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What’s the definition of feminism? 12 talks that explain it to you

What’s the definition of feminism? 12 talks that explain it to you

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Earlier this month, Merriam-Webster announced that 2017’s word of the year is feminism. Searches for the word on the dictionary website spiked throughout the year, beginning in January around the Women’s March, again after Kellyanne Conway said in an interview that she didn’t consider herself a feminist, and during some of feminism’s many pop culture []

How should we talk about transgender issues?

How should we talk about transgender issues?

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Geena Rocero did a pretty bold thing at TED2014: She came out. The transgender fashion model chose Vancouver to reveal to the world that she was assigned male at birth. “I am here exposed … to help others live without shame and terror,” she says in today’s talk. The trans community has had a spotlight []

The future is coming. 6 ways it will change everything

The future is coming. 6 ways it will change everything

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by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google How will our minds be blown in the next 30 years? Well, that’s quite a long time, given the acceleration in history. Still, I’ll be brave and make six hypotheses. 1. Machine Intelligence I think that just as the Internet has been such a great driver of change across []

What will be the most important driver of change in the future?

What will be the most important driver of change in the future?

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One of the installations at TED this year challenged attendees to vote on ten potential drivers of change in the next 30 years. The crowd had their say via that enormously sophisticated piece of technology, the sticky note. As we could likely have predicted, there wasn’t much consensus among those in Vancouver, but the range []

How Star Trek will finally come true

How Star Trek will finally come true

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by Nilofer Merchant In the next 30 years, the full Star Trek story will actually come true.  Already, we’ve seen many of the show’s far-fetched ideas come to fruition. Everyone now carries a communicator, aka the smart phone. We have medical devices that test for diseases with light, not by drawing blood (like new tests for anemia []

What it will mean to live on a legible planet

What it will mean to live on a legible planet

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by Andrew Blau, Deloitte Technology advances over the last 30 years mean that we have crossed an invisible threshold: for the first time in human history, we now live on a legible planet. What will blow our minds in the next 30 years is what it will mean when almost anyone can read and understand the world []

What are anonymous companies? An infographic

What are anonymous companies? An infographic

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At TED2014, Charmian Gooch made the TED Prize wish to launch a new era of openness in business and end the phenomenon of anonymous companies. “Anonymous companies are making it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to find the actual human beings responsible for really bad crimes,” she said. So how do anonymous companies work? This infographic explains the []

How to grow a bone without a body

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_lk4Q-2x8I&w=560&h=315%5D This video features the work of TED Fellow Nina Tandon and Sarindr Bhumiratana, her colleague at Columbia University’s Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering and partner-in-new-business-crime. Together with a group of fellow bio-engineers, the pair recently founded the company, Epibone, which they describe as “a revolutionary bone reconstruction company that allows patients []

Today, the Bionic Woman can just go ahead and print her own parts

Today, the Bionic Woman can just go ahead and print her own parts

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A persistent sight in David Sengeh‘s childhood, growing up in Sierra Leone: amputees. Losing a limb was an all-too-common fact in the civil-war-torn region. But as if the loss of a limb weren’t enough, the aftermath was almost worse, Sengeh saw, as he watched family members and friends struggle with ill-fitting, uncomfortable prosthetics that hurt []

The ethics of genetically enhanced monkey-slaves

The ethics of genetically enhanced monkey-slaves

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Think parents should be able to select their children’s talents and personalities? Or want to run and hide in the woods at the thought of it? Whatever your opinion, it is precisely the kind of question that Julian Savulescu wants you to take seriously. Professor of practical ethics at the University of Oxford, Savulescu thinks []

Think you’ve got a terrible memory? You don’t know the half of it

Think you’ve got a terrible memory? You don’t know the half of it

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Last year, MIT neuroscientists Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez manipulated the memory of a mouse. In a fascinating and mildly troubling breakthrough caused by a laser and the protein channelrhodopsin, they “activated” fear memories in a mouse. The impetus, says Ramirez, was the awful feeling of a break-up, the desire, Eternal Sunshine-style, to erase the []

Embrace messiness: Liz Coleman on the next role of higher education

Embrace messiness: Liz Coleman on the next role of higher education

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What’s the future of education? It’s a popular question right now, with answers ranging from online learning to charter schools. But Liz Coleman is focused on a more fundamental issue: what will schools teach? And what does that mean for the future of our society? In her eye-opening talk at TED2009, Coleman shared her hopes []