money,” Narula says. “By democratizing money, things are going to change and unfold in ways we can’t even predict.”

Finally, in Session 3, speakers laid down the gauntlet to status quo thinking, encouraging us all to do more in whatever ways we can.

A whole-body music composition. Producer, songwriter, beatboxer and vocal arranger MaJiKer uses his whole body to express himself through music. At TED@BCG, he premiered a new piece that combines piano (occasionally played with his foot and head) with beatboxing to craft a catchy, experimental composition.

Harnessing nature’s own designs. Unlike the mere 200-year timespan of modern science, nature has perfected its materials over three billion years, creating materials superior to anything we have managed to produce by ourselves, argues nanobiotechnologist Oded Shoseyov. Shoseyov walks us through amazing examples of materials found across the plant and animal kingdoms in everything from cat fleas to sequoia trees — and the creative ways his team is harnessing these materials for applications as widespread as sports shoes and medical implants.

Transforming the future of two million children. Education innovator Seema Bansal forged a path to public education reform for 15,000 schools in Haryana, India, by setting an ambitious goal: By 2020, 80 percent of children should have grade-level knowledge. The catch? The reforms must be scalable for each school, and function within existing budgets and resources. Bansal and her team found success in low-cost, creative techniques — such as communicating with teachers using SMS group chats — that have measurably improved learning and engagement in the past year.

The commodity of trust. “Every now and then, a truly stellar new technology emerges, and it always takes us to places we never imagined,” says blockchain specialist Mike Schwartz. We witnessed this type of revolution with the combustion engine, the telephone, computers and the Internet, and now blockchain promises to be the next to transform us. Blockchain will commodify trust in the way that the Internet commodified communication, so that “people with no knowledge of each other can interact with confidence and without relying on a trusted third party to do so.” But as with any new technology, there is a steep learning curve and it will take a lot of trial and error to make that future a reality, “In order to shape this future you need to participate. Those organizations that learn how to play in more open and collaborative ecosystems will survive and thrive. Those that don’t probably wont.”

A tiny forest you can grow in your backyard. Forests don’t only have to be far-flung nature reserves, isolated from human life. TED Fellow Shubhendu Sharma brings small, diverse forests back to urban life by flipping the script on engineering: Instead of taking natural resources and turning them into products, he engineers soil, microbes and biomass to kickstart nature’s uninhibited processes of growth. By mixing the right native tree species, Sharma has created 75 dense, thriving man-made forests in 25 cities worldwide.

Reinventing modern agriculture with Space Age technology. How will agriculture expand to feed our growing world in a way that doesn’t deplete resources? Lisa Dyson is working on an idea developed by NASA in the 1960s for deep-space travel — adapting it for use here on Earth. Dyson is using microbes called hydrogenotrophs — super-charged carbon recyclers that can produce nutrients in a matter of hours without sunlight and in small spaces — to create a virtuous, closed-loop carbon cycle that could sustain life on earth. These microbes can produce the building blocks of foods like pasta and bread as well as oils needed for industry. “Let us create systems that keep planet Earth, our spaceship, from not crashing, and let us develop ways of living that will be beneficial to the lives of the 10 billion that will be on this planet by 2050.”

Lisa Dyson wants to use super-charged carbon recycling microbes to change the way we feed the world. Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

Not to be outdone by the Time 100, the journals Foreign Policy and Prospect have together released a list of the Top 100 public intellectuals — with voting. Many TEDTalks favorites appear on the list, and you can help choose the eventual top 20 by voting for your very own top 5. From Foreign Policy‘s site:

Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.

TEDTalks speakers on this top 100 list include George Ayittey, Steven Pinker, Neil Gershenfeld, Malcolm Gladwell, Craig Venter, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Larry Lessig, Steven Levitt, E.O. Wilson, Dan Dennett and Bjorn Lomborg — and look for upcoming TEDTalks from others on this list, including Paul Collier, who spoke at TED2008 about “the bottom billion.”

