AARP Bulletin - January/February 2010

; Your World
Harvard@home. The site features more than
60 multimedia-rich programs on topics ranging
from stem cells to Beethoven.
>>
Howcast. Its videos run the gamut from “How to
Look Great in Photographs” to “How to Jump-Start
Your Car.” Make your own how-to shorts in How-
cast’s Emerging Filmmakers Program.
How-to ...

Learning center. Acquire lots of different skills—
from organizing your daily life to mastering Google
Desktop—from Hewlett Packard’s online classes. Each
class includes up to 10 lessons and may also include
interactive demos, assignments and quizzes.
Nobel Prize winners. The online home of the Nobel
Prizes is packed with interviews with and lectures
by some of the world’s smartest people. There’s
an interview, for example, with Italian neurologist
Rita Levi-Montalcini, the first Nobel laureate to
reach the age of 100. (She and a colleague won the
1986 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their
discovery of nerve growth factor.) In it, Levi-Mon-
talcini talks about why this latest period of her life
has been the best.
WonderHow To. Curators scour more than 1,700
websites and hand-pick instructional videos—from
how to live longer (with University of Cambridge re-
searcher Aubrey de Grey) to teaching your dog to
roll over and play dead.
Deep Thinkers
TEDTalks. Since 1984, the annual con-
ference that goes by the acronym TED
(Technology, Entertainment, Design) has
brought together some of the world’s top
thinkers and doers and challenged them
to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes or
less. This site aggregates the best of those, including
Australian science writer Margaret Wertheim’s pre-
sentation about the beautiful mathematical links
among coral, crochet and hyperbolic geometry.
Forum National Network. A consortium of
public television and radio stations offers live and
on-demand lectures by some of the world’s fore-
most scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policy-
makers and community leaders. Recent lecture
webcasts included Harvard sociologist Sara Law-
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