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If the player is blocked by the network, open Bonnie Bassler’s talk at TED.

All eight

• BacteriaBonnie Bassler — How bacteria talkQuorum sensing: the chemistry by which a bacterium knows whether it is alone. The best single talk if you have twelve minutes and a prejudice that microbes are solitary.
• EditingJennifer Doudna — How CRISPR lets us edit our DNAThe public account by one of the people who made Cas9 programmable. Pair it with the longer history on the serendipities page so the story does not start in 2012.
• LightEdith Widder — The weird and wonderful world of bioluminescenceMost of the animals that make light live where sunlight does not. A corrective to the idea that the interesting ocean is the part you can see from a boat.
• FormJanine Benyus — Biomimicry’s surprising lessonsAsking what an organism has already solved before you design a material. Listen for the biology, and keep a line between a real adaptation and a metaphor for innovation.
• EpidemicsPardis Sabeti — How we’ll fight the next deadly virusGenomic surveillance as a public-health practice, told by someone who has done the field work. The talk predates COVID-19 and is clearer for that.
• TissueNina Tandon — Could tissue engineering mean personalized medicine?Growing cells on scaffolds, explained without a promise that spare organs are a solved problem. A good place to practice hearing a hope and a method as separate things.
• NumbersSuzana Herculano-Houzel — What is so special about the human brain?A counting argument: how many neurons, and at what metabolic cost. The specialness, if it is there, is not a larger slogan. It is a number.
• MapsSebastian Seung — I am my connectomeThe proposal that you are the wiring of your neurons. Hear it as a research program with a philosophical title. The wiring diagram is harder than the sentence.

A talk is not a paper. If you will quote a number from one of these, find the paper or the book it came from. The publications page is the next shelf.