The past few weeks have seen some extraordinary TED-relevant news items, both happy and sad. Below are some highlights. This year’s TEDGlobal included a new simulcast event, TEDxVilniusLive, which featured a livestream of the conference, a TEDxYouShare audience session, and a Maker Fair that showed off plenty of innovative local work. Lithuania’s youngest quadcopter constructor, […]
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This weekend, thousands gathered in Washington, DC, to help lay one million handmade representations of human bones — 1,018,260 bones, to be exact – on the National Mall. This breathtaking installation created a haunting river of bones leading to the US Capitol, and represents the culmination of a nearly five-year social activism project imagined by TED […]
Two best friends inadvertently turn their hometown in Zanzibar into a tourist attraction, in this short film directed by TED Fellow Kibwe Tavares. How did they do it? By taking a chance photograph of a gigantic fish — far bigger than a human being — leaping out of the nearby water. The film, called Jonah, […]
Anita Doron’s first feature film, The Lesser Blessed, is a love story that takes place in a remote community in the Northwest Territories. This moving film is being released theatrically in Canada today, and will arrive in the U.S. on June 13th. As it opens, we asked Doron to tell us about the film, her path from poet […]
A blue whale scientist. A mobile finance entrepreneur. A DIY neuroscientist. A comedian. A sound artist. This year’s class of TED Fellows brings together trailblazers in a wide variety of fields from locations all around the globe. The TED Fellows program is getting ready to choose its new class — so they’re looking for 20 […]
For four years, artist Naomi Natale’s social art practice, the One Million Bones project, has used education, hands-on artmaking and public art installation to raise awareness of ongoing genocide and mass atrocities. On June 8, Naomi and the One Million Bones team will be joined by thousands of volunteers to lay down the one million […]
Five years ago, the non-profit tech company Ushahidi exploited existing technology to create a powerful platform that allowed users to crowdsource crisis information sent over SMS. Now the Kenyan company is set to do the same with the BRCK, a wireless, rugged, battery-powered modem ready for any environment. As the BRCK’s Kickstarter campaign gathers steam, Ushahidi […]
Astrobiologist and geologist Louisa Preston looks for analogues to possible life on Mars in the most extreme environments on Earth. Now she’s also considering how humans might someday make a home on the red planet, and is raising funds on Kickstarter in support of AstroGardening – an educational exhibit designed to explore how we might someday […]
In recent months, That Game Company’s downloadable PS3 game Journey has swept up an armload of awards — the Game Developers Choice Award for Game of the Year and BAFTA Video Game Award for Best Game Design, to name just two — not to mention a Grammy nomination for Best Original Soundtrack. Company co-founder and TED Fellow […]
TED Senior Fellow and architect Mohammad Tauheed runs ArchSociety.com, a nonprofit community resource for architects and designers in developing nations. When the Rana Plaza building in Savar, Bangladesh, collapsed last week, killing hundreds of garment factory workers, Tauheed supported the rescue efforts. Here, he tells us his experience of the disaster, how corruption and greed […]
Photographer Camille Seaman sees the personality in elements of nature. The TED Fellow thrilled us at TED2011 with her haunting photos of polar ice — some glaciers timid, others proud and defiant — and, at TED2013, shared stunning images of supercell clouds, which she characterizes as “lovely monsters.” We are very excited that Seaman has […]
Conceptual artist Alicia Eggert uses words as found objects in her sculptural art — a body of work that serves as an ongoing investigation of time. Here, she tells us about taking her neon piece “You are (on) an island” to various locations in the world, shares how childhood experiences in South Africa sparked her […]
Squishy, vivid, frozen, frothy – architect and artist Antonio Torres’s wildly colorful and whimsical built spaces are often created using membranes filled with gases, liquids and organic materials, inviting people to crawl in, jump, touch and play. Here, we ask him about his incredible works and where his inspiration comes from. Tell me about yourself […]
Skylar Tibbits makes things that assemble themselves, with potential large-scale applications from self-adjusting water pipes to self-assembling structures in space. At his recently founded Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, he’s pioneering 4D printing — using smart materials to make objects that change shape and evolve. Here, he explains how 4D printing works, and describes his journey from architect […]
TED News in Brief: A quadcopter cam, love from Will Smith, and more
