Synthetic biologist Tal Danino manipulates microorganisms in his lab to create eye-catching, colorful patterns. Here’s a look at the process he uses to turn “Oh, yuck” into “Oh, wow.”

Synthetic biologist Tal Danino washes his hands constantly, one of the occupational hazards of working with bacteria all day at the Synthetic Biological Systems Lab, which he runs at New York City’s Columbia University. Danino, a TED Fellow, spends most of his time trying to harness bacteria’s unique properties — the same properties that can make them so dangerous for humans – and turn them into powerful cancer fighters. But when he’s not programming bacteria to fight cancer, he’s programming them to make art, in part to make difficult scientific principles more accessible. “It’s nice to use the visual arts to help communicate science,” he says, “and that’s because art really transcends the boundaries of language and also of knowledge.” Danino’s recent creative endeavors include a feminist installation of bacterial cultures taken from the bodies of 100 women (for which he collaborated with conceptual artist Anicka Yi), as well as a series of ceramic dishes inspired by naturally occurring bacterial patterns (a collaboration with artist and photographer Vik Muniz). For his latest project, Microuniverse, he produced a series of dazzling, abstract images created by different species of bacteria, each grown under different conditions for varying lengths of time. “The project is about getting to see this unseen universe that’s really small and all around us, every day,” he says. Here, he describes some of his strangely beautiful projects.

The intriguing aesthetics of bacteria

Every day, Danino observes the intricate patterns that bacteria form in dozens of petri dishes in his lab. As their cells grow, divide and communicate with each other, they self-organize into colonies to maximize their chances of survival. The patterns they form are determined by both their genetic makeup and their environment. Selecting bacteria that are known to generate certain patterns — for instance, E. coli naturally grows as a fractal, whereas Proteus mirabilis grows as concentric rings — as well as interesting-looking bacteria from soil samples taken in his own backyard, Danino and his team began to experiment with controlling their growth patterns. Ultimately, he hopes that if they could better understand how nature shapes behaviors and patterns in bacteria, it might in turn inspire their work engineering them to fight cancer.

Alter the environment, alter the design

By changing the conditions — like the temperature and humidity — under which the bacteria are grown, Danino found he was able to manipulate them into creating certain patterns. For instance, the optimal temperature for growth of many bacteria is 37 degrees Celsius, which is, unsurprisingly, the temperature of the human body. If it’s hotter or colder than 37 degrees, bacteria growth will simply slow. Humidity affects the bacteria in a different way: the drier the environment, the more likely the bacteria are to group together to conserve moisture. Changing the concentration of agar gel — the growth medium for bacteria — on the petri dish also affects patterning, says Danino. The softer the gel, the faster the bacteria spread across a wider area.

Wait and watch

Once Danino sets the initial conditions, he lets the bacteria grow and waits for the results. He used about 20 different species of bacteria for Microuniverse, letting them grow for as few as two days and as long as two months. Regardless of the conditions in which they’re raised, “each bacteria has a natural preference for a type of pattern,” he says. “And it has to do with the specifics of how bacteria swim and how they communicate with each other. They each have their own personalities, if you will.”

Colonies of color

It’s standard for scientists to use chemical dyes to gather information about a bacteria’s structure. If they want to distinguish Streptococcus pyogenes from E. coli, for instance, they will stain a dish to reveal the shapes of the cells, allowing them to identify them visually. “Scientists mostly look at just single-color images,” Danino says, “so we just played off of that.” In addition to traditional scientific dyes, he also experimented with using food coloring on the agar as well as on the bacteria themselves. He also tried out various color combinations to achieve a gradient effect, as in this image above.

Exposing an unseen universe

“Every framed image or every petri dish is its own little world,” Danino says. “Those patterns look like something that you could see in a snowflake, something that you could see underwater.” With each petri dish, the project aims to represent an abstract universe all its own. “I started seeing these petri dishes, and I was like, whoa, that looks like something you would see in outer space.” Hence, the name Microuniverse.

