If you’re dreading the inevitable day your New Year’s resolutions—to lose weight, get a better job, and drink less, perhaps?—fall flat, it might be because you need different resolutions. Instead of focusing on outcomes, why not set your sights on process this year? Here, 10 resolutions inspired by TED Talks. They just might inspire you […]
Perhaps you are looking forward to a new and hopeful 2014; perhaps you see late December as the perfect time for reflection and resolution. I’m pleased to let you off the hook. This is the time when you should look back at your year and focus on the question: What TED Talks did I miss? Lucky for you, […]
Packing up for your holiday trip home? For the downtime from eggnog, food and family, consider bringing a couple of these excellent novels from TED speakers whose talks were published this year. Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, The Age of Miracles, quickly took off when it was published last year. Walker imagines a world in […]
Diana Nyad swam 110 miles from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, a journey that took her just under 53 hours last September. In today’s talk, Nyad gives a vivid account of what it was like to be out in the water, making her fifth attempt at this swim — one she first tried […]
In a major setback last week for the LGBT community, an Indian Supreme Court ruling upheld Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — a 153-year-old law criminalizing gay sex. This act overturned a 2009 Delhi High Court ruling that this should not apply to consensual acts and, essentially, recriminalized homosexuality. While the Indian government […]
How does being rich affect the way we behave? In today’s talk, social psychologist Paul Piff provides a convincing case for the answer: not well. “As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases,” he says in […]
DNA. It’s what encodes the genetic material of every living thing. And it also makes a yummy cocktail. This video, which stars TED Fellow synthetic biologist Oliver Medvedik, shows you how to make a delicious adult beverage out of frozen strawberries, pineapple juice and Bacardi 151. Follow the adorably animated instructions, and you’ll be able […]
If you’ve ever had the ending of your favorite TV show ruined by a spoiler-filled tweet, Jennie Lamere feels your pain. The 18-year-old tech whiz won the grand prize at Boston’s TVNext Hack event in April for inventing Twivo, a clever app that blocks all mentions of a show you’re waiting to watch until you’re […]
In 2013, TED published more than 250 talks, each with an idea worth spreading. And yet, certain ideas seemed to resonate throughout the year, as if speakers at different events were singing parts of the same choral symphony. As 2013 draws to a close, here is a look at some of the big ideas we […]
Listen to too much talk about innovation, and before long you’re bound to hear someone utter the “cross” word. It might be followed by “fertilization,” maybe “pollination,” perhaps even “disciplinary,” but the sharing of ideas with unlike-minded people is a hot topic, the holy grail of wannabe world-changers. After all, the thinking goes, working with […]
It’s not often that you see a designer throw their creation on the ground and break it to smithereens. But that’s exactly what TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits does in the video above. Why? Because he works in the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. When the pieces break apart, they quickly re-assemble themselves, as if the film […]
In the developing world, would-be entrepreneurs are easily able to get microloans. But getting access to formal financial institutions — the kind that give large-scale loans — well, that’s much more difficult. Because 70% of those who start small businesses simply don’t have a financial identity. TED Fellow Shivani Siroya has created a tool to […]
Limitations, schimitations. At TED2013, Phil Hansen shared the story of how he thought his art career was over when he developed a severe hand tremor. Instead, by learning to “embrace the shake,” Hansen became a creative powerhouse, constantly coming up with new ways to transcend his limitation. And so we wondered: what if we asked […]
When the lights went down at TEDxMet, a TEDx event hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October, anyone looking very closely could see a tiny light in the first row, casting a dim glow on a lucite desk. The desk was created for artist Alice Attie, who sat with a piece of paper […]
Mental health suffers from a major image problem. One in every four people experiences mental health issues — yet more than 40 percent of countries worldwide have no mental health policy. Across the board it seems like we have no idea how to talk about it respectfully and responsibly. Stigma and discrimination are the two […]
When Jane Chen and her team arrived in India five years ago, it was with a bold idea. They wanted to develop a simple, affordable solution to a terrible problem: infant mortality. They went to the right place. According to a recent Child Mortality report, produced by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, […]