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, 2018, in Vancouver. Photo: Ryan Lash /TED

Forget those miserly folk who hoard their best for the last — TED believes in starting 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 countries. In this session, the 10 newest Fellows, and 4 Senior Fellows, took the stage in the 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 explore and protect southern Africa’s Okavango Delta, the largest undeveloped river basin in the world. Navigating territorial hippos and incendiary landmines in dugout canoes, they explored and conducted detailed scientific surveys of all of the major rivers in the basin. A group of 57 scientists is also exploring an area 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, but now 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 passionate talk, conservation activist Steve Boyes makes the case to preserve wild spaces — not just for the wild animals and plants that live there, but for humanity’s sake too. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

In a puzzling galaxy far, far away …  As far as we know, the universe houses more than one trillion galaxies, and most of them take the form of spirals like our own Milky Way. However, there are other kinds and shapes 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 type … 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 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 see 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, counterproductive,” says Berti, fueling a never-ending cycle of conflict, trauma and radicalization. The alternative she proposes: shift away from a military-first approach and toward a sustainable focus on protecting civilians and building lasting peace. By shielding everyone from violence and ensuring that their lives can be lived in dignity, Berti 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 about the Ukraine. 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.”

With her project StopFake.org, Olga Yurkova helps train people to avoid sharing viral untruths. She reminds us: Is that viral story in your social media feeds dramatic and emotional? It might just be clickbait, because “the truth is often not that exciting.” Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Designing for equity and justice. Discrimination, racism, sexism and 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 other people. “Designers such as myself have started to realize that if these different forms of oppression are by design, then they can be redesigned,” Carroll says. After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and the demonstrations and unrest that followed, 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, and then ask yourself: Which of the parties involved is not in 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 on the African migrant labor force in the Middle East — until his muckraking writing caused him to be forced out of Dubai and deported. Unable to take 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 help with healing. What if you could take a pill that enabled you to 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 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.”

Energy bills can consume up to 30 percent of the budget for a low-income family — forcing them to make impossible choices. DeAndrea Salvador works with families, politicians and researchers to help make energy more affordable and even more sustainable. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Humans and glaciers belong together. “Where there are glaciers, there are people, and the two have been influencing each other for the entirety of human history,” says glaciologist M Jackson. “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 — to focus on measuring and predicting the recession of Earth’s 440,000 glaciers. Jackson, though, advocates for a more inclusive approach; as 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. “When we look at people and ice together through different times, and scales, and geographies,” Jackson says, “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 older adults in love. LA-based photojournalist Isadora Kosofsky specializes in deeply immersive work, and onstage she shares the four years she spent documenting the lives of Jeanie, Will and Adina, a senior-citizen threesome, or “throuple.” Her warm photos of this loving relationship among seniors, she tells us, have been off-putting to some people: “Beyond challenging sociocultural norms about the elderly, the trio sheds light on a fear of remoteness,” she says. 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. Perhaps the discomfort of seeing a senior “throuple” lies in the fact that it serves as a reminder to us: “We may never reach the fantasy we have envisioned for ourselves,” as Kosofsky puts it.

Photographer Isadora Kosofsky spent four years documenting the lives of three older people in a romantic relationship. In her talk, she unpacks why the photos made some people uncomfortable. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

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, pollutant levels change hour by hour and street to street, making the stations not so useful in helping people figure out areas to avoid and which open spaces to play with their kids in. To that 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 information actionable, tracking where and when you’re exposed to pollutants and allowing you to decide how 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. 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. But they have too little of the equipment and resources they need to save lives. Through her startup CanDo, Hallam is helping first responders in Syria by identifying trusted and effective 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. “Local humanitarians have the courage to persist, to dust themselves off from the wreckage and start again, risking their lives to save others,” says Hallam, “and we can match their courage.”

Closing the session is “Blinky Bill” Sellanga. Thanks to his upbeat soundtrack, the attendees exit dancing.

From left, a sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica), a Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), and neuroscientist Greg Gage. All three of these creatures use electrical impulses to convey information within their bodies, but Greg Gage is the one who gets to explain that. He speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Do plants have brains? Well, no, but they’re certainly not dumb. And, in the case of the carnivorous Venus fly trap, plants not only move – and quickly – but can count. Neuroscientist and electrophysiologist Greg Gage takes the stage to demonstrate that plants, like animals, can use electrical signals to convey information and allow quick responses. He shows the action potential of Mimosa pudica, a plant whose leaves curl if you touch them, and whose branches fall if you tap them, possibly an insect-deterring response. The lesson? What muscles do for animals, water cells do for plants, receiving electrical signals that prompt movement. Next, a Venus fly trap. Gage touches the sensor hair inside the plant’s trap, its action potential spikes onscreen – yet it doesn’t close. Why? It takes a lot of energy for the plant to move, so it wants to be sure there’s a food in there before it invests. The plant “counts” 20 seconds, and will only snap shut only if it gets stimulated again within that time.

Reid Davenport wants more people with disabilities to make films — to make sure their voices and experiences get heard. He speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

When filmmaker Reid Davenport was denied participation in a study-abroad program due to his cerebral palsy, he spent three weeks exploring Europe instead, documenting his experiences with inaccessibility along the way. It turned out to be exhausting, but when Wheelchair Diaries finally screened, he knew it was worth the effort to help audiences empathize. Partly because of the physical rigors of filmmaking, people with disabilities are underrepresented in the industry, says Davenport. “But the different physicalities of people with disabilities are precisely why we need more filmmakers with disabilities.” He encourages doing whatever is necessary – even taping camera phones to wheelchairs – to imprint our unique physicality on screens big and small to make their voices and experiences heard.