The process of molecular cloning

Danino’s art projects are something he does in his spare time. His days are taken up with work in synthetic biology, a relatively nascent scientific field which, broadly defined, involves engineering living organisms to achieve a desired behavior. In his lab, Danino edits and programs bacteria using a process called molecular cloning. After identifying which gene sequences create a certain biological function in a type of bacteria, he and his team can isolate these sequences, amplify them in the lab, and then insert them into the DNA of the bacteria they want to exhibit that function. “Nowadays, you can actually type in that sequence online, and a company will produce that sequence synthetically and send it to you in a tube,” Danino says.

Harnessing its anti-cancer potential

Recently, Danino and his team have been engineering bacteria — they’ve been working with E.coli, an E.coli probiotic, and Salmonella — to detect and treat cancer. Remarkably, bacteria can grow inside tumors where even the immune system can’t reach, and they can also be programmed to produce various toxins that cause tumor cell death. Using molecular cloning, Danino is attempting to program bacteria to detect and reveal tumors in the body and also to release cancer-fighting toxins once inside them. “It’s almost like a Trojan-horse type situation,” he explains. “Bacteria get into the tumor and then they start making the drug, and then the tumor can actually slow down or decay.”

A visual gateway to science

Danino hopes projects like Microuniverse will inspire people to learn more about the complex microbial worlds all around — and inside — us and to show them that bacteria can be used for positive purposes, like fighting cancer. “It’s really difficult to teach people about DNA and proteins and molecular cloning,” he says. “But I think when you see an image, regardless of your background, it attracts you to learn more about the science.” What’s next for the project: Danino has partnered with the company Print All Over Me to create custom apparel based on the images of bacteria from Microuniverse (part of the proceeds will go towards cancer research). He also hopes to continue touring Microuniverse, which will be on exhibit at MIT later in 2017. His lab is also working to capture time-lapse videos of the bacteria growth which means, that’s right, E. coli could be coming soon to a theater near you.

All images: Soonhee Moon. Author bio: Patrick D’Arcy is the Editorial Manager of the TED Fellows program.

Theoretical physicist (and TED Fellow) Shohini Ghose has two great passions: physics, and advocating for gender equity in the sciences. “There are still relatively few women in physics — and the higher up the ladder in academia or industry you go, the fewer women you find,” says Ghose. “Yet the laws of physics themselves are gender neutral, and the beauty of the universe is equally accessible to everyone. So why so few women, and how can we change that?” Below, Ghose shares five of her favorite facts about women and their contribution to physics.

1. Marie Curie is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific disciplines. First, Marie Skłodowska Curie won in 1903 for her studies of radioactivity. She shared the prize with her husband, Pierre Curie, and with the other discoverer of radioactivity, Henri Bequerel. Originally, the Nobel committee had only selected Pierre Curie — but he refused to accept the prize without proper acknowledgement of Marie’s contribution. Then in 1911, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her discovery and studies of radium and polonium.

2. Before 2018, only two women had ever won the Nobel Prize in physics. Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in 1963 for her model of the structure of the atomic nucleus. Goeppert Mayer faced a great deal of gender bias in her career: she had to work in unpaid positions at Columbia University and University of Chicago, where her husband was employed. (In 2018, Donna Strickland shared the Nobel with two other winners, bringing the total to three.)

3. Austrian physicist Lise Meitner first developed the theory explaining the process of nuclear fission. However, she was overlooked by the Nobel Committee, who instead awarded Meitner’s colleague Otto Hahn the prize in 1944. Meitner came to be known as the “mother of the atom bomb,” although she refused to work on the Manhattan Project after fleeing Nazi Germany. Element 109 is called meitnerium in her honor.

4. Albert Einstein called German mathematician Emmy Noether a creative mathematical genius. Noether’s Theorem is a fundamental idea on which much of modern physics is built. Published in 1918, her theorem states that if an object has symmetry — i.e., if it looks the same regardless of changing locations or times — then this leads to conservation laws in nature. Says Ghose: “A simple example is a movie of the motion of a ball when you throw it. The motion looks the same if you run the movie backwards in time (time symmetry). This means that the total energy of the ball remains the same (conservation of energy) — the energy just gets converted into different forms as the ball moves. This is a simplified example, but the theorem is widely applicable and is a real workhorse of modern physics.”

