{"id":656667,"date":"2013-05-07T20:51:18","date_gmt":"2013-05-08T00:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ted.com\/?p=75629"},"modified":"2013-05-07T21:00:46","modified_gmt":"2013-05-08T01:00:46","slug":"bosons-bicycles-and-big-data-7-things-i-learned-from-tedxcern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/656667","title":{"rendered":"Bosons, bicycles and big data: 7 things I learned from TEDxCERN"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Backstage<\/p>\n

There’s a place in Switzerland where scientists travel on bicycles through tunnels filled with atom-smashing tubes, where the first webpage was born, and where a giant wooden globe watches over researchers replicating the very beginnings of our universe. That place is CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and last Friday, it held its first TEDx event: TEDxCERN<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the event, 23 speakers and performers — including a Nobel laureate, an Ig Nobel Prize founder, a Google Science Fair winner, and an opera singer — gathered together in CERN\u2019s\u00a0Globe of Science and Innovation<\/a> to talk about the Higgs boson, science education, classifying galaxies, and — naturally — an analysis of the forces required to drag sheep.<\/p>\n

So what did we at TED HQ learn at TEDxCERN? A lot. But to make things easy, here are seven takeaways from TEDxCERN:<\/p>\n

1. In 2010, when prompted to draw a \u201cscientist,\u201d only 33% of schoolchildren asked drew a woman.
\nIn 1980, the figure was 8%. At TEDxCERN, Londa Schiebinger, head of the Gendered Innovations project<\/a> at Stanford University, talked about some of the issues women in the sciences face today, and the importance of recognizing gender bias in science and technology.<\/p>\n

2. Animated elephants and double scoops of ice cream make pondering particle physics a lot more palatable.
\nThanks to a collaboration between the whip-smart scientists at CERN and the talented animators at TED-Ed, four new TED-Ed lessons<\/a> premiered at TEDxCERN — bringing mind-boggling concepts like antimatter, big data, the Higgs boson, and the origins of the universe to life in a way that even the most science-averse student could appreciate: with chocolate-almond ice cream, a lemon, and a giant pile of leaves.<\/p>\n

3. Brian May from the band Queen is an astrophysicist.
\nYeah, we didn\u2019t know that either. But thanks to a talk from Zooniverse head Chris Lintott, we learned that not only is May a card-carrying astrophysicist (he earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College in 2007), he is a fan of Lintott\u2019s Galaxy Zoo<\/a> project — a herculean effort to gamify and crowdsource galaxy classification.<\/p>\n

4. Science goes beyond geography.
\nPeople called SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East)<\/a> \u201can impossible project.\u201d But this lab in Jordan, built around a giant synchrotron particle accelerator, has brought together Israeli, Jordanian, Palestinian, Turkish, Pakistani and Iranian scientists to study a universe bigger than us all. At TEDxCERN, SESAME scientists Eliezer Rabinovici and Zehra Sayers talked about the project\u2019s groundbreaking work.<\/p>\n

5. Cool teachers bring their students on field trips via Google Glass.
\nPhysics class can be boring. But not so much if your teacher is Andrew Vanden Heuvel<\/a>, the TEDxCERN presenter and online physics teacher who traveled to Switzerland to give his students a live tour of the world\u2019s largest particle collider live through his eyes, using Google Glass. At TEDxCERN, we got to see a video diary of his trip, and it is mesmerizing:<\/p>\n