The theme of TED2013 is “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.” So how did we find those undiscovered speakers with incredible stories to share?

From April to June 2012, TED held a worldwide talent search. Working with TEDx organizers in 14 cities across the globe — Amsterdam, Bangalore, Doha, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Tunis and Vancouver — we held special salons to find the new voices you need to hear. Thousands applied to speak at these events and, in the end, 290+ speakers stormed the stage.

This February, thanks to this partnership between TED, TEDx organizers and big thinkers worldwide, 34 of these Talent Search speakers will appear on the TED2013 stage. In fact, these great talents comprise more than a third of our just-announced program. These speakers have energy, power and beautiful insights — and we can’t wait to hear them in action.

After the jump, the Talent Search speakers who will be speaking at TED2013:

• Phil Hansen, who’ll talk about his unusual art process, took the stage at TED@NY.

• Teenage inventor Richard Turere was discovered at TED@Nairobi.

• The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys, who’ll show off their bluegrass chops, appeared at TED@NY.

• Alastair Parvin, of WikiHouse, spoke at TED@London

• Yo-yo champion BLACK appeared at TED@Tokyo.

• Lesley Perkes, who’ll talk about making renegade public art, spoke at TED@Johannesburg.

• Artist Liu Bolin, who will share his secret of invisibility, was discovered at TED@Shanghai.

• Young Jack Andraka, who has created a promising test for pancreatic cancer, first wowed us at TED@NY.

• Teenager Dong Woo Jang, who will share why he’s fascinated by ancient bows, spoke at TED@Seoul.

• Jinsop Lee, who’ll talk about designing for all five senses, also spoke at TED@Seoul.

• Kate Stone, who’ll talk about the promise of printing electronics, spoke at TED@Amsterdam

• Leyla Acaroglu who’ll answer the age-old question “Paper or plastic?” presented at TED@Sydney.

• Allan Savory, who’ll share how wildlife can bring dying grasslands back to life, came to us via TED@Johannesburg.

• Design visionary Yu “Jordy” Fu appeared at TED@Shanghai.

• Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao, finalists for Canada’s top student biotechnology award, spoke at TED@Vancouver.

• Michael Green, who imagines a wooden skyline, spoke at TED@Vancouver.

• Edible garden enthusiast Ron Finley also appeared at TED@Vancouver.

• Ajit Narayanan, who will share his grammar engine based on a visual language, spoke at TED@Bangalore.

• Mohamed Jemni, who has created an avatar that speaks sign language, shared the story at TED@Tunis.

• Saki Mafundikwa, who’ll share the intricacies of Afrikan writing, was at TED@Nairobi.

• John McWhorter suggests that that txting is a coherent language system. He tested this idea on us at TED@NY.

• Prime number fan Adam Spencer took the stage at TED@Sydney.

• James Lyne, who’ll talk to us about cryptography, spoke at TED@Amsterdam.

• Daniel Reisel, who’ll discuss the neuroscience of evil, spoke at TED@London.

• Kees Moeliker, whose life changed with a dead duck, spoke at TED@Amsterdam.

• Rose George, who’ll ask us to take toilets seriously, was at TED@London.

• Undercover journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas spoke at TED@Nairobi.

• Ji-Hae Park, who’ll talk about the joy of the violin, took the stage at TED@Seoul.

• Hyeonseo Lee, who made a harrowing escape from North Korea, appeared at TED@Seoul.

• Eleanor Longden, who’ll share what she’s learned from the voices in her head, was at TED@London.

• Christopher Ryan, who’ll ask “Why is sex such a big deal”?” spoke at TED@Vancouver.

• Philospher Daniel Ogilvie took the stage at TED@NY.

• Writer Joshua Prager, who’ll talk about his personal half-life, also was at TED@NY.

• And Orly Wahba, who’ll talk about the power of kindess, is a TED@NY alumni too.

2012 was the year of radical openness at TED. In that spirit, while our office is closed for winter break, TED’s editorial staffers have selected their favorite talks of the year …  giving you a peek into both our process and our personalities. We hope you enjoy.

I’m impressed and intimidated by people who can give a TED Talk in more than one language. So let me start by saying: Arunachalam Muruganantham speaks much better English than I do Tamil. He even cracks jokes in English — really funny jokes. Respect.

Muruganantham is an inventor from Tamil Nadu who started a business making something he knew nothing about: maxipads. It’s a painfully intriguing topic — of regular interest to some of us, it makes others squirm in their chairs. (And given the number of people on Earth who have periods, compared to the number who have, say, robotic prosthetic arms, it’s actually strange we hadn’t yet seen a great talk on the subject. Believe me, we are looking for more.) When Muruganantham saw that his wife had a problem affording sanitary supplies, he worked for years to design and (here it comes…) test an effective and cheap maxipad. He then built a philanthropically oriented business helping women’s groups around India make and sell their own pads.

