In a zippy demo at TED U, AnnMarie Thomas shows how two different kinds of homemade play dough can be used to demonstrate electrical properties -- by lighting up LEDs, spinning motors, and turning little kids into circuit designers.

AnnMarie Thomas works on the playful side of engineering -- using cool tools to teach and help others.

AnnMarie Thomas joined the faculty of the University of St. Thomas in the fall of 2006.

Previously, she was a faculty member at Art Center College of Design. She is the director of the UST Design laboratory and leads a team of students looking at both the playful side of engineering (squishy circuits for students, the science of circus, toy design) and ways to use engineering design to help others (projects in technology design for older adults).

Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia.

But a moral concern with transplants (where do donor livers come from ...) led her to look further, and to ask: Could we be transplanting cells, not whole organs?

At the INK Conference, she talks through her new research, discovering healing cells in some surprising places.

A surgical pioneer in Singapore, Susan Lim is a researcher and entrepreneur.

Susan Lim established her reputation as a surgeon in 1990 after performing Singapore's (and southeast Asia's) first successful liver transplant.

She has gone on to further pioneer in the field of general surgery, two new surgical technologies for Singapore, the mammotome minimally invasive breast biopsy and robotic surgery for the private sector.

Former journalist turned online media powerhouse, Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.

Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation, she ran CBC.CA, the website for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one of Canada’s most prominent and best-loved cultural institutions (and one of my personal favorites).

I was especially interested in Gardner's talk as I am a HUGE fan and regular supporter of Wikipedia, without which Amazing Women Rock would not be the site it is today.

In this informal interview, Gardner explains how Wikipedia depends on the generosity of "strangers" to stay afloat:

In this first-of-its-kind demo, Heather Knight introduces Data, a robotic stand-up comedian that does much more than rattle off one-liners -- it gathers audience feedback (using software co-developed with Scott Satkin and Varun Ramakrishna at CMU) and tunes its act as the crowd responds. Is this thing on?

Heather Knight runs Marilyn Monrobot, which creates socially intelligent robot performances and sensor-based electronic art. (and she helped build the amazing Rube Goldberg machine for OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass.")

Heather Knight is conducting her doctoral research at the intersection of robotics and entertainment at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.

She runs Marilyn Monrobot in New York, where she and her cohort create “charismatic machine performances.”

Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP's risky pursuit of oil.

Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more ... and too often, we're left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein's question: What's the backup plan?