But the bridges that we saw that opened and closed -- I'm slightly squeamish -- but I once saw a photograph of a footballer who was diving for a ball.

(Clanging) (Buzzing) A few weeks ago we took littleBits to RISD and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever -- just cardboard, wood and paper -- and told them "Make something."

This is made by recycling an old CD player that you can get from an old computer, some cardboard, tape, couple of sensors, a few blinking LEDs, and then suddenly you have a tool. You build something that you cannot find on the market.

I've turned the computer on, and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk built out of cardboard, and it's put into the computer.

Ten percent of the species actually make a ball, and this ball they roll away from the dung source, usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source, and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls.

The beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade, so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld.

So the ball leaves a little thermal shadow, and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face, and all the time it's trying to cool itself down, we think, and avoid the hot sand that it's walking across.

(Applause) (Applause ends) They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me.

I am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube, and this exhibition is the first one I did using paper tubes.

Now, normally, when an object flies through the air, the air will flow around the object, but in this case, the ball would be going so fast that the air molecules wouldn't have time to move out of the way.

This would result in a flood of x-rays that would spread out in a bubble along with exotic particles, plasma inside, centered on the pitcher's mound, and that would move away from the pitcher's mound slightly faster than the ball.

What they see is cardboard cutouts, and it's very sad and it's very lonely, and it's very rare, fortunately.

And that's exactly why Juliano could kick that ball just by thinking, because he was wearing the first brain-controlled robotic vest that can be used by paraplegic, quadriplegic patients to move and to regain feedback.

And the most amazing thing is, 10 seconds after he did that, and looked at us on the pitch, he told us, celebrating as you saw, "I felt the ball."

And the kinds of generalizations babies have to make about ducks and balls they have to make about almost everything: shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings.

(Laughter) But the important point is it's really easy to pull three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly blue balls.

Laura Schulz: Told you. (Laughs) (Video) HG: See this one? (Ball squeaks) Hey Clara, this one's for you. You can go ahead and play.

All right, it's nice that babies will generalize properties of blue balls to yellow balls, and it's impressive that babies can learn from imitating us, but we've known those things about babies for a very long time.

(Video) HG: See this? (Ball squeaks) See this toy? (Ball squeaks) Oh, that was cool. See? (Ball squeaks) Now this one's for you to play. You can go ahead and play.

Eighteen months later, it's talking to you, and babies' first words aren't just things like balls and ducks, they're things like "all gone, " which refer to disappearance, or "uh-oh, " which refer to unintentional actions.

(Laughter) The piece on the left -- and that ultimately led to the piece on the right -- happened when the kid that was working on this took one of those long strings of stuff and folded it up to put it in the wastebasket.

They appear to behave either as particles, like little baseballs, or as waves, like water waves, depending on the experiment that we perform.

(Laughter) Now, the thing is, of course -- so I've made some decisions in my life where, in hindsight, I should have just listened to the ball.

So the ball may get smarter and smarter and smarter, but I believe it's still on us to make the decisions if we want to achieve something extraordinary, on the right end of the curve.

There is no way in the world that we, as a community, should be calling the police for kids playing ball in the street.

If you toss a baseball up in the air, its wavelength is a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a meter, far too tiny to ever detect.

On one side, the air moved in the opposite direction to the ball's spin, causing increased pressure, while on the other side, the air moved in the same direction as the spin, creating an area of lower pressure.

Even if the ball didn't disintegrate on impact, or hit any obstacles, as the air slowed it, the angle of its deflection would increase, causing it to spiral into smaller and smaller circles until finally stopping.

And they were emotional because they could hear the sounds of the basketball, the sounds of the whistle and the cheering fans in the stands -- sounds that we take for granted.

Without dolphins, the bait balls are more dispersed and sharks often end up with what I call a sardine donut, or a mouth full of water.

NL: William Paley, who started CBS, David Sarnoff, who started NBC, Edward R. Murrow, the greatest of the foreign correspondents, Paddy Chayefsky -- I think the best writer that ever came out of television -- Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and me.

(Laughter) So I went back to my favorite material, the gateway drug for making, corrugated cardboard, and I made myself a suit of armor, replete with the neck shields and a white horse.

Over about a month, he graduated me from cardboard to roofing aluminum called flashing and still, one of my all-time favorite attachment materials, POP rivets.

They go into the batting cage and do batting practice for hours, having different types of pitches being thrown at them, hitting ball after ball as they limber their muscles, getting ready for the game itself.

Scientists added a single gene that codes for a protein represented by this orange ball that feeds back on itself to keep cranking out more of that protein.

See how it constantly logs every resident of our neighborhood; logging the kids who play football in the no-ballgame area and marking them as statutory nuisances.

(Laughter) What these bees do is, they sit there. These solitary bees, they drill a hole in the ground or drill a hole in a branch, and they collect pollen and make it into a ball, and they lay an egg on it.

And space is limited, so at every table, one pair of players practices forehands, another practices backhands, and every now and then, the balls collide in midair and everybody says, "Wow!"

And then as now, it was a beautiful place of balls and punts, beautiful people, many of whom took to heart Ronald Reagan's comment that, "even if they say hard work doesn't do you any harm, why risk it?"

You see, what's going on here, and in the bat and ball problem is that you have some intuitive ways of interacting with the world, some models that you use to understand the world.

This is the neurotypical child, and what you see is that the child is able to make cues of the dynamic information to predict where the ball is going to go.

It looks around, searches for the ball... looks around, searches for the ball, and it tries to play a game of soccer autonomously -- artificial intelligence.