5. British astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin established that the sun and other stars are all composed mostly of hydrogen. Payne-Gaposchkin later became the first woman to chair a department (astronomy) at Harvard.

Art credit: iStock. Note: The article above has been adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas.ted.com article. To read daily coverage of the world of ideas, check out Ideas.ted.com. To read more great articles about science in education, sign up for the free weekly TED-Ed newsletter here >>

Tips on how to protect yourself.

At the American Civil Liberties Union, privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian (TED Talk: How to avoid surveillance … with the phone in your pocket) spends much of his time thinking about how individuals can protect themselves from spying. Last year, he recorded a Facebook Live conversation with his fellow TED Fellow, Will Potter (TED Talk: The secret US prisons you’ve never heard of before) — an investigative reporter who specializes in covering dissident politics and culture. Read on for their tips about how to protect your online privacy and security:

Will Potter: If I don’t have anything to hide, why should I be concerned about privacy or security, anyway?

Christopher Soghoian: I hear this all the time from people, and you know, I think many of us do have something to hide. We may not all be worried about the government, but there are things we may not want our employers or members of our families to know. We have curtains in front of our windows, we wear clothes, we get prescription medications, and we have components to our lives that we don’t reveal to everyone we know. Children may not be worried about the government, but they may not want the principal at their school to know what they’re interested in or who they’re talking to.

The concept of privacy is more nuanced than just, “do I care about my privacy or not?” It’s, “who am I worried about? Who am I trying to protect my information from?” Yes, every once in a while, you find someone who has truly no secrets, but there are plenty of other people who do have things to hide, and we shouldn’t flush privacy down the toilet because a few people are privileged enough to have nothing to worry about.

What are the top few things we should all do to protect our basic information?

There are some general tips that I would recommend for everyone. The most basic one, and the tip that is really the best bang-for-buck when it comes to privacy, is putting a sticker or a Band-Aid over your webcam on your laptop. When I first started researching privacy and surveillance, I was shocked to learn the capabilities of the many software tools that people can buy online and install surreptitiously on someone’s computer. The ease with which someone can take over your webcam, turn on the camera and have it surreptitiously collect video footage even without the light on the camera turning on is really staggering.

And while I hope that one day we will have computers that are secure enough that they can protect us from that, when you put a sticker or Band-Aid over the camera, you don’t have to worry about that any more. Now you’re not trusting the security of your operating system or the security of your computer, you’re trusting the fact that there’s something physical between the lens and you.

Would you suggest covering up the microphone as well?

Certainly there is spying software that is both commercially available and used by governments that can remotely enable the microphone either in a smartphone or in a laptop when it’s not being used. The problem with the sticker approach is that a sticker over the microphone doesn’t actually work that well. The folks I know who are truly paranoid either put hot glue in the microphone port, or they will actually open up their laptop and cut the wire. Now you know, I’m not going to recommend invasive laptop surgery for the layperson. But it’s really hard to protect the microphone on your device. There’s no easy sticker-thing you can do for the microphone.

So if you’re worried about sensitive conversations being picked up with a hacked microphone, the best thing to do is to leave that phone out of your bedroom. If you’re having a private conversation in your office, leave the phone outside. Maybe you don’t need to take that phone into the bathroom. There are places that maybe we shouldn’t have microphones.

Okay, so how likely is it that I’m actually being watched if I’m just a regular person going about my life?

The first thing you really need to think about is, who am I worried about? Depending on where you live, your socioeconomic status and your race, maybe you’re less worried about the police. But there are plenty of law-abiding African-Americans and Latino-Americans who have good reason to be worried about the police, even though they’re just regular, tax-paying, law-abiding individuals.

Then again, maybe you’re worried about your employer watching what you’re doing or what you’re saying. Maybe you’re worried about advertisers tracking you as you surf the web. You visit a page on WebMD because you’re worried about some potential disease you might have, and then two weeks later, you see a popup advertisement for a related medication. Maybe someone harassed you in the past, either in person or over the internet, and you’re now worried this person may be furthering that stalking through technology. The first question to ask is, who is out there that I’m worried about — and then what can I do to limit their access to my information?

