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Back in August I wrote a post covering a rash of reports on the worrying rise of bad science in TED talks. A couple of months later TED pulled the following TEDx talk after the neuroscientist Bradley Voytek posted a question about it to Quora: "Is Randy Powell saying anything in his 2010 TEDxCharlotte talk or is it just total nonsense?". The top voted response was from Stanford theoretical physicist Jay Wacker and began:

There's a new TED-Ed series that tackles questions that we don't know the answer to. In this first episode, TED Curator Chris Anderson asks: How many universes are there? And Why can't we see evidence of alien life? On the latter question, his answers are somewhat pedestrian and even outlandish, but Anderson takes a wide swath at the possibilities and includes some genuine solutions, including the Great Filter and postbiological existence.

This week, I'm at TED, where I had the honor of curating a selection of books for the TED Bookstore around this year's theme, Full Spectrum. Here are my picks, along with the original text that appears on the little cards in the bookstore, and my blurb about the selection:

Last week as part of its glitzy annual conference in Long Beach, California, TED awarded its $1 million prize to Sugata Mitra to support his wish to build a "School in the Cloud," a self-organized learning environment based on his "Hole in the Wall" and "Granny Cloud" research. Next week Pearson, the largest and most powerful education company in the world, will publish Dale Stephens' book Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will, a personal experience narrative and guide about dropping out of college and making it in Silicon Valley.

Professor Lee Cronin is a likably impatient presence, a one-man catalyst. "I just want to get stuff done fast," he says. And: "I am a control freak in rehab." Cronin, 39, is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules. But that is not the extent of his ambition. A couple of years ago, at a TED conference, he described one goal as the creation of "inorganic life", and went on to detail his efforts to generate "evolutionary algorithms" in inert matter. He still hopes to "create life" in the next year or two.