See the full list of 100 >>

Image: Kelsey Flora, National Geographic Society

Why explore? Why leave the safety of the familiar for the dark and dangerous unknown? The answer is simple: We explore the outer reaches of space, the depths of the ocean and everything in between because they are there. If you have this insatiable curiosity and hunger for a new frontier — no matter your profession or vocation — you are an explorer.

Last week, TED Fellows Asha de Vos, Jedidah Isler, David Lang and Genevieve von Petzinger were named 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorers. This program recognizes explorers of all kinds — educators, storytellers, innovators and scientists alike — who are making a positive impact on the world. Each explorer is awarded $10,000 for their research that covers subjects such as ….

Stopping illegal wildlife trafficking
Turning recycled waste into construction materials
Cracking the dynamics of supermassive, hyperactive black holes
Cataloguing Ice-Age-old cave art
Using 3D surveys to study ancient Egypt
Creating underwater robots for citizen scientists

Read more about each TED Fellow included in this year’s Emerging Explorer class:

Asha de Vos (Watch her TED Talk) is a marine biologist who studies blue whales on the shores of her native Sri Lanka. She specializes in the “unorthodox” kind of whales: small pygmy blue whales that are 1.5 feet shorter than average, feed in warm tropical waters (instead of cold) and have their own distinct acoustic dialect. The northern Indian Ocean contains one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, which makes these whales especially vulnerable to ship strikes and pollution, threatening their survival. One of the biggest obstacles de Vos faces in protecting them? Lack of awareness: “The ocean is very much a vocational space and not a recreational space. The connection to and fascination about the ocean is largely missing,” de Vos says in conversation with Christina Nunez for National Geographic. “People from around the world, but mostly Sri Lankans, write to me and say, ‘I didn’t know we had whales in our waters.’”

TED Fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Asha de Vos. Photo: Bret Hartman

Jedidah Isler (Watch her TED Talk) is an astrophysicist who studies blazars (blazing quasars): supermassive, hyperactive black holes that weigh up to 10 billion times the mass of the sun. By looking at the physical mechanisms that spur their central jets — powerful particle streams that move at 99.99 percent of the speed of light —  she hopes to uncover some of the fundamental processes of the universe. Jedidah has another passion: increasing diversity in STEM (Watch her TED Talk on the subject). She advocates for early interventions to counteract structural disadvantage. “There are practices and traditions that are currently alive and well in our system that are designed to create an uneven playing field,” she says to Nunez. “I think a lot of things need to happen, from the very top in terms of institutional, systemic change all the way down to very simple family-level, neighborhood-level interventions that can help one find and persist on a path.”

TED Fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Jedidah Isler. Photo: Ryan Lash

David Lang (Watch his TED Talk) is a maker who wants to create a network of citizen ocean explorers. He co-founded OpenROV, a company working to distribute low-cost underwater robots, and OpenExplorer, a digital platform that allows anyone to document their own adventures. More important than tangible discoveries, Lang says, is fostering a spirit of adventure. “What’s really important to me is just people getting up to the starting line. More people getting that enthusiasm, building this confidence to start exploring,” he says to Nunez.

TED Fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer David Lang’s OpenROV underwater robot. Photo: Courtesy of David Lang

As a paleoanthropologist, Genevieve von Petzinger (Watch her TED Talk) is like an art historian who, instead of critiquing van Gogh, studies cave art from the Ice Age. In art-rock sites across Europe, von Petzinger looks at the often-neglected geometric shapes that surround images like animal drawings. She has the catalogued these oddly recurring shapes, creating the first-ever relational database that she hopes to make open source one day. Her studies, she says, may also help her understand exactly when in history humans like us became, well, humans like us. “200,000 years ago, there were people who looked like us and had our brain size, but they didn’t seem to quite be thinking like us yet. I’m trying to understand: When did these people truly become us, and how far back does that actually go?”