Fish paleobiologist Lauren Sallan dives into hundreds of billions of years’ worth of fish fossils to follow the trail of evolution. She speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

“You are here because of golden opportunities made possible by mass extinction,” says Lauren Sallan, fish paleobiologist and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the fossil record to figure out why some species live and other species lose — or, as she wryly puts it, she knows how to make dead fishes talk. At her lab, she combs a 500-million-year database for evolutionary patterns, looking for major pathways of change throughout time. Take the Devonian period, some 360 million years ago. The ecosystem at the time was a crowded one in which strange creatures like armored predators and crablike fishes dominated. Meanwhile, our four-legged ancestors, the tetrapods, were struggling in the tropical river plains. Then there was a huge extinction event and 97% of species died. “What counted was what survivors did over the next several million years in that devastated world,” notes Sallan. “The former overlords should have had an advantage, yet they merely persisted for a while declining without innovating, becoming living fossils. They were too stuck in their ways and are now largely forgotten.” See a gallery from Lauren’s talk >>

In her music and film, Kayla Brië‘t works to tell the stories of her heritage and her own identity. She speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Kayla Briët was raised in multigenerational home of extended family. Her mother is Chinese and Dutch Indonesian, her father Ojibwe and an enrolled tribal member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi tribe. Being surrounded by this mix of cultures was her norm – but also confusing, she says. Seeking her own voice in the mix, she never felt “enough,” never felt fully a part of any community. She found her voice in music, making soundscapes as sonic portals of memory and emotion. Briët makes films to add a visual layer to her explorations – her latest documentary, Smoke That Travels, addresses her fear that her Native heritage will be forgotten due to forced assimilation and the loss of language. Now, wherever she travels, she meets indigenous people involved in similar struggles to preserve language and culture. “We are all storytellers,” Briët says. “Reclaiming our narratives – and listening to others – can create a portal that can transcend time itself.”

Biomedical engineer Elizabeth Wayne is working on a new way to bring cancer drugs to the places they need to go. She speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

We have the drugs to treat cancer — what we need is a better drug delivery system, one that doesn’t bypass cancer to kill healthy cells, or allow loss through the body’s natural processes. Biomedical engineer Elizabeth Wayne had an idea: immune cells already know how to travel to places of disease in the body. Why not add an extra passenger – a drug that can kill cancer? In her lab, Wayne creates nanoparticles out of the same materials as our cell membranes, and inserts a payload of Trial, a drug that kills cancer but not healthy cells. These nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream where they bind with immune cells, which carry the medicine to cancer cells. In her animal tests, this method killed more than 75 percent of the cancer cells, compared to 25 percent in control tests. This is great news for cancer research, but what’s even more exciting: using different combinations of medicines and molecules, this immune-cell delivery could someday be applied to any disease where immune cells are present – from unclogging artieries or to delivering wound-healing agents, or crossing blood brain barrier to treat Parkinson’s.

When journalist Anjan Sundaram reported on the war in the Central African Republic, he was struck by the silence around the conflict. The first question locals would ask him: “Do people know?” He tells their story at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Three years ago, journalist Anjan Sundaram traveled to the Central African Republic to report on its ongoing war. When he arrived there, he realized that he had come at a terrible moment: “I was witnessing the slow preparation for ethnic cleansing.” The Central African Republic, a nation of five million citizens, has experienced waves of violence since French colonial rule ended in 1960. When Sundaram was there, the conflict was between the minority Muslim government and citizen militias, who were mostly Christian. As he journeyed around the country via motorcycle, he was struck by the silence and desolation … and gradually realized, he says, “in a war zone, you know that you are near the killing when people have left.” Many residents had fled into the jungles, and when some emerged to speak to Sundaram, their first question to him was “Do people know?” He says, “The question surprised me. Their children were hungry and sick, but they didn’t ask for food and medicine. I became determined that this moment in their lives should not be forgotten.” The events that Sundaram experienced there still haunt him today. He continues to ask himself, “Why did I go there? Why did I put myself at risk?” His answer: “I do this work because I feel that ignored people in all our communities tell us something important about who we are.”

Every we learn more and more about the cells in our gut. Diego Bohorquez shares a recent discovery about how gut cells can smell, taste and even “touch” foods. He speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Did you know that the cells that line your gut can smell, taste and touch foods, using the same molecular receptors used by your nose, tongue and hands? Until now, it’s been thought that enderoendocrine cells – which Ecuadorian neuroscientist Diego Bohorquez calls gut sensors – communicated information to the brain via hormone signaling. But his recent studies are making us rethink how these cells interact with the body’s nervous system. After studying sensor cells for seven years using molecular tools, Bohroquez has discovered that they have a unique arm called a neuropod – a protrusion that appears to be able to make direct physical contact with neurons. In other words, communication might not be mediated through hormones but by forming a synapse – the difference between communicating via email and a handshake. This has implications for understanding how pathogens might pass from the gut to the brain, how our guts affect our dietary cravings, and might help us understand how we might use nutrients to treat the brain directly from the gut.