So: a topic we’re squeamishly passionate about, a social message worth hearing, gorgeous footage, and a warm and laughing audience in the theater at TED@Bangalore. There’s just one thing standing between this talk and the TED front page, and it’s a tough question to think about: Some of the words that Muruganantham speaks are hard for our wider audience to understand.

Understanding is something we take really seriously. When TED first started posting videos online in 2006, we didn’t yet have transcripts or translations. And we started right away to get emails from people in the hearing-impaired community, as well as from those who did not speak English. Both of them said the same thing, and I’ll never forget hearing it: You’re sharing these ideas with everyone but me. Transcribing all our talks, and building the Open Translation Project, were driven by the desire to fix that. Now, below the window of every TED Talk is a button to turn on a transcript in English or any language it’s translated into.

So we decided, for Muruganantham’s talk, to build a text transcript and have it pop up automatically when you visit his TED Talk. It took a surprising number of people to make this simple thing happen.

First, the transcripts themselves, which happen at top speed. TED staffers Thu-Huong Ha and Morton Bast work together with a professional transcriber to attach time-coded text to the edited video. It’s doubly important to get these texts exactly right, both for our users who choose subtitles and because the English text is used as a basis for translations in 94 languages. Something like 35,000 separate text files depend on these English texts to be correct.

Then, the default behavior of our subtitles is to disappear until needed. So the transcript team had to work with our engineers to make sure that on this particular talk, the the subtitles would pop up automatically. While we’ve placed auto subtitles on talks given in French and Spanish, making it work in English took a little tweaking. Thanks, engine room!

To get around the issue, our video editor Laurie House tried a quick experiment with burning subtitles into the talk video itself — instead of using a separate layer — but quickly realized that once the talk was translated, the new language would want to go right where the English titles were burned in. So, scrap that.

Meanwhile we’ve got three people working on this transcript over the weekend, checking the text phrase by phrase into our subtitling back-end software. And they’re making a lot of headway. But on the Monday the talk is scheduled to run, just hours before we post it at 11am, we still have seven “[unclear]“s. In other words, seven places where the speaker mumbles, or makes a reference we can’t catch, or is drowned out by laughter. We’ve never gone live with this many “[unclear]“s, but we can’t just guess at what Muruganantham is saying. So at 9:30am, we socialize the problem, sending an email to everyone and anyone who might have insight on the talk.

At 9:40am, Jenny Zurawell, our Open Translation Project coordinator, takes a pass (she speaks four or five languages herself) and clears up three of the missing words.

At 9:48am, Lakshmi Pratury, the host of TED@Bangalore, weighs in from India with the rest of the four words, and a major correction we’d all missed:

At three minutes in, the transcript reads “that is why I am jealous of science in India”. ‘Science’ is not what Muruganantham said. He said ‘Saints.’  The sentence should read “…jealous of saints in India”.

And just before post, we hear from Muruganantham himself, who confirms Lakshmi and Jenny’s readings, and says:

“further any doubts, i can clear it.”

We post the talk, and — well, what we expect to happen happens. There are those few folks who won’t ever watch a talk about maxipads and lady problems. There are those few folks who get frustrated by someone who can’t speak perfectly crisp English. But most people watch the talk, read the subs, and fall in love with this beautiful guy, who just wanted to solve his wife’s monthly problem, and then found a way to help a nation full of women too.

As Rebecca Eisenberg wrote when Upworthy featured the talk on Facebook: “It must have been this guy’s time of the month to be awesome.”

Arunachalam Muruganantham at TED@Bangalore, part of the TED2013 Talent Search. Learn more at http://talentsearch.ted.com. Photo courtesy TED@Bangalore.

Jeff Smith was blown away by some of the brilliant business ideas he heard while spending 366 days in prison between 2009 and 2010.

“[Prison] was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate,” says Smith in today’s talk, filmed during the TED@NewYork stop of the TED Talent Search. “Ninety-five percent of the guys I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside … They talked about it in a different jargon — but the business concepts they talked about were not unlike what you’d learn in a first-year MBA class at Wharton.”

In this talk, Smith shares that he made just $5.25 per month in prison, working in a warehouse. And yet, he had to navigate an underground economy of majorly marked-up goods. As Smith shares—in prison, a cigarette costs $3, a flip phone goes for $300 and a dirty magazine can fetch the upwards of $1000.

“We learn to hustle,” says Smith of the prison experience. “One of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity, whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people’s hair with toenail clippers or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied onto tree limbs.”

The tragedy, says Smith, is that none of this creativity and business acumen is harnessed. In this talk, Smith posits the idea: what if we trained inmates in business basics like how to write a business plan? Could this change the startling statistic that 2 out of 3 released prisoners reoffend within five years?