TED Fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Genevieve von Petzinger in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain. Photo: Courtesy of Genevieve von Petzinger

In her research, she also hopes to team up with David Lang to potentially explore art in ancient caves that are now under water.

Congratulations to Asha, Jedidah, David and Genevieve!

Parag Khanna speaks at TED2016 – Dream, February 15-19, 2016, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

It wouldn’t be a conference about dreams without an ode to John Lennon. In this session, we take a cue from his iconic lyric and imagine a world without borders. Get ready for talks on mega-cities and online museums, as well as on the global movement to end poverty, Islamophobia and climate change.

Recaps of the talks in Session 7, “Imagine There’s No Countries,” in chronological order.

Connectivity is destiny. Parag Khanna has brought a new map of the world with him to TED — one defined by connected megacities, not by political borders. “I want you to re-imagine how life is organized on Earth,” he says. “We can start by overcoming some ancient mythology.” That mythology — that geography is destiny — no longer applies because an equally powerful force, one of our own making, is sweeping the planet: connectivity. “We can no longer even think of geography as distinct from it,” Khanna says. “In fact, I believe the two forces are fusing together into what I call ‘connectography.’” This fusion manifests itself in massive investments in infrastructure and the construction of megacities — not dots on a map but vast archipelagos of development stretching hundreds of kilometers. “All of these networks are devoted to one purpose, mankind’s number-one priority in the 21st century: sustainable urbanization,” Khanna says. Transferring knowledge and policy between cities has started to reduce their carbon intensity, and it has the potential to make the world more peaceful. In Asia, the same countries that are building the world’s fastest-growing militaries are also investing billions in each other’s infrastructures and supply chains. “They are more interested in each other’s functional geography than in their political geography,” Khanna says. “By wrapping the world in such seamless physical and digital connectivity, we evolve towards a world in which people can rise above their geographic constraints.”

6 million pieces of art, free to view on your computer. It’s amazing to see masterpieces of art in museums: “When we get access to them, we’re blown away. We fall in love,” says Amit Sood. But for many in the world, it’s impossible to travel to Paris, London, New York and other cultural institutions. Instead, there’s Google’s Art Project, presented today by Sood with help from artist Cyril Diagne. In a joy-filled demo, Sood and Diagne zoom through 6 million images of cultural heritage in high resolution. They show the 211 Vincent van Gogh works in the database, zooming in the details of three versions of a bedroom, held in Amsterdam, Paris and Chicago; they show how, if you want to physically see all 500 Rembrandts in the system, you’ll need to travel 53,000 kilometers (and use 10 tons of CO2 emissions); they show a particularly fun application that captures a face and shows a portraiture match of angle and expression in real time. This project, says Sood, exists because, “You don’t really see kids excited about portrait galleries.”

Amit Sood speaks at TED2016 – Dream, February 15-19, 2016, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

The real representatives of Islam. Dalia Mogahed hopes that when people look at her in her headscarf, they see a social policy expert and woman of faith. But she knows that many see someone who is “oppressed, brainwashed, a terrorist — or just an airport security delay.” Mogahed says her decision to wear the hijab was “a feminist declaration,” and that putting the focus on her inside over her outside felt exhilarating. But then came September 11, 2001. “In a flash, someone else’s actions had turned me from a citizen to a suspect.” Mogahed is scared of terrorists too, but she stresses that the generalized fear of Muslims is not only unwarranted — but distracting and dangerous. “People talk about my community kind of like we’re a tumor in the body of America,” she says. If it’s malignant, remove it; if it’s benign, watch it carefully. “But Muslims like all other Americans aren’t a tumor … we’re a vital organ.” Mogahed points out that attendance at a mosque is actually associated with greater religious tolerance — and that the radicalization process begins with isolating people from their communities. “ISIS has as much to do with the Koran as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity,” she says. “We would be giving in to their narrative if we cast them as representatives of a faith of 1.6 billion people.”

