Saturday was the closing day of TED—the annual conference celebrating technology, entertainment, and design—which meant it was time for the TED Prize winners to reveal their personal wishes to change the world. (Each year, TED picks three people to make a wish and gives them 100,000 dollars and the support of TED's community of influential scientists, artists, and politicians, to help fulfill it.) This year, University of Cambridge mathematical physicist Neil Turok wished for help in unlocking scientific talent across Africa; novelist and San Francisco community activist Dave Eggers wished for every conference attendee to become directly involved with a public school; and religious scholar Karen Armstrong wished for the creation of a Charter for Compassion, written by Christian, Jewish, and Islamic leaders and thinkers, and built upon the universal ideals of justice and respect.
Last year, E.O. Wilson wished for an Encyclopedia of Life, an online catalogue of the world's 1.8 million known species, and the first pages went live last week. The site currently contains pages for roughly 1 million species, though only about 25 are considered exemplary of what the creators hope to achieve. —Stephen Mapes