Wanuri Kahlu proposes a new rule for art about Africa — to step away from the over-serious focus and tell more than a single story. She speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu thinks that too much art in Africa has a political agenda – and what’s missing is art for art’s sake. So she proposes a new lens through which to view the continent: Afrobubblegum – “Fun, fierce and frivolous art in the name of all that is un-seriously African,” she says. “We’re so used to narratives out of Africa being about war, famine and suffering,” she says. “Where is the fun?” In her own films, she uses science fiction and fantasy to tell modern African stories – stories about Nairobi bands that want to go to space, about robots that fall in love, about girls who race camels or just want to dance. That’s not to say that Kahiu thinks issue-driven African art should go away – her first feature film From a Whisper covers the twin bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example. But Kahuri cautions that telling a single story about an entire continent is dangerous: “We should ask, are two or more Africans in this story healthy, not in poverty or need saving? Are they thriving, loving, enjoying life to the full? If we see such stories, will we think we are worthy of more happiness?”

Manu Prakash demos one of his cheap-and-cheerful inventions that allow people to do science for pennies. He speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

For inventor Manu Prakash, “frugal science” means creating affordable scientific tools that allow as many people in the world as possible to have the “Oh my god” moment – that spark of wonder and curiosity leading to a sense of empowerment to solve problems. The inventor of the Foldscope has already deployed 50,000 paper microscopes across 130 countries, building a community of people around the world who are sharing their discoveries online. Today, on the TED Fellows stage, Prakash introduces two more of his Stanford lab’s low-cost scientific tools. The first, a 20-cent paper centrifuge, is based on one of the world’s oldest known toy, the whirligig. Centrifuges are critical tools for diagnosing such diseases as anemia, malaria, HIV and tuberculosis; Prakash’s paper centrifuge uses the g-forces of the toy to separate blood cells from plasma, allowing health care workers to diagnose diseases in remote areas where such tools are most needed. More recently, he’s figuring out how to record the buzz of mosquitos with cell phones and upload the acoustic signature to a database, making it possible to identify mosquito species and map their location in real time – valuable information that could help prevent the spread of vector-borne diseases like Zika and malaria.

For her gorgeous photos, TED Senior Fellow Uldus Bakhtiozina creates costumes and sets and elaborate characters that build a fantasy world full of authentic detail. She speaks and shows her work at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

When Russian artist Uldus Bakhtiozina found herself in London, making ends meet by working as a waitress, she made life bearable by creating the character of a waitress, and pretended to be playing the character in a film. Now, as an artist, she invites the subjects of her elaborate photographs to play the same game: creating a fantasy life for them to occupy. She hand-creates sets, costumes, and even effects – nothing in her images is digitized. In other words, everything in this fantasy world takes place in reality, and part of the beauty of the process is the authenticity of making. Uldus works with people who live with adversity – such as one young woman whose health prevented her from being an athlete. Uldus photographed her as the warrior she wanted to be, and the image was exhibited in Milan to thousands of people, just before her death at the age of 22 of heart disease. “Reincarnation gives us the very real feeling of being important and powerful to influence our reality,” says Uldus.

Senior Fellow Negin Farsad shares her not-so-serious but also serious tips for fighting bigotry, stereotypes and agendas of hate. She speaks at TED2017, April 24, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

It’s not always easy to take our current president with a sense of humor, as Iranian-American comedian Negin Farsad knows. But she gives it a go. Here, a few rules of thumb for How to Make Jokes at a Tyrant – aka Rules for Schmyrants:

1. Never use their real name. Call him instead, say, “popular-vote-losing minority president Donny Twiimp.” At a loss? Visit Donnytwimp.com to access an exhaustive database of alternate names.
2. Undermine their stereotypes. For example, “Muslims: totally obsessed with Pop Tarts.” “Mexicans: annoyingly good at astrobiology.” “Women have blood coming out of their PhDs.” For more, visit Twitter bot @altstereotypes. Repeat aggressively.
3. Flip the script on the Baby Schmyrants – you know, the trolls who insist on calling you a Jewy McJewface when you are clearly a Muslim. Don’t fight. Just respond with a smiley face. “When they go low, we go emoji.”
4. Hit ’em in the coin purse. Taking a stand against Twimp’s agenda of hate, Farsad and her comedy partner Dean Obeidallah have launched the Boycotting Bigotry campaign, calling for boycotts of Trump interests, including his golf courses in Florida.
5. And finally, because nothing sucks the life force out of a schmyrant like seeing you have a good time: “Do all these things with a smile and wink. Have fun, because they hate that.”

Greg Gage left a career in engineering when he realized his real passion was for neuroscience. He creates kits to help spark this interest in kids, so they don’t “miss their calling like I did.” Many of the kits involve experiments with roaches. Photo: Courtesy of Daily laurel

Gage, a latecomer to science himself, is passionate about revolutionizing neuroscience education. His goal is to make research equipment previously only accessible in university labs available to teachers and home enthusiasts. Here, he tells the TED Blog about the evolution of Backyard Brains, his plan to create a class of independent neuroscience researchers and his home for retired cockroaches.

Tell us about your scientific background. Were you always passionate about neuroscience?

I was actually an engineer for many years. I made circuit boards. I had a nice job with a technology company and lived in Europe, where I was in charge of engineering for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South Asia Pacific. I always enjoyed science — I read Scientific American and science books, but I thought science was stuff that you learned in school. That it was made up of already-accumulated facts. I never realized that science was a career you could do — that you can actually get paid to make experiments, and understand how nature works.

