A big idea in 18 minutes

The Junushof theatre is already sold out but videos of the lectures will be screened live at the university, the town council and the event’s sponsor, Wing. The idea behind TED is to give people 18 minutes to explain an interesting idea. Videos of all the TEDs delivered around the world can be seen online. The 1200 talks available so far cover a vast range of topics: from someone’s personal experience of a stroke to moral behaviour in animals. Quite a variety of subjects will be addressed at TEDx Wageningen too. Our pick of the lectures: George Kowalchuck, professor of Molecular Ecology at the NIOO The earth, microbiologists are fond of telling us, is a planet inhabited by micro-organisms plus a couple of funny multicellular experiments. This does not stop us overlooking our microscopic fellow earth-dwellers. Kowalchuck will talk about everything bacterial communities do for the planet and how they are responding to such events as climate change. John Liu, film maker and environmental campaigner Since it embraced the market economy, China has embarked on a dizzying economic ascent. This has brought benefits but also all kinds of costs, both social and ecological. The environment suffers damage that costs tens of billions of dollars every year. Concern about these costs led Liu to set up the Environmental Education Media Project for China. Now he makes educational films about ecology and the environment. Andy van den Dobbelsteen, professor of Climate design and Sustainability at the Technical University of Delft. Van den Dobbelsteen researches sustainable construction methods. Ways of creating cities and regions that make good use of their location to minimize waste of resources and generate their own energy. He also looks at how we can adapt building methods to the warmer world that is coming. His ideas are not just on paper: he is trying them out in new buildings in Rotterdam.