You’ve talked about how the encryption tools that are built into certain devices are disproportionately favoring privileged populations over others. Can you explain a little bit more about what that means, and the repercussions that that has?

Sure. In a nutshell, Apple has spent a lot of time and money to build security features into mobile products such as the iPhone and the iPad. Those devices encrypt data by default, which means that if you have a password on your device and someone tries to get into it, they’re going to have a really difficult time, whether that someone is an employer, your partner or a government agency, Apple devices are really, really secure.

Separately, Apple devices automatically encrypt text messages sent by one person with an iPhone to another person with an iPhone, which means if the police are investigating you, and they go to Verizon or AT&T and they say, “hey, last week Will and Chris exchanged messages, can we get a copy of them?” AT&T or Verizon will say they don’t have them, because the messages are transmitted in a way that the phone companies cannot read them.

For Apple’s customers, this is a great thing — but Apple devices are expensive. Not everyone can afford to spend $600 on a smartphone. With its $50, $100 Android phones, Google is really killing it at the lower end of the smartphone market, and unfortunately, the security of Android is really lacking in comparison.

This isn’t just a privacy issue or a cyber-security issue. It’s really an issue of equality and racial justice, because if the poor and vulnerable in our societies are using devices that do nothing to protect them from surveillance, and the rich and powerful are using devices that make them essentially off-limits to the government, that creates a system of surveillance inequality, and further perpetuates the existing problems of inequality that we have in our society.

What advice do you have for teens and young people online today?

I’m not a teenager anymore, and I haven’t been a teenager in a while. I don’t know what it’s like to be a teenager in this modern world, but I have to imagine it’s truly terrifying. But one thing I hear over and over again when I talk to adults is this feeling that young people don’t care about privacy, and how awful that is.

And that’s actually not true, and some amazing research has been done on this by academic experts. danah boyd has a book about how teenagers use technology, and how teenagers view privacy, and her big insight is that yes, teenagers are not concerned about the FBI or the NSA, but they are concerned about their teachers, their principals and their parents. And teenagers are so good at protecting their privacy, they’re so good at hiding sensitive information from their teachers and their parents, that their adults think they’re not taking any actions at all. They’re basically hiding in plain sight.

So if you are a parent, and you’re worried that your kids are sharing more information online than you think they should be, I think you’ll be surprised at how tech-savvy and privacy-savvy many kids are. And I think the massive popularity of services like Snapchat, which delete messages after a very short period of time, demonstrates that kids inherently get the harm that comes from the long-term retention of data. We’ve all been idiotic children at one point, and some of us have done idiotic things later in our lives too. When technology captures that and saves it forever, we can be haunted by those stupid things. I think kids using services like Snapchat are super smart, because they shouldn’t be haunted for the rest of their lives because of something they say or do when they’re 16.

How heavily are social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter used for surveillance by governments and organizations?

There are two types of surveillance of social media that we should be thinking about. One is surveillance of private communications, and one is surveillance of what you might call public communications. So if you have a public Twitter profile, and anyone can follow you, there are still going to be companies and governments that want to see that information. And there are so many people tweeting every day that it’s actually difficult for these large organizations to focus on individual things.

Now Twitter has had a very difficult time making money, and one of the ways that Twitter makes money is by selling access to what’s called the firehose: they basically sell bulk access to every tweet. And then analytics companies come in, mine the tweet stream and sell data to companies and governments that want it. There are companies that say they can predict social uprisings or major, world-changing events before CNN has even reported them. A few months ago, Twitter announced they would no longer sell this data to the CIA. But the Department of Homeland Security is still a subscriber.

So that’s the public surveillance. But all of the tech companies also routinely receive demands for private user data from government agencies in the US and from abroad. To their credit, Facebook, Google, Twitter and all these big tech companies publish an annual transparency report revealing how many requests they’ve received. And I’m not blaming the companies for this. In many ways, if they have data, they’re required to turn it over to governments when those governments satisfy legal requirements. But what is clear from these transparency reports is that governments in the US and elsewhere have an enormous appetite for data.