“I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it,” says Smith. “When I came out I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure guys like the ones I was locked up with didn’t have to waste any more of their life than they already had. The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and tremendous untapped potential in our prisons.”

Smith’s powerful talk begs a few question: what was the lie he told and how did he end up in prison? Below, a look at how Smith got there, as well as a look at the writing and political commentary he’s been doing since his release.

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In the This American Life episode “Mortal vs. Venial,” which aired in April of 2012, Smith shares the story of how a relatively small sin compounded into three big offenses that led not only to the end of his political career but also to his incarceration.

In 2004, Smith — then a 29-year-old political science professor — ran for the U.S. Congressional seat vacated by Dick Gephardt. Smith built a grassroots campaign to challenge front-runner Russ Carnahan in the Republican primary. While he ultimately lost the primary, his vibrant campaign was chronicled in the documentary, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?.

As Smith tells This American Life, during the course of this campaign, he was approached by a media consultant who offered to send out an anti-Carnahan mailing as an “independent expenditure.” Smith’s campaign staff provided this man with information for the mailing. This is a violation of election law — as those funding independent expenditures, which are exempt from campaign finance limits, are not allowed to coordinate with candidates.

Russ Carnahan noticed that Smith’s campaign seemed to be in cahoots with the mailing, and filed a Federal Election Commission complaint. While Smith did have loose prior knowledge of the mailing, he signed an affidavit saying he didn’t.

Years later — after Smith had been elected to the Missouri state Senate and formed a reputation as a force to watch in the legislative body — the incident came back to haunt him. To hear exactly how a strange series of coincidences, and a wiretap, lead to Smith pleading guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, listen to the episode.  It’s a truly fascinating story — and one that highlights the complexities of running for political office.

Since being released from prison in 2010, Jeff Smith has rebooted his life — he’s now a  professor of politics at The New School in New York City and actively campaigns for the prison reform he outlined in his TED Talk. At the same time, Smith has been writing prolifically as a political commentator and advice columnist, while also working on a memoir. Here, a selection of his recent works, all of each which seed more of his powerful story.

Some of Smith’s recent columns from website The Recovering Politician:

• Jeff Smith: 7 Things Republicans Must Do, published November 13
• Jeff Smith: What Sandusky Can Expect In Prison and What The Washington Post Doesn’t Understand, published October 17
• Jeff Smith’s New Beginning at The New School, published October 11

Some selections from Smith’s “Do As I Say: A Political Advice Column,” on City & State NY:

• Does direct mail still work?, published November 12
• How do you ask for money?, published October 8
• What should I do if I’m considering a run for office?, published September 5

And Smith’s recent posts from Politico’s commentary space, The Arena:

• Should House speaker Boehner watch his back?
• Mitt Romeny lacks big bucks?
• Do oil companies deserve tax breaks?

Some extra credit reading:

• What’s the matter with Missouri?, an essay by Jeff Smith published in The Atlantic on August 24
• Former inmate offers advice for Rod Blagojevich, an NPR radio interview with Smith from March 15

Interested on what life is like in prison and how we can avoid people ending up there? Here, some TED Talks on making prison a more rehabilitating experience:

• David R. Dow: Lessons from death row inmates
• Nalini Nadkarni: Life science in prison
• Damon Horowitz: Philosophy in prison
• Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice

Ludwick Marishane is the youngest person in South Africa to hold a patent. His invention? A “bath without water,” a lotion called DryBath.

In today’s talk, filmed during the Johannesburg stop of the TED2013 Talent Search, Marishane shares how this unusual product came to be. When he was 17, he was sunbathing with a few friends in his town, where the water and electricity supply is highly unpredictable. One of his friends said, “Man, why doesn’t someone invent something that you can just put on your skin and you don’t have to bathe?”

Marishane thought, “I would buy that.”

Marishane spent four years creating DryBath’s formulation, using his mobile phone to do online research about how to make a germicidal lotion. While the product was originally thought of as a convenience, he quickly realized that it could also ward off disease and even preventable blindness for people without access to clean water. Marishane typed a 40-page business plan — and submitted his patent application — all on the small screen of his mobile phone.

To hear more about how Marishane invented and marketed DryBath, listen to his charming and funny talk. Below, watch three more talks about washing.

Theresa Flores: Find a voice with soap
Theresa Flores didn’t have a word for what happened to her as a teenager. Now she does — human trafficking. In this talk from TEDxColumbus 2011, she shows how trafficking can happen to your average girl from the Michigan suburbs. She also shares how, when returning to a motel where she had been abused, she had an idea — putting an 800 number for the National Human Trafficking Hotline on the bars of soap in the bathroom. She gave this soap to motels for free in areas where trafficking is common, in hopes that girls like her would find it in the bathroom.

