Alpine Schadenfreude

So, this is CLIMBeR.

This climber was snow blind.

These changes in the alpine world are accelerating.

He lives in a small Alpine village in Austria.

They tried to radio a message to Rob Hall, who was a superb climber stuck, sort of, with a weak climber up near the summit.

This climber is on the last pitch of it.

Now, he's a rock climber, but you know, he's our executive director.

This robot is called CLIMBeR Cable suspended Limbed Intelligent Matching Behavior Robot.

Narrator Lynn Verinsky, a professional climber, who appeared to be brimming with confidence.

And one more climber should have died that day, but didn't, and that's Beck Weathers.

This red dot marks the Great Basin of North America, and I'm involved with an alpine biodiversity project there with some collaborators.

So here's a food web, or a map of feeding links between species that live in Alpine Lakes in the mountains of California.

We also got some bad news in the storm that Beck Weathers, another climber, had collapsed in the snow and was dead.

All of that, strip it away. In the world of the arctic and alpine environments, where the ice is, it's real and it's present.

You can see on this climber, we have two oxygen tanks in the backpack little titanium tanks, very lightweight and we're not carrying much else.

In this talk from TED University 2009, veteran rock climber Matthew Childs shares nine pointers for rock climbing. These handy tips bear on an effective life at sea level, too.

And a professor in the University of Massachusetts, in the zoology department, bought this climber because she wanted to study the insect diversity of the top of the tree canopy.

Europeans are buying gemütliche Alpine ski chalets, glamorous condominiums with Mediterranean views in the South of Spain, and, increasingly, villas in picturesque sites in Turkey, Hungary, and Croatia. Australians are buying oceanfront properties at the Sunshine Coast and the Whitsundays.

A poster shows three white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag. And images of junkies and Muslim women in headscarves are contrasted in a promotional movie with idyllic pictures of Alpine scenery and efficient banks the People s Party s Switzerland.

At TEDxNASA, Dennis Hong introduces seven award winnning, all terrain robots like the humanoid, soccer playing DARwIn and the cliff gripping CLIMBeR all built by his team at RoMeLa, Virginia Tech. Watch to the end to hear the five creative secrets to his lab's incredible technical success.

Moreover, after his career is over, he is unlikely to become a manager of his sport like Jean Claude Killy, the former Alpine skier who was co president of the 1992 winter Olympics, or his fellow football legend Michel Platini, who helped coordinate the 1998 World Cup. After all, Zidane, arguably the world s best football player, left with a gesture that has no place in any game.