The last thing I’ll add is that there is an extremely common practice, particularly in schools, for police officers who are posted in those schools to create fake Facebook accounts — friends, students — in order to try and learn what’s going on. They’re not submitting a court order and demanding data from Facebook; they’re tricking the students into sharing their data.

Law enforcement has been using this against political activists as well, increasingly.

For sure. And there are a number of Black Lives Matter activists, Tea Party groups and others who are worried they are being surveilled. It’s really hard when you’re organizing a social movement that anyone can join. How do you know if the person who’s seeking to join is truly an interested individual who wants to change the world, or an undercover law enforcement agent?

Right — how do you be inclusive, while also being safe? So is there any kind of software that might be useful in tackling or detecting unwanted surveillance?

One of the most interesting things for me is that the best practices for security that are followed by experts are so different from the best practices followed by laypeople. So none of the experts that I know, myself included, use antivirus software. We think of antivirus software, essentially, as a scam that’s designed to take money from consumers who don’t know any better. Whereas if you ask the average person what they should do to protect themselves from viruses, the first thing they’ll say is, “antivirus.”

Ask a regular person what kind of password they should have and the layperson would say they’re supposed to have uppercase and lowercase and numbers and special symbols. The expert says you should have a bunch of words, they can all be lowercase. Have a password that’s three or four words long, and the words should have nothing to do with each other. It shouldn’t be lyrics from a song, but it should be easy to type and easy to remember.

We never hear that! A lot of websites now will prompt you and say you have to have X number of numbers and characters and whatever.

And that’s super infuriating. And, you know, we live in a world now where it seems like there are data breaches every week. So if you are using the same password to access multiple websites, it’s only a matter of time before one of your passwords gets hacked. And there’s no way for a human being to remember 50 different unique passwords; our brains don’t work that way.

So I recommend the use of tools like password managers where you install the tool and then it creates random, long passwords for every website you visit. It enters them automatically into the sites you visit, so you don’t have to remember any of that stuff, you just need the one passphrase for the password manager. There are several out there: LastPass, 1Password, KeePass. I don’t really care which one you use, but use one of them.

Okay. So if you don’t do any of this, and then something happens and you get hacked or lose your information, what steps should you take?

It’s really hard to recover after a hack. In the US and in many other countries, laws are really built around data breaches in which financial information is stolen. So you can put a fraud alert on your credit file. You can ask your banks to send you new credit card numbers, and in many cases the banks will know if your card is hacked before you will. But that, in many ways, is a system that is built around the kinds of hacks that we had two or three years ago, where it was just financial information that was being stolen.

Today, you have forums like Ashley Madison, a dating website for people who are engaging in nontraditional relationships, in many cases outside of marriage. Or there are websites for people with some kind of sensitive medical condition. You can get a new credit card number, you can even get a new Social Security number, but you cannot establish an entirely new life, and if the first Google result for your name is that sensitive medical result from a test that got hacked, you’re toast. If you have photographs of yourself without clothing that are hacked and put online, and the first Google result for your name is a nude photo of you, that’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life. Every future job interview, your employer’s going to type your name in and see this information.

We don’t really have a way to deal with breaches of non-financial information, and in many ways, the financial ones are the easiest to deal with — it’s a pain in the butt, you get some new cards. But in all countries around the world it seems like hospitals are moving towards electronic health records, and it’s terrifying. I’ve been in the situation where I’m filling out an intake form at the doctor and I’m wondering how much of my medical history I actually want to disclose. Normally, I want my doctor to know everything possible so they can help me, but now I’m asking myself what exactly I want to tell this doctor, because I’m worried that at some point down the line this doctor might get hacked, and all my stuff will be online.

It sounds like fundamentally we need better education about privacy, technology, and how to be smart from the start.

In the same way that it would be great if we taught financial literacy to young people in schools, I think it would be great if we taught digital security and privacy. I think kids do figure out privacy, but they don’t always get all the details right, and I think the threats that are out there are so real that everyone would be helped by learning a little bit more about privacy and security.