That all changed when I attended an evening talk on astronomy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. After the lecture, I talked to the graduate students who presented, and found out this was their full-time job: making experiments, collecting data and writing results and papers. I realized: this could be me! I could actually become a scientist! So I quit my job and went back to grad school in Michigan. Meanwhile, everyone told me I was crazy to leave my well-paid and comfortable job.

What did you study?

I was a basal ganglia guy, studying deep brain structures. I recorded from the motor cortex, the nucleus accumbens, the striatum. I trained rats to do decision-making tasks. When they heard a tone, they’d go one way, and when I played another tone, they’d go another way. At some points, I’d play both tones at the same time to confuse them, and I’d observe which direction they chose. I’d use that data to look at brain cells. I recorded the spike trains from the cells, looking at the exact moment in which they were making the decision — then determine what cells were firing when, to get an idea of what the microarchitecture and microcircuitry of our brains are like.

We made some nice discoveries: we found that certain interneurons — which are missing in people with schizophrenia — fire really, really fast at the moment you’re making a decision. These cells seem to be suppressing unwanted decisions, and only allowing the ones that are the strongest to escape and be chosen. It actually fits pretty well with schizophrenia. This research was published in the journal Neuron, and was a fairly high-impact paper.

Backyard Brains offers low-cost neuroscience equipment and free online lessons and experiments exploring basic principles. This illustration is part of a lesson that goes with the Neuron SpikerBox, and explores how muscles and neurons work together. Image: Courtesy of Backyard Brains

Given my experience, I felt it was important to explain what scientific careers are, so young people wouldn’t miss their calling like I almost did. While I was in grad school, I did outreach. I’d visit schools with my neuroscience labmate Tim Marzullo to teach kids about how the brain works. We’d explain that there are really cool opportunities out there to study neuroscience. I used to tell kids, “If you like Sudoku, solving puzzles in general or building things, you’ll love being a scientist.”

Tim and I would enter these little competitions called “Brains Rule!” where we’d try to create better demos to get kids interested. That led to trying to bring what we did in our graduate research into the classroom, so kids could see more than just demos consisting of ping-pong balls as transmitters. Many science exhibits make science too “fun” so that it just becomes a game — and then kids leave without a real understanding of what the brain or neurons actually do.

In 2008, we identified this need to make it real. But we couldn’t bring in our equipment from the lab because it cost $40,000. We couldn’t bring our animals in, because that’s illegal. If someone wants to study the brain, they typically have to go to grad school — which is silly. This isn’t the case in other areas of science. You can study the planets or stars with a cheap telescope — you don’t have to get a PhD in astrophysics.

So we set about building what we called the “$100 spike” — inspired by Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop. Could we build neuroscience equipment rugged enough that students could use it, and cheap enough that schools could afford it? Six months later, we revealed our first prototypes at the Society for Neuroscience conference. We got some publicity. People started writing us, wanting to buy one. People loved the idea of making neuroscience equipment available to classrooms.

I was still writing my dissertation, recording data, training rats. I’d had a couple of high-profile publications, but never really received much feedback. On this little $100 spike project, Tim and I were getting emails all the time. I was learning in my research how the basal ganglia uses dopamine to change the probability of future behaviors. So it made sense that as we kept getting positive attention for the project — and none for our graduate school work — we decided to focus on this venture. We named it Backyard Brains.

Backyard Brains’ flagship product, the Neuron SpikerBox, is a “bioamplifier” that allows you to hear and see spikes of neurons in insects and other invertebrates. Priced at $99, it was inspired by Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop. Photo: Courtesy of Backyard Brains

We have a number of inventions. The first one was the Neuron SpikerBox, a kit that allows you to record the living brain cells of insects. The idea was to bring electrophysiology into the classroom. We demonstrated the process at TEDYouth: first you anesthetize the insect in ice water — which is the recommended way to do it, according to Vincent Wigglesworth, who published the standard paper on insect pain in 1980.

When the cockroach is anesthetized, we remove one of its legs, and let the leg warm back up so the neurons fire. We put the pins in the leg, which pick up the small electrical discharge from the spikes and amplify it — so you can hear it. Then you can plug it into your smartphone and can actually see, record and do data analysis on it.

With that prep, you can then carry out a dozen or so experiments. You can look at somatotopy — what do different parts of the legs encode, and what is the location of these neurons? This is very much like the different parts of our brain; our somatosensory cortex is laid out in certain ways, so that our fingers and hands are represented by large areas of the brain while the backs of our thighs are represented by a very small area of the brain. You can do that experiment in the cockroach leg, and actually figure out some of the representations of neurons in certain areas of the leg.

So can you tease out each one? Say, this neuron is about movement, and this one is about pain, and this one is about being touched?

It’s more about density and location. What’s important to the cockroach is in the tarsus and tibia areas — the hands. You can see a lot more dense representation of neurons there, while in the upper arm area you don’t see as much.

You can also do neuropharmacology — which is looking at how neurons respond to an increase in neurotransmitters. You can look at functional electrical stimulation, which is what’s used for treating people with stroke — basically, stimulating muscles using an electrical discharge. That’s what we do when we make the leg dance with the music from an iPod.

These are really advanced neuroscience experiments we’re allowing people to do at an amateur and high-school level. We have another line of products called the Muscle SpikerBox, which allows you to record from the output of the human brain — the muscles. You’re recording from the motor cortex on down, so it records from the arms and potential actions of the hand. It records the individual motor units from the lower motor neuron in the spinal cord — so you can actually see a little pulse as that neuron in the brain is telling the muscle to move.