A global network of engaged people. When Hugh Evans was in high school, he took a transformative trip to the Philippines, where he befriended a young man named Sunny Boy. Sunny Boy lived in a landfill, and one night Evans lay in the slum with him and his family on a concrete slab, half the size of Evans’ bedroom back home in Melbourne. “Why should anyone have to live like this when I have so much?” he thought. That empathetic teenager became the head of a movement that mobilizes the kind of person Evans calls a “global citizen,” “someone who self identifies first and foremost not as a member of a state, tribe or nation, but as a member of the human race.” The Global Citizen network is for people, says Evans, who want to make their social passion part of their identity. And it has clearly resonated with its tens of millions of members. Says Evans, “It’s not that people don’t want to act, it’s that they don’t know how to take action or think it will take no effect.”

Impossible isn’t a fact, it’s an attitude. Shortly after Christiana Figueres was tapped by the UN to lead its international climate talks following the spectacularly failed summit in Copenhagen in 2009, a reporter asked her if she thought we could ever get a global climate change agreement. Her response: “Not in my lifetime.” Find out how she overcame her skepticism and helped the world achieve the most important climate agreement in history in a full recap of her talk.

Dalia Mogahed speaks at TED2016 – Dream, February 15-19, 2016, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

Last week, TEDTalks celebrated our 50 millionth view by counting down the Top 10 TEDTalks of all time (so far) — and inviting people to share their own favorites. Here are a few:

My favorite is still Susan Savage-Rumbaugh and those bonobo apes.
— S.F., Boynton Beach, Florida

Stamets (mushrooms), Isabel Allende (passion), Dave Eggers (schools), and Ballard (ocean) — not to be missed.
— Marian Angele

Majora Carter’s talk on her environmental work in the Bronx.
— lydia chadwick

Majora Carter‘s is my absolute favorite!
— Ariel, a TED fan

I am dropping a line to say how much I enjoyed Aubrey de Grey’s speech on aging.
— Diana Pasley

I think Malcom Gladwell is that hidden gem.
— +Jono

I nominate Theo Jansen’s talk on creating new creatures as one of the “Hidden Gems.”
— Paul

If your own favorite TEDTalks aren’t on the Top 10 list yet — or you’d like to share your own hidden gems — write to us at [email protected] or post a comment.

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights.

A real-world test of basic income. Too often, humanitarian aid donations of food and materials, while well-intentioned, aren’t what the recipients actually need. But what about a different approach: giving people a basic income to spend however they like. GiveDirectly has announced plans for a pilot program for 6,000 rural Kenyans living in extreme poverty: cash transfers for 10 years, no strings attached. (The recipients, and the exact locations, are still being decided.) “Studies show school attendance and access to healthcare significantly improve when people receive cash. Recipients also tend to save or invest the money, which promotes income generation instead of reliance on food aid,” Lin Taylor writes for the Thomson Reuters Foundation News. (Watch former GiveDirectly COO Joy Sun’s TED Talk)  

The Food Revolution continues. On May 20, Jamie Oliver celebrated his fifth annual Food Revolution Day with an ode to the omelette. As he let chefs around the world take over his Facebook page with live demonstrations, he challenged food enthusiasts to create a recipe for a nutritious omelette that embodies their country. One food lover gave their omelette a Turkish spin with spicy sausage, while another created a “caprese omelette quesadilla” in honor of her Italian and Mexican heritage. (Watch Jamie’s TED Prize talk.)

