Sharon L. Butler, an artist and writer, maintains an award-winning art blog, Two Coats of Paint, blogs for The Huffington Post, and is a contributing writer at The Brooklyn Rail.

She has received several grants, residencies and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, Pocket Utopia artist residencies, Connecticut Commission on Culture artist fellowship, Blue Mountain Center Artists' fellowship, and Connecticut State University research grants.

In addition, her art work is included in private collections in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Baltimore, Tampa, Philadelphia, Providence, Berlin, London and Kyoto.

Butler is an art professor at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens.

We now rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

Amber Case studies the symbiotic interactions between humans and machines -- and considers how our values and culture are being shaped by living lives increasingly mediated by high technology.

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist, examining the way humans and technology interact and evolve together.

Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams brings tough love to the dream of world peace, with her razor-sharp take on what "peace" really means, and a set of profound stories that zero in on the creative struggle -- and sacrifice -- of those who work for it.

Jody Williams won a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to eradicate landmines. Now she’s teaming up with five other female peace laureates to empower women to fight violence, injustice and inequality.

In more than 100 years of Nobel Peace Prizes, only a dozen women have ever won.

Civil-rights and peace activist Jody Williams, received the award in 1997 as the chief strategist of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which established the first global treaty banning antipersonnel mines.

Working with a team of physicists, Dr. Deborah Rhodes developed a new tool for tumor detection that's 3 times as effective as traditional mammograms for women with dense breast tissue.

The life-saving implications are stunning. So why haven't we heard of it? Rhodes shares the story behind the tool's creation, and the web of politics and economics that keep it from mainstream use.

Deborah Rhodes is an expert at managing breast-cancer risk. The director of the Mayo Clinic’s Executive Health Program is now testing a gamma camera that can see tumors that get missed by mammography.

For all of the lives it saves, mammography still cannot detect the early onset of breast cancer in as many as one of every four women ages 40 to 49.

In this short talk, Arianna Huffington shares a small idea that can awaken much bigger ones: the power of a good night's sleep.

Instead of bragging about our sleep deficits, she urges us to shut our eyes and see the big picture: We can sleep our way to increased productivity and happiness -- and smarter decision-making.

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of many  books.

She is also co-host of "Left, Right & Center," public radio’s popular political roundtable program, as well as "Both Sides Now," a weekly syndicated radio show with Mary Matalin moderated by Mark Green.