Backyard Brains released the Roboroach kit as the “world’s first commercially available cyborg.” With this kit, students can wirelessly control the left/right movement of a cockroach by stimulating its antenna nerves. Photo: Courtesy of Backyard Brains

Roboroach is an interesting invention, because it allows us to study behavioral effects of the brain. You surgically fit an electronic backpack onto the roach, and it sends an electrical current directly into the antenna nerves. When you use the app to send the current, the roach responds with a turning behavior.

You can then ask, “Why is that cockroach doing that?” It’s the nature of the roach — you touch its antenna, and it turns in the other direction. It’s called a wall-following behavior. With the Roboroach kit, we’re talking to the same neurons using small pulses of electricity. We’re making the roach think it’s touching something.

Behavior is what’s really interesting about neuroscience. Neurons are the things that we’re firing when we do and think anything. They drive behavior. The more you can see neurons and behavior working together, the more interesting it gets.

The fact that the SpikerBox and Roboroach require removing parts of the cockroach caused quite a bit of controversy among animal activists. What do you say about that?

I think it’s partly perception of what the Roboroach, for example, does. Some people thought that Roboroach is a permanently remote-controlled insect — and that it was a slippery slope to something more macabre. But that’s not what’s happening. The reality is that this works on the cockroach because the insect naturally follows simple rules. But very soon, it adapts to a unnatural stimulus. After 15 minutes, the roach ignores the backpack. It retains its free will.

The other issue is about pain or damage to the cockroach. To install the micro-stimulator, you put the cockroach under ice water, you remove a portion of its antenna, and you place some stimulating wires inside. Afterwards, you remove the backpack and put the cockroach back in its cage. We’ve looked carefully at behavior before and after surgery, and the cockroach appears, in every way, shape and form, to function with the smaller antennae.

We have a retirement community called “Shady Acres” for roaches that have given their service to Backyard Brains. When we put food in the cage, their antennas move and they walk over. They appear to be functioning well. They also live just as long as other cockroaches do — the death rate of roaches used in experiments is equal to that of controls. In nature, you’ll see cockroaches in the wild missing antennae and even limbs. Their ability to adapt easily to damage is different from that of humans.

But the real question is: what is the human benefit and does it outweigh the cost to the cockroach? This is a question you have to ask every time you do an animal experiment. The benefit is the ability to demonstrate neurotechnology to a group of students who may be interested in pursuing a career in science. Students are able to study neural systems and behavior, and learn how the most advanced neurological treatments work in humans. The Roboroach is deep brain stimulation — the same technology used to treat diseases like Parkinson’s. About 20% of the world is diagnosed with a neurological disorder that doesn’t have a cure. So I think the benefits to humanity make it our moral responsibility to teach about the brain using insects.

The Reaction Timer works with the EMG SpikerBox to to measure reaction time by recording how quickly a person can flex their muscles in response to stimuli. Photo: Courtesy of Backyard Brains

We have a kit that can measure how much time it takes for your eyes to see something and for you to react. We can record the delay between a green LED coming on and your muscles moving in response. It takes about 350 milliseconds.

We can make the experiment more complex. Instead of just a green light, we can use an additional red light to distract you. The task is the same: react as fast as you can to the green light. But reaction time is longer because you need to be sure the color is correct first. You can record how long it takes your brain to deal with this extra cognitive step.

You can also use a tone, so you know how long information takes to go from your ear to your muscle. It turns out the eye processes information 100 milliseconds faster, because we have more neurons in our visual pathway, as we’re more visual creatures.

What are some of your latest inventions?

We’ve been moving into neural interfaces — connecting machines to the brain via electrical signals we can detect. We have devices that snap onto an Arduino board, and students build their own computer interfaces from their muscles, heart or brain. Our talk at this year’s TED used a Muscle SpikerBox paired with an Arduino to control a muscle stimulator. We call it the “human-to-human interface.”

We focus on the latest technology that labs are using, and make DIY versions of it. Right now we’re developing an OptoStimmer that will soon make affordable optogenetics classroom tools. Optogenetics is a breakthrough technology that allows you to turn on and off specific neurons in the brain by genetic targeting. Specific neurons enable a gene that grows little channels that make the cell communicate when you shine a light. Normally, light doesn’t affect neurons, so this technique causes only targeted neurons to fire spikes. You can pulse this light, and all the other neurons ignore it except for the ones that you want to control. You now have this amazing ability to turn on or off any neuron, any time.

I can’t overstate how important this technique is to our field. This has been the holy grail, so you can figure out what neurons are actually doing. It’s given answers to long-standing debates. For example, no one really knew how deep-brain stimulation for treating Parkinson’s works. There were theories and models, but now it can be tested. Scientists carefully targeted possible neurons in mice and other animals using optogenetics, pulsed the light and looked to see which neurons actually had therapeutic effects. It turns out it was not even where they were stimulating in the deep brain — it was another section way far away, the motor cortex, that mattered.

We’d like to make this tool available for high school students to do experiments using fruit flies. They’ll be able to do some recordings on optogenetic flies under a microscope. Then pulse a little bright red LED, which shines through the skin of the fruit fly. When a targeted neuron sees the red light, it will start firing. Depending on which neuron you are targeting, you can drive vastly different behaviors: from thinking they tasted something sweet to moonwalking like Michael Jackson. You’ll be able to see how specific neurons are affecting behavior.