Modern life’s toll on veterans of war. Sebastian Junger has put his life on the line to bring back reports from the front lines of wars around the world, but he stays closer to home in his latest book, investigating the challenges soldiers face when they return home. Out May 24, Tribe proposes that the challenges may not stem entirely from the war zones soldiers are coming back from, but also the societies they come back to. Junger’s proposition has startling implications not just for veterans, but for all of us, revealing an unexpected cost at the very heart of modern life. (Watch Sebastian’s TED Talk)

A citizen-funded star hunt. At TED2016, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian shared a tentative and surprising hypothesis: maybe the massive object –1,000 times bigger than the area of Earth — blocking light from star KIC 8462852 could, possibly, be an alien megastructure. Or a cloud of comets. Or something even weirder we haven’t seen yet. With the help of Planet Hunters, a group of citizen scientists who search for data patterns, Boyajian and her team got closer to cracking the mystery. Going further, she’s launched a Kickstarter campaign to help secure telescope time to unlock this curious secret about the most mysterious star in the galaxy. (Watch Tabetha’s TED Talk)

The history of the gene. The ability to read and edit genes is the culmination of centuries of thought, exploration and experimentation that began in the days of Aristotle. But the ability to do so asks as many questions as it answers about what it means to be human when we have the power to edit ourselves and the world around us. Released May 17, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book, The Gene, takes us on a journey back in time through the history of the gene, so we can look with clearer eyes to the future. (Watch Siddhartha’s TED Talk)

A poverty solution for America. On May 16, Acumen launched an initiative to tackle the problems faced by the 47 million Americans living in poverty. Founded by Jacqueline Novogratz in 2001, Acumen was among the first to fuse philanthropy and business, tackling poverty through investment in communities. Acumen will apply this model–honed by 15 years of experience–to address three areas of critical importance to America’s poorest people: health, workforce development and financial inclusion. (Watch Jacqueline’s TED Talk)

Acknowledgement of staggering achievement. On May 19, President Barack Obama awarded chemist and inventor Joseph DeSimone and biomedical inventor Robert Fischell each a National Medal of Technology and Innovation in the East Room of the White House. DeSimone has made numerous contributions to 3D printing, fluoropolymer synthesis, nano-biomaterials and green chemistry, among other fields. Fischell has invented medical devices like the rechargeable pacemaker, the implantable insulin pump and a neurostimulator that uses magnetic pulses to treat migraines. (Watch Robert’s TED Prize Talk and Joseph’s TED Talk).

The future of transportation is already here. Self-driving cars are the epitome of sci-fi dreams. But as David Pogue notes: many cars on the road already have self-driving features. In a Scientific American piece, Pogue walks through the features such as auto stop and go, parking assist and collision alerts that already exist. In another piece, Pogue investigates how self-driving technology, implemented in on-demand networks like Uber and Lyft, could revolutionize transportation and life in general. “Inexpensive robotic rides would mean there would be no particular reason to own a car. You’d never be late because you had to push the snow off the windshield or shovel your driveway… who will need driver’s ed or a driver’s license? And it won’t matter if you (or your parents) are too old, frail or disabled to drive; millions of homebound Americans will suddenly be liberated.” (Watch David’s TED Talk)

Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

We have all been there: standing in aisle five of the supermarket trying to decide which jar of mustard to buy. Do we go organic, or for the brand with whole mustard seeds? Or do we simply pick the one in the brightest yellow bottle?

In a fascinating talk at TEDxStanford, “Sometimes it’s good to give up the driver’s seat,” marketing professor Baba Shiv reveals that discomfort over making choices extends into medical decisions. Five years ago, Shiv’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“The most harrowing and agonizing part of the whole experience was that we were making decision after decision,” Shiv shares in his talk. “The wisdom of the ages is that when it comes to decisions of importance, it’s best to be in charge. But are there contexts where we’re far better off taking the passenger seat and having someone else drive?”

Shiv decided to test the theory on undergraduate students about to solve word puzzles. While one set of students was asked to chose between two teas — caffeinated or relaxing chamomile — the other group was told by the researchers which of the teas to drink. In the end, the students assigned a tea solved more puzzles than those who were given a choice. Shiv hypothesized that this is because making the choice allows a person to have doubt about their decision when faced with the prospect of immediate feedback.

