Month: June 2016

Mārtiņš Otikovs: Decrypting the Puzzle of Spider Silk

Decrypting the Puzzle of Spider Silk

Don’t judge the book from the cover, so the saying goes. That’s definitely the case with spiders, whose webs are made of spider silk, a material with amazing mechanical properties. So common in nature, and, as it turns out, so...

Bring back the magic: How you can help reinvent the cinema experience

Bring back the magic: How you can help reinvent the cinema experience

Do you ever feel like the cinema experience is not what it used to be? You are not alone. After years of experience in marketing and media, fueled by a passion for cinema as a storytelling medium and encouraged by...

Stereotyping gender — how is this still a thing? Linda Curika at TEDxRiga

Stereotyping gender — how is this still a thing?

Gender stereotypes in media are capable of driving a sane person insane; yet still they persist. Is fighting stereotypes head-on hopeless? Linda is one of the first and most recognizable Latvian feminists. For more than 10 years she has observed...

Dialogue as partnership: Lena Hercberga at TEDxRiga

Dialogue as partnership

Lena addresses people within corporations, social entrepreneurs to open up for a dialogue. She insists that building cross-sector social innovation is the only way to build a strong world. What can we learn from the changing relationship between the big...

Would you be ready to host a refugee?

Would you be ready to host a refugee?

What questions do you ask yourself after seeing the news about sinking boats full of refugees at the doorsteps of Europe? Egils Grasmanis and his wife asked themselves if they would be ready to host a refugee. Would you?

The Missing Link

The Missing Link

[translation_languages]no languages[/translation_languages] [translation_text language=”en”] The latest art project by Ivars Drulle includes planting hundreds of flowers in ruins of an abandoned building. However, this is an unusual step by a classically trained sculptor, who once thought that in the quest...

Maria Golubeva @ TEDxRiga

Two Lessons from Late Medieval Politics

Mass culture tells us that medieval political life was somewhat like ‘Game of Thrones’ – kings and dynasties fiercely fighting each other for power. This image is rather far from the complexities of late medieval politics, where institutions played at...

When looking for certainty, beware of experts

When looking for certainty, beware of experts

As a professor of psychology, Ivars Austers knows well how biased is our thinking. He wants to raise our awareness to the fact that when we crave for certainty, an expert will often show up to provide it. But not...

What we can learn from birds about ourselves

What we can learn from birds about ourselves

[translation_languages]no languages[/translation_languages] [translation_text language=”en”]Why do we cheat? Why do we forgive? Why do we get stressed? When difficult questions like these cannot be answered using humans, we turn to other organisms. It turns out that birds have the answer…[/translation_text]  ...

MNTHA: Fluidity

Fluidity

Project MNTHA started recently – summer of 2014 – when Marija Mickeviča accidentally started experimenting with production and electronic music. This led her to the National finals of Eurovision. In 2016, new music is still being written, the debut album...