Are there amateur neuroscientists outside the classroom using Backyard Brains products to do research?

Yes. One of our goals is to have a peer-reviewed paper that comes from an amateur with an institutional address that is their home address. It’s happening already in mathematics and astronomy, but not in neuroscience. We want to change that. We want real discoveries to happen at home, using our gear.

What I like about Backyard Brains is that we not only push out products, we push out experiments. We want our experiments to be novel and educational. We want to develop new tools and techniques that we can publish in academic peer-reviewed journals. We train undergraduates on how to do experiments, and we write those up and publish them. Our first article about the SpikerBox was published in 2012 in PLOS ONE, and we’ve been publishing every year since.

Our work is independent from any university and is financed with the money that we’re generating from grants and sales at Backyard Brains. It feels great to finally be an independent scientist. Our goal is to see scientific neuroscience papers published by amateur scientists. The neuro-revolution is coming.

Above: Backyard Brains shows exactly what happens when you play hip-hop music into the light-reflecting nerve cells of a squid. 

Astrophysicist Jedidah Isler talks about the wonder of supermassive hyperactive black holes — called blazars, or blazing quasars — during TED Fellows Talks, Session 1. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

TED Fellows and Senior Fellows have just opened TED2015 with a bang in the beautiful Kay Meek theatre in Vancouver. In the first session, discover: how bacteria can be programmed to detect and treat cancer, a yellow legal pad that smuggles transgressive data into the halls of power, what makes non-state armed groups tick, hyperactive supermassive black holes — and much more.

East African singer Somi sets the mood for the TED2015 Fellows talks with Abbey Lincoln’s “Should Have Been,” accompanied on double bass by Jodi Proznick. (Read more about Somi and her album The Lagos Music Salon on the TED Blog.

There are more bacteria in our bodies than stars in our galaxy, says bioengineer Tal Danino, and they are an integral part of our health. But did you know that we can program bacteria as though they were computers? Danino first engineered bacteria to produce fluorescent proteins in a rhythmic fashion, and generated a molecule that allows bacteria to communicate and synchronize. Danino next turned his attention to using programmable bacteria to detect and treat diseases like cancer. He programmed a bacteria to alert to the presence of liver cancer by producing a molecule that changes the color of urine in cancer’s presence. Another bacteria can be programmed to produce molecules that cause tumors to shrink. Danino also produces beautiful works of art using bacteria engineered to form complex patterns; he shows an image of a colorful and intricate mandala, a symbol of the universe, that speaks to the power and beauty of the invisible.

Slovenian photographer Jošt Franko takes us to Gaza, about two months after the 2014 war, to show us the devastating and often unseen consequences of conflict. Many of his subjects, rendered in black and white, are Palestinian farming families deeply affected by the atrocities of war, people whose homes have been destroyed and whose land and crops have been rendered uncultivable or lost to encroaching buffer zones between Israel and the Gaza Strip. His images show children living in a UN refugee school, farmers looking over their ruined fields, a makeshift rooftop playground surrounded by snipers. “I aim my camera at the world beyond the world of fighting and blood, and document lives,” he says. “The main story of every war isn’t the fighting but civilians who struggle to survive long after the bombing has stopped.”

Whiteflies devastate cassava by transmitting a destructive virus to the staple crop, on which 700 million people depend for their daily food. Smallholder farmers in Africa rely on cassava not only to feed their families, but as a cash crop that pays for the other necessities of life, such as school fees and health care. Computational biologist Laura Boykin uses genomics, supercomputing and phylogenetics to study the speciation of whitefly. So far, she has identified 34 species of Bemisia tabaci, information crucial for researchers to develop cassava that is genetically modified to be virus resistant as well as resistant to the correct whitefly. She announces that her team at the University of Western Australia is making this information available to the scientific community with the launch of WhiteFlyBase – the world’s first database of whitefly genetic information. Boykin’s dream: to soon see East African markets filled with healthy and plentiful cassava, and for the region to be food secure for many years to come.

Jonathan Home is building a quantum computer at the atomic level. He explains during TED Fellows Talks, Session 1, at TED2015. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

Have you ever seen an atom? In the photograph that opens quantum scientist Jonathan Home’s talk, a lineup of seven individual atoms look like a row of stars. These are the building blocks of matter — but Home is isolating them in order to build a new kind of computer, one that can solve complex problems of science and mathematics — as well as crack RSA cryptography — far more quickly than a classic supercomputer, using far less space. So how to build one? Home manipulates individual atoms’ quantum states using laser pulses, and manipulates the connections between atoms to create circuits, using atoms as quantum wires to communicate information. How close are we to quantum computing? There is no fundamental barrier, says Home. The challenge now is to build larger systems, requiring building more complex structures, something that may be possible with fabrication methods used to make the chips in our current-day laptops.

Neuroscientist and co-founder of Backyard Brains Greg Gage delights the crowd with a demo of his Human-to-Human Interface, the latest in his set of low-cost, DIY kits designed to make learning about neuroscience accessible to young people. Applying sensors to the arms of volunteers Samantha and Miguel (“You’re about to lose your will,” Gage warned), Gage showed how electrical activity from Sam’s brain as she flexed her arm sent a signal to Miguel’s ulnar nerve, causing his arm to contract involuntarily. The best part? When Gage manipulated Samantha’s arm himself, nothing happened — proving that brain activity, not muscles, are the origin of movement.