Shiv’s thoughts on choice are counterintuitive. But his work is part of a growing body of research on choice. Below, more studies — many from TED speakers — which suggest that having a variety of options isn’t always what we need.

In a jam
TED speaker Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia University, performed a classic experiment in the realm of choice studies in 1995. In the study — which she describes in her TEDTalk “How to Make Choosing Easier” — Iyengar presented shoppers in a gourmet market with a display of jams. At times, the display showed 24 varieties. At others, it included only six. Iyengar found that, yes, 60 percent of customers found themselves pulled to the large display while only 40 percent stopped at the small one. But with 24 possible options, consumers questioned themselves and only 3% made a jam purchase. At the small display, nearly a third of consumers who stopped by bought a jar of jam.

The pasta problem
Malcolm Gladwell also thinks extensively about choice, and in his riveting TEDTalk “Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce,” he describes a visionary who anticipated Iyengar’s findings more than a decade before they were made. Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist turned market researcher, was asked by Prego spaghetti sauce in the early ‘80s to help them revise their product line. And thus Moskowitz headed out on the road with 45 pasta sauces, asking thousands of Americans to rate each one. But, using knowledge gleaned from working for brands like Pepsi and Vlassic Pickles, Moskowitz recommended that — rather than offering a large number of the top-rated varieties — Prego look for simple trends in the data. In the end, Prego added to a single variety to its product line — extra chunky. The company made $600 million by giving consumers a targeted choice rather than unlimited options.

Life and death decisions
Like Shiv, Iyengar recently moved her focus onto the weighty decisions made in hospitals. In her TEDTalk “Sheena Iyengar on the Art of Choosing,” she describes a study conducted on parents in both France and the United States who’d been faced with the horrible decision to take their infant off of life support. In the United States, this decision rests on the parents. However, in France, this decision is made by medical professionals. Iyengar and her fellow researchers looked at how the parents felt a year after in both countries. They found that while American parents harbored hugely negative emotions about the experience, the French parents were more able to reframe the tragedy with statements like, “Noah was here for so little time, but he taught us so much.” Still, American parents felt strongly that they would not have wanted their doctors to make the decision.

Financial times
In his blockbuster TEDTalk “Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice,” the Swarthmore College professor quotes a study conducted by Iyengar and Emir Kamenica.  The pair looked at the retirement savings choices made by half a million employees through the Vanguard Group. Analyzing the data, the pair found that for every 10 additional funds offered to an employee, the chances that an employee would invest in none of the above increased by 2.87%. Schwartz explained the significance in his talk. “With 50 funds to choose from, it’s so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you’ll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow,” he said. “By not participating, they are passing up as much as $5,000 a year from the employer.”

Mo’ money, mo’ problems
Schwartz mentions another favorite study in his talk, from independent analysis done by David G. Myers of Hope College and Robert E. Lane of Yale University. In looking at market data, the two found that — even though the gross domestic product had doubled in the United States over a 30-year period — the proportion of the population describing themselves as “very happy” had declined by about 5 percent. This doesn’t sound like a huge shift, but the translation shows the significance: when given far more choice in life, 14 million Americans reported feeling less happy than their peers 30 years before.

Some chewy food for thought this week on the Internets:

The host of the blog Ask a Korean! responds to a chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers that links culture to frequency of plane crashes. (Watch an unrelated talk from Gladwell here.) Read the original post here and some updates here, which includes Gladwell’s response to the criticism. [Ask a Korean!]

Being cynical is awesome, says Julian Baggini. It’s the optimists who are too cynical about cynicism. [Guardian]

The cultural divide isn’t between scientists and humanities scholars; it’s between farmers and everyone else. [Aeon]

With their astounding built-in compasses and clocks, other animals put human transportation methods to shame. Ugh, MTA. [Nautilus]

Elon Musk’s high-speed loop reminds us of the secret 30-year history of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. [Idle Words]

The TED community has been very busy over the past few weeks. Below, some newsy highlights.