Would we be safer if we used open-source software like Linux or Mozilla?

Open-source software is not always more secure. There’s this idea that the more people who can look at software, the easier it is to find the bugs — and that hasn’t actually shown to be true. Flaws can hide in plain sight for long periods of time. In many cases, what affects the quality of the software, what affects the security of a tool, is more about how many people are working on it. If you have one tool made by a volunteer, it may be less secure than a tool made by 50 people who were getting paid to do it full time. So while the Firefox browser is probably more privacy-preserving, it is actually less secure than Chrome.

It’s unfortunate that we have to choose between which browser is more secure and which browser is more private, that we cannot have one that does both. I mean, Google is the largest advertising company in the world. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the web browser given away for free by the largest advertising company in the world is not going to protect you from other advertising companies, or companies including Google, online. Chrome facilitates that mass delivery of your personal data to every advertiser when you browse the web. You leave a trail of data behind you when you browse with Chrome. At the same time, the Chrome team does a great job of keeping you secure from hackers. And so you sort of have to pick your poison: are you more worried about being hacked, or are you more worried about online advertisers tracking what you’re doing online?

When you set your security settings on Facebook or on social media to allow only certain people to see what you’ve posted, is that stuff still being recorded or monitored or open to surveillance, despite you trying to stop it from blasting out to the world?

Privacy settings really only control the distribution of information through the platform. The privacy settings do not stop Facebook’s ability to collect and retain data, and they don’t stop Facebook’s ability to turn over your data to the government if the government asks for it. Separately, I think many people think that Facebook is only watching what they’re doing when they’re on Facebook. That is a huge misconception. Everywhere you see a Like button on the internet, Facebook is watching you. Think of the Like button, in many ways, as a pair of eyes. [Editor’s note: At this point in the Facebook Live conversation, all “likes” stopped cold … before starting up again about ten seconds later.]

Newspapers and blogs have Like buttons so that you can like an article. What that means is that Facebook has this view of what you’re doing online. They know which articles you’re reading, they know which videos you’re watching, they know which content you’re looking at. And so they can pool this information, and then monetize it and use it to deliver ads to people that the company thinks are more relevant. But what that also means is that Facebook has truly unparalleled access to information about the kinds of people we are, what makes us tick, what makes us happy, what makes us sad. That’s information that they leverage for advertising purposes. It’s also information that governments or divorce lawyers could come and ask for really at any moment.

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Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science! Around the world, there are many excellent role models — both male and female! — for students interested in science, technology, engineering and math. Here are 5 of our favorite TED-Ed Lessons written by women in science:

1. What’s below the tip of the iceberg?

It’s a well-known fact that the majority of an iceberg lies below the surface — but just as stealthily hidden are their fascinating qualities. Traveling the seas, teeming with life, and sometimes even making a noise called “bergie seltzer,” there’s so much more than meets the eye. Camille Seaman gives homage to these icy isles. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

2. Why are blue whales so enormous?

Blue whales are the largest animals on the planet, but what helps them grow to the length of a basketball court? Asha de Vos explains why the size of krill make them the ideal food for the blue whale — it’s as if the blue whale was made to eat krill (and krill was made to be eaten by the blue whale). Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

3. The Arctic vs. the Antarctic

How can you tell the two poles apart? Where are the penguins? What about the bears? The Arctic pole is located in the Northern Hemisphere within the deep Arctic Ocean, while the Antarctic pole is smack in the middle of the ice-covered Antarctica. Camille Seaman describes how enterprising people and organisms have found ways to reside around both poles despite the frigid temperatures. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

4. Light waves, visible and invisible

Each kind of light has a unique wavelength, but human eyes can only perceive a tiny slice of the full spectrum — the very narrow range from red to violet. Microwaves, radio waves, x-rays and more are hiding, invisible, just beyond our perception. Lucianne Walkowicz shows us the waves we can’t see. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

5. The death of the universe

The shape, contents and future of the universe are all intricately related. We know that it’s mostly flat; we know that it’s made up of baryonic matter (like stars and planets), but mostly dark matter and dark energy; and we know that it’s expanding constantly, so that all stars will eventually burn out into a cold nothingness. Renée Hlozek expands on the beauty of this dark ending. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

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Like many kids, German-Moroccan paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim nursed a fascination for dinosaurs from a young age. The difference is, he grew up and actually found one.