At 12, astrophysicist Jedidah Isler fell for the love of her life: the night sky. Now she studies some of the most exotic objects in the universe, including supermassive hyperactive black holes called blazars — or blazing quasars. These devour material at the rate of a thousand times more than an average supermassive black hole, and produce powerful particle streams. Blazars pull in material via an accretion disk that spins around the black hole, and shoot it out via jets that move at 99.99% the speed of light — some of which are pointed at Earth. Isler is working to understand how and where the highest-energy light from the jet is made, and how energy is transported through the galaxy. “Who knew that chasing after the universe would ground me so deeply to my mission here on Earth? Then again, when do we ever know where love’s first flutter will truly take us?”

As a result of the US-led invasion of Iraq, an estimated 150,000 to 1 million Iraqis lost their lives, says artist Matt Kenyon — a number that stands in startling contrast to the 4,486 American service members who died in the same period. Yet it’s the latter number most often quoted in Western media. Wanting to create a monument to individual Iraqi lives, Kenyon took inspiration from a school civics assignment, in which a teacher encouraged students to write a thoughtful letter to a member of government in the hope of getting a reply. His monument, Notepad, looks like an everyday yellow legal pad, but its lines, specially printed in microtext, contain the names, locations and dates of Iraqi civilian casualties. Kenyon has smuggled these pads into the stationery supplies of US and coalition governments, sort of a Trojan horse of transgressive data. Now he offers each member of the Fellows audience a sheet, asking them to use it to write to a member of US government. As each piece of government correspondence is archived in the Library of Congress, Kenyon’s monument will infiltrate and become part of the US permanent historical record. 

Artist Matt Kenyon wants to  infiltrate the halls of power with transgressive data. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

Physical therapy can be painful, frustrating and boring, as Romanian physical therapy entrepreneur Cosmin Mihaiu knows firsthand. As a kid, he fell out of a tree and broke his arm during a game of hide-and-seek. His physical therapist advised him to flex and extend his arm 100 times a day, 7 days a week, to regain movement after the cast came off. Of course he balked at doing his exercises, and recovery took months longer than necessary. His story is common: patient noncompliance in physical therapy is high. Mihaiu’s software platform MIRA Rehab could change all that. Running on a PC with a Kinect controller, MIRA creates fun-to-play games that lead patients through therapy-specific exercises — like navigating a bumblebee through a garden with flex-and-extend motions — while allowing physical therapists to monitor recovery. The games are appropriate for all ages and address orthopedic and neurological problems, and more games are in development for children with autism and for speech therapy. MIRA Rehab is already being used in 10 clinics in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, a home version is in the works.

“What do non-state armed groups do when they’re not shooting?” asks Middle East policy analyst Benedetta Berti. In order to engage or defeat groups like Hamas, Hezbollah or ISIL, we need to understand what makes them tick. Contrary to their portrayal in Western media, non-state groups are quite plugged in. Hamas has set up media communication — radio, TV, its own social media strategy, says Berti. ISIL even has its own glossy magazine, published in English for the sake of recruitment. Non-state groups launch for-profit companies that fund their activities. But what makes them so popular? Berti suggests that non-state groups are filling a vacuum by offering the services governments are failing to provide. They win populations over by building schools and hospitals, and offering vocational training programs and microloans. And, as with the Taliban, they can offer personal safety, social order and security. Yet in the West, all we see is the violence. Once we accept how complex and sophisticated such groups are, the less we can think of them as the opposite of the state. “Military can win battles but not give us peace,” says Benedetti. Perhaps the journey there will require governments to invest more in their people’s nonmilitary needs. Read more on ideas.ted.com.

Astronomer Aomawa Shields looks for other planets in the universe where life might exist. While some astronomers do this work by measuring the distance between planets and their suns, Shields uses computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere a planet would need in order to be able to support life, because while distance to a star is one marker of habitability, it’s not the only one. For example, while Venus looks hospitable, its surface is 900 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead – not due to its proximity to the sun but to its thick atmosphere, which traps heat. Another contradiction: ice on a planet orbiting a cooler star could absorb heat to make it warmer than a planet orbiting a warmer star. Shields, who besides being an astronomer is a classically trained actor, also works to interweave science, art and education with her organization Rising Stargirls, which teaches astronomy to middle-school girls of color, using theater, writing and visual art. She hopes that “maybe one day they’ll join the ranks of astronomers who are full of contradictions — and use their backgrounds to discover, once and for all, that we are truly not alone in the universe.” 

Negin Farsad skewers the Iranian-American experience during TED Fellows talks. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

What do mushrooms have to do with climate change? In agricultural entrepreneur Trang Tran’s native Vietnam, farmers traditionally burn the straw left over after the rice harvest, twice a year, for two months at a time. This is a common practice in rice-producing countries around the world, says Tran. In Vietnam alone, 20 million tons of rice straw are burned annually, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the particulate matter, when inhaled, causes health problems in poor communities. Tran and a friend did some research and discovered rice straw is a perfect substrate for growing mushrooms. They gathered some straw, soon had a delicious crop of mushrooms, and even found that the used substrate made excellent amendment for soil. When Tran returned to Vietnam from getting her MBA in the US, she launched her social enterprise Fargreen to teach farmers this sustainable, profitable and closed-loop mushroom production model — which also saves farmers from having to  travel to the city between rice crops to earn money. Fargreen’s farmers have so far collectively saved 10 tons of straw from being burned — equivalent to 10 tons of greenhouse gases.