121 years of celebrating art. Originally an art exhibition, the Venice Biennale is a tradition stretching back to 1895 and has expanded over the years to include events for music, theater, film, dance and architecture. Opening on May 28, the 15th International Architecture Exhibition is curated by Alejandro Aravena, winner of the 2016 Pritzker Prize. Under the theme “Reporting from the Front”, the exhibition will explore architecture’s importance beyond aesthetics and prestige, presenting its ability to address urgent human needs, a theme that is no surprise given Aravena’s career eschewing high-profile projects for those solving social problems. You can also find Vik Muniz’s arts-oriented school, built in one of Rio’s favelas and featuring artwork by fellow TED speaker JR, and Kevin Slavin’s art installation based on his research mapping the microbiomes of cities using bees. (Watch Alejandro, Vik, JR, and Kevin’s TED Talks)

Mental health and the global agenda. China and India are two of the world’s most populous countries, and both are in the throes of seismic demographic and epidemiologic shifts. Something else they have in common: less than 10 percent of people receive mental health care. A new series of studies, including Vikram Patel’s paper in The Lancet, explores the state of their mental health systems, and The New York Times draws on this latest research to highlight the international effort to put mental health at the center of the global health agenda. This effort could also involve collaboration with non-Western medical practices, including acupuncture, yoga and Ayurvedic medicine. (Watch Vikram’s TED Talk)

Trompe l’oeil. The Louvre Pyramid is an iconic Paris landmark, but to viewers between May 25 and June 27, it will seem to have disappeared. The Louvre invited street artist and TED Prize winner JR to cover the Pyramid in one of his photographic collages. It took several days and a crew of six to install the exhibition, which entailed pasting images of the buildings behind each side of the pyramid onto each glass side, so that the pyramid, viewed from the correct angles, would appear to vanish. The installation explores what the museum would look like without the pyramid, which was widely criticized upon construction but has become one of Paris’ most photographed landmarks. (Watch JR’s TED Talk)

An inside look at Uber surge pricing. It’s late, raining, and you just want to catch an Uber home, but a dreaded notification pops up that prices are surging, the bane of Uber users everywhere. On NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, Keith Chen, now the head of Uber’s Economic Research, enlightens listeners on the inner workings of surge pricing. Expect to learn things like why you may be more likely to take an Uber at 2.1x than 2.0x surge pricing, and why a rainy day may mean fewer taxis and more Ubers on the road. (Watch Keith’s TED Talk)

A prize for wooden architecture. Michael Green has won Canada’s Governor General’s Medal in Architecture for 2016. The award, one of 12 given this year, recognizes Green’s firm Wood Innovation and Design Centre and their innovative and sustainable forms of wood production. In Green’s TED Talk, he pointed out what makes building with wood so unique, “Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It’s Mother Nature’s fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment.” (Watch Michael’s TED Talk)

A humanitarian response to climate change. On May 20, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon announced that Mary Robinson and Macharia Kamau have been appointed Special Envoys on El Niño and Climate. The appointment comes on the heels of severe drought and flooding in regions of Africa, Central America and the Pacific caused by El Niño, and looming threats of severe weather events caused by climate change — and both will hit poor communities the hardest. As Special Envoy, Robinson will be able to continue her quest for climate justice. (Watch Mary’s TED Talk)

A web of crime in Rio’s favelas. In The New York Times Book Review, Edward Dolnick reviews Misha Glenny’s Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio, a true account of how an ordinary man became the king of Rio de Janeiro’s biggest slum and leader of a notorious drug cartel. Peeling back the layers of corruption and violence, Glenny chronicles a complex, twisting world with journalistic precision and care. “He is at his best in a quieter voice, sorting out why the police cannot simply swoop into a favela and arrest Mr. Big, and how street lookouts work and, especially, how a smart young Brazilian with a sick baby could transform himself into a crime lord,” Dolnick reflects. (Watch Misha’s TED Talk)

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