Ibrahim vividly remembers learning about Spinosaurus, a massive aquatic dinosaur whose only known bones were destroyed during World War II. As a kid, Ibrahim dreamed of finding new fossils of this giant — and in his mid-20s, he succeeded. (TED Talk: “How we unearthed the spinosaurus.”) Below, he explains how sheer determination and a bit of magic led to his current achievements as a paleontologist.

Can you actually say, “I have discovered a dinosaur”?

I can. I led the team that re-discovered Spinosaurus, a 50-foot-long carnivore who hunted its prey in rivers 97 million years ago. I also discovered a big flying reptile with a 20-foot wingspan — the largest flying creature that lived in Africa, that we know of. We call it Alanqa saharica. “Alanqa” is an Arabic/Persian name for the phoenix. You know how the phoenix dies and then rises from the ashes? Well, our flying reptile disappeared seemingly forever, but by finding the fossils, we allowed it to rise from the ashes so we could reconstruct it. “Saharica” means “desert,” so the name means “the phoenix from the desert.” We also have found remains of giant plant-eating dinosaurs, crocodile-like predators and many other prehistoric creatures.

Being a paleontologist is, for me, about more than just discovering dinosaurs. They are only small pieces in a much bigger picture. Since I was five, I’ve had a deep-seated fascination not only with dinosaurs but with animals of all kinds — with their anatomy and diversity. At the same time, my imagination was captured by the idea of traveling to places with exotic, magical names like “Timbuktu” or the “Gobi Desert.” So with paleontology, I get to combine all these passions.

Ibrahim in the border region between Morocco and Algeria, where he does his fieldwork. “Getting up here sometimes involves dangerous climbing, including jumps from one rocky ledge to another,” says Ibrahim. “My shirt is showing the first signs of desert climbing wear and tear.” Photo: Zac Kinney

What does a day in the life of a dinosaur hunter look like?

Well, it’s not a typical workday. We work under very interesting — and often difficult — conditions, mostly in the border region between Morocco and Algeria. When in the field, we go out to the desert with Land Rovers. Early explorers had camels — but that’s pretty much the only difference. We still have to work in scorching heat, with sandstorms and smugglers, bandits and snakes. We’ll stay in the desert for anywhere from a week to over a month, typically in tents.

Sometimes there are places in the middle of nowhere where you can get a meal and a place to sleep. But the Sahara is a lawless place. All the norms and infrastructure we take for granted often don’t exist. But it is also a pristine place, in many ways. It’s timeless. Camel caravans follow the same routes they did for hundreds of years.

For various geological reasons, fossils in the Moroccan-Algerian border region are often exposed along steep edges, so there’s a lot of climbing on sharp rocks involved. We spend a lot of time walking around, looking for ghosts from deep time: fossils. That’s the best way. You can’t really spot things out of a moving car.

What do you look for when you’re walking?

We’re looking for bone that’s weathering at the surface, so there’s a chance that there is more underground, where it’s been protected from erosion, rain and so on. We’re talking about hundreds of kilometers, so you really need to develop a pretty good eye. We do have geological maps, so we know roughly where rocks of the right age are cropping up. It’s difficult, though, especially in the Sahara. It’s much easier to look for fossils in Wyoming or Montana, or in famous fossil localities in Canada. There are parts of Canada where dinosaur skeletons are just lying around. Finding things in the Sahara is much, much harder. You’ll find bits and pieces, teeth, enough clues to reconstruct part of the ecosystem. But finding exceptionally well-preserved fossils or partial skeletons is like looking for a needle not in a haystack, but in a desert.

Do you get to name your own dinosaurs when you find them?

Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Spinosaurus already had a name, as it had been found about a 100 years ago. The only remains — a few bones, including part of the giant sail, had been in a museum in Munich, and were destroyed during World War II. The scientist who had found the bones in Egypt — German paleontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach — was more or less forgotten.

My rediscovering Spinosaurus in Morocco was also about restoring his legacy. It was like all the stars aligned so I could close that circle. Being German and Moroccan, I was also probably the only person in the world that could really pull the story off. You’ll have to watch the National Geographic documentary to see why, but it involved a lot of detective work and many crazy coincidences. I actually set out to find Spinosaurus when I was six or seven years old.

How could you have known about the Spinosaurus at such a young age?

It didn’t have a big presence in dinosaur books, because so little was known about it. But there was enough to realize that this was an odd, poorly known animal and that the only known remains were destroyed. I thought, “I’d love to go back to the Sahara and find a new skeleton.”

When I finally started my fieldwork in the Sahara, I was in my mid-20s. I had never been there, but I took a group of people to one of the most beautiful — and most dangerous — places in the world. They just had to trust me.

An artist’s rendering of spinosaurus and the river ecosystem that existed 100 million years ago in what is now the Sahara Desert. Artwork: Davide Bonadonna, advised by Nizar Ibrahim and Simone Maganuco.

So you had this vision of finding Spinosaurus when you were a child — and you achieved that in your 20s. Can you top such a feat? What’s next?

I have plans for a couple of projects that could be as interesting, if not more so. But I’m continuing my work in the Sahara, because it’s a big treasure trove. Who knows what we are going to find next? It might be something really cool.

Meanwhile, we put together a big international exhibition that will travel around the world for five years. It includes Spinosaurus, all these creatures from the Cretaceous period and the historical background. It was in Washington, D.C., until April. Now it’s going to Milan, then to Berlin.

One thing I’d like to do is take the exhibition to Morocco, to make sure we tell this incredible story to the young people of the region. Sadly, many Morrocans don’t know anything about their natural heritage. Morocco’s dinosaurs are pulling in crowds in D.C., and breaking visitor records at the National Geographic Museum — yet in Morocco, some people don’t even know that their country has produced some of the most spectacular dinosaur discoveries. The country is slowly catching up, as are other parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Every culture and country needs explorers, people that are pushing boundaries, and scientists working on topics that are beyond the norm.

Of course, this will take resources — a good university infrastructure, for a start, and job prospects. But that early spark of enthusiasm and passion — kids have that. They’re natural-born scientists. Kids are incredibly inquisitive, and for many scientists, like me, the thing that got them hooked was a visit to a natural history museum, a zoo, an aquarium, even a book. It’s important to invest in capturing imaginations. Not every country has plentiful natural resources, but every country has young brains. It’s the world’s biggest asset.

Top image: A rendering of alanqa saharica, one of Ibrahim’s discoveries. This flying reptile had a 20-foot wingspan — and its name means “phoenix of the desert.” Artwork: Davide Bonadonna, advised by Nizar Ibrahim

This piece is adapted from a longer Q&A that originally ran on blog.ted.com.

Blue whale researcher and TED Senior Fellow Asha de Vos unveiled her TED-Ed lesson today on the TED Fellows stage. The video — “Why are blue whales so enormous?” — stars a puppet version of de Vos, which she had been coveting for weeks. So Fellows & Community Director Tom Rielly presented her with it, hand-carried from London by TED Senior Fellow Taghi Amirani. We asked her how she felt to be gifted with her own plush doppelgänger.

“It was such an amazing surprise! When I saw the first cut of the video, I was roaring with laughter. I hadn’t known they were going to make a puppet of me. So I had actually been pestering Tom and all the TED staff for the last few days about how I could get my hands on it. Tom was very convincing when he said it was in the middle of nowhere and it would be impossible to get it,” says de Vos. “I realize now in hindsight that they’ve been avoiding me a little bit for the last two days. It was a well-kept secret. I’m looking forward to using it when I talk to kids about the ocean, which I usually do wearing a mask and fins! Now she [the puppet] can do it.”

Original Post and Photo: Karen Eng

Learn more about TED Fellows here, and get more news from TED at the TED blog.

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