Paleontologist and National Geographic explorer Nizar Ibrahim wonders why so many of our favorite exotic, alien worlds and creatures exist as figments of our imagination? He takes us on a tour of what is now the Sahara Desert, traveling back in time 100 million years to a lush and extreme ecosystem that he describes as the most dangerous place in the history of our planet. “Three different kinds of flying dragons inhabit this alien world,” he says, “and its huge river systems cover an area approaching the size of the continental US — in which giant river monsters patrol in search of car-sized fish.” This aquatic dinosaur, Spinosaurus, was bigger than T rex, had a sail taller than a human, long slender jaws for fishing — and, says Ibrahim, makes our imaginary dragons seem pretty boring in comparison. Ibrahim, who helped co-discover the Spinosaurus, continues to comb the Sahara sands for fossils of these fantastic creatures, his discoveries resurrecting a real past that is more bizarre than we could possibly imagine.

Standup comedian, filmmaker and writer Negin Farsad ends Session 1 with an edgy, uproarious and downright scatological take on the trials and tribulations of being an Iranian-American in Iran (“Maybe I should hide all the freedoms I enjoy — like boys, and alcohol, and peaceable assembly…”), involving an unfortunate incident with an American-style, husband-repelling toilet.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Talking as fast and fervently as a circus busker, TED Fellow Greg Gage introduces the world to RoboRoach — a kit that allows you create a cockroach cyborg and control its movements via an iPhone app and “the world’s first commercially available cyborg in the history of mankind.”

“I’m a neuroscientist,” says Gage, “and that means I had to go to grad school for five years just to ask questions about the brain.” This is because the equipment involved is so expensive and complex that it’s only available in university research labs, accessible to PhD candidates and researchers. But other branches of science don’t have this problem — “You don’t have to get a PhD in astronomy to get a telescope and study the sky.”

Yet one in five of us will be diagnosed with a neurological disorder — for which we have no cures. We need more people educated in neuroscience to investigate these diseases. That’s why Gage and his partners at Backyard Brains are developing affordable tools that allow educators to teach electrophysiology from university down to the fifth grade level.

Explaining the RoboRoach as it’s being set up for demonstration, Gage explains that the neurons inside the cockroach’s antennas allows it to navigate the world, sending information back to the brain. If the cockroach is touched by an object on the left it moves right, and vice versa. “What if we sent a little pulse of electricity?” asks Gage.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

As he speaks, he and his partner, Tim Marzullo, release a large South American cockroach wearing an electronic backpack — which sends an electrical current directly into the cockroach’s antenna nerves — onto the table on stage. A line of green spikes appear, accompanied by a sound like rain on a tent or popcorn popping. “The common currency of the brain are the spikes in the neurons,” Gage explains. “These are the neurons that are inside of the antenna, but that’s also what your brain sounds like. Your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams, all encoded into these spikes. People, this is reality right here — the spikes are everything you know!” As Greg’s partner swipes his finger across his iPhone, the RoboRoach swerves left and right, sometimes erratically going in a full confused circle.

So why do this? “This is the exact same technology that’s used to treat Parkinson’s disease and make cochlear implants for deaf people. If we can get these tools into hands of kids, we can start the neurological revolution.”

After Gage’s talk, Chris Anderson asks about the ethics of using the cockroaches for these purposes. Gage explains that this is microstimulation, not a pain response — the evidence is that the roach adapts quickly to the stimulation. (In fact, some high school students have discovered that they can control the rate of adaptation in an unusual way — by playing music to the roaches over their iPods.) After the experiment, he says, the cockroaches are released to go back to do what cockroaches normally do. So don’t worry — no animals were irretrievably harmed in the making of this TED talk.

Greg Gage’s talk is now available for viewing. Watch it on TED.com »

Here are the speakers who appeared in this session of TEDGlobal 2013. Click the speaker’s name for a full recap of their talk:

Bernie Krause records the sounds of endangered biospheres. His soundscapes uncover nature’s rich sonic tapestry — along with some unexpected results.

Marla Spivak researches bees’ behavior and biology in an effort to preserve this threatened, but ecologically essential, insect

Science historian Sonia Shah explores the surprisingly fascinating story behind an ancient scourge: malaria.

Greg Gage helps kids investigate the science in their own backyards – particularly the electrical impulses that control the nervous system.

Reflective and precise, Yaron Herman plays piano jazz.

Suzana Herculano-Houzel shrank the human brain by 14 billion neurons — by developing a new way to count them.

Carin Bondar is an expert on the sexual life of animals — and loves to tell their wild sex stories.

At TED2012, DIY neuroscientist and TED Senior Fellow Greg Gage shocked the TED audience when he cut the leg off a live cockroach onstage to demonstrate his Spiker Box – a device that allows anyone to see and hear spikes in the neural activity of insects.

A year later, his company Backyard Brains is coming up with new science education products — like the MicroManipulator, which allows you to place electrodes on tiny things. These products are affordable enough to allow students of all ages to learn about and experiment with electrophysiology, an experience previously only accessible in professional labs.

Here at TED2013, he demonstrates the BYB SmartScope – affectionately known as the RoachScope. This sturdy, portable microscope, currently in beta, uses smartphones to view, snap and share magnified objects over Facebook, Twitter and email, and costs $80 – putting cutting-edge experimentation into the hands of students, teachers and the just plain curious.