Henry Evans is an enthusiastic world traveler. In the past year, he has visited Vermillion, South Dakota; Sydney, Australia; and Qusar, Azerbaijan. He’s explored halls of the Smithsonian, gone scuba diving in California, and flown over Bora Bora. He is in the midst of finagling a trip to space. Evans, it should be noted, does […]
“As you can see, my legs are bionic,” said Hugh Herr on the TED2014 stage. “The artificial part of my body is malleable, able to take on any form, any function, a blank slate through which to create structures that can extend beyond biological capability.” Standing tall in a suit hemmed at his knees, Herr […]
Bionics designer Hugh Herr spoke today on the TED stage about a future in which disability is a mere memory – a future he believes is both imminent and imperative. With pant legs cropped to reveal his own two bionic legs (“I made sure to shave today,” he joked), he explained the fascinating details of […]
Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics Group at The MIT Media Lab, strolls onto the TED2014 stage in a pair of long, black shorts. Normally, what he’s wearing wouldn’t be of note—except that he’s chosen his ensemble today to show us something. Below the hem of his shorts, we see that he has two prosthetic legs. […]
Derek Paravicini is many things: an incredible piano player, a blind man, an excited talker, a musical savant, and a 30-something with severe autism. In today’s TED Talk, we get a fascinating peek into how he understands music. Paravicini — who was playing major concert halls at the age of 10 — not only has […]
Walt Cochran, a teacher in Kansas City, shared this touching video with us for Education Week about his children — one disabled, one not — who make you think about the depth of the sibling relationship. Lindsay, 10, suffers from a form of Muscular Dystrophy called Spinal Muscular Atrophy and has been in a wheelchair […]
Almost twenty-three years ago, Joshua Prager experienced a moment that could only be described as “a great hinge in my life,” one that divided it “like the spine of an open book.” Just 19 years old then, Prager was in Israel for a year after high school. He was sitting in the backseat of a minibus […]
[ted id=1643 width=560 height=315]Sue Austin’s first ride in a wheelchair was an exhilarating one. “An extended illness had changed the way I could access the world … I’d seen my life slip away and become restricted,” explains Austin in today’s talk, which was given at TEDxWomen in December. “When I started using the wheelchair 16 years ago, […]
Close your eyes and listen to the grunts and jostling, the smack of rubber on cement and triumphant high-fives. You could be listening to a pickup basketball game anywhere. But you’re in Afghanistan and this is much more than just a game. It is the country’s very first wheelchair basketball tournament and the players are […]
Until he was 19, Joshua Prager wanted to play professional baseball or be a doctor. After 19, he was just glad he could walk. For eight years Prager was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for his long-form pieces investigating historical secrets. In his talk […]