Joe Smith: How to use a paper towel
Think you know how to use a paper towel after washing your hands? Maybe not. In this talk from TEDxConcordiaUPortland, Joe Smith will inspire you to use a single paper towel for every hand wash, by shaking your hands 12 times and folding the paper towel in half to maximize absorbency. The end result? Saving 571,230,000 pounds of paper per year.

Renée Botta: Soap saves
About a million children die every year from preventable diarrhea simply because of lack of access to soap and water. In this talk from TEDxChange, Renee Botta tells the story of a young African woman who began making and selling liquid soap in her home. Could this public health problem be solved with solutions that also feed the local economy?

In today’s talk, Munir Virani extols the virtues of vultures. Despite our harsh judgments of these funny-looking birds, Virani explains that they are natural garbage collectors and that they kill harmful bacteria that might otherwise threaten us, as well as our livestock. As of now, 11 of the world’s 16 vulture species are facing extinction. In this talk, Virani warns that as a result, we could face an upsurge in diseases.

To hear more about why we should adore vultures, listen to Virani’s talk given during the Nairobi stop of the TED Talent Search. His talk made us think — what other animals are unexpectedly lovable? Below, find more creatures that we may initially meet with disgust, but that actually hold many gifts for the advancement of science and society. Get ready to consider bats and spiders creepy-crawlies no more.

Cheryl Hayashi: The magnificence of spider silk
That spider you squished last week? Its evolution was almost 380 million years in the making. As the spiders have evolved, so have the many silks they spin. At TED2010, Cheryl Hayashi breaks down the DNA of spiders to show what we can learn from the variations in the ancient material produced by these eight-legged weavers.

Andrea Marshall: An up-close look at the majestic manta ray
Andrea Marshall has been fascinated with the ocean since childhood. That led her to study manta rays, which are often mistaken for stingrays because of their shape. In this talk from TED@Johannesburg, Marshall reveals the riveting details she discovered from tracking these animals, while laying out what we can learn from this iconic marine species.

Joshua Klein: The intelligence of crows
Joshua Klein’s research of crows was inspired by one person’s utter disgust with them. In this talk from TED2008, Klein will change your ideas about crows – they are significantly more intelligent than you thought and have an incredible ability to adapt. Watch them navigate traffic, improvise tools and even learn to use a vending machine.

Marcel Dicke: Why not eat insects?
At TEDGlobal 2010, Marcel Dicke delivered a message that may be hard to swallow: he wants us to eat insects. Dicke tells us that insects save the US economy 57 billion dollars per year. What more can they give us? They have the potential to be a delicious, eco-friendly alternative to meats.

Emma Teeling: The secret of the bat genome
Emma Teeling has a secret: those bats that we are so afraid of may actually provide the secret of everlasting youth. At TEDxDublin, Teeling explains the unique set of senses bats possess, and the ways these features could help us.

Robert Full on animal movement
Warning: this talk contains slo-motion video of a cockroach. At TED2005, Robert Full marvels at the design of animal feet, showing how a roach’s spiny legs are perfectly suited for climbing surfaces. In the meantime, he also gives a look at the complex legs of worms, crickets and tarantulas.

A letter — be it handwritten or typed — feels like an unpremeditated revelation, a glimpse into the writer’s subconscious. Letters are, also, often rooted to the place where they were written: a cozy armchair, a backyard hammock, the corner desk of a classroom, a train. It’s this physical and temporal presence that enables a special kind of opening-up, even when the recipient is a stranger.

Hannah Brencher knows the letter’s power. Her organization, The World Needs More Love Letters, facilitates letter-writing between strangers. In today’s heartfelt talk, given during the New York leg of the TED Talent Search, Brencher explains how she found this unique calling. Because her family has always communicated by letter, when she found herself depressed after college, she did the only thing she could think of — she penned pages and left them in libraries and cafes where strangers could chance upon them. The idea snowballed into a global exchange.

“Most of these letters have been written by people who have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper,” says Brencher in her talk. “They’re the ones from my generation. We have grown up in a world that is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less. But what if it’s not about efficiency?”

Brencher’s talk deeply resonated when we posted it on the TED Talent Search website. One commenter declared, “Hannah is an anachronism, a much-needed reminder of our need to slow down and pay attention. Outstanding! I wonder if she needs a Nana…”

Before Twitter, before Facebook, before Gmail and AIM, there were ink and paper. There were people who dedicated time to writing correspondences, and then waited for a reply. After the jump, excerpts from five of the most delightful, beautiful or simply intimate letters we’ve come across.

1. William James, a psychologist and philosopher (and brother to the writer Henry James), penned a letter to his wife, Alice James, from Vienna on September 24, 1882:

Dear, perhaps the deepest impression I’ve got since I’ve been in Germany is that made on me by the indefatigable beavers of old wrinkled peasant women, striding like men through the streets, dragging their carts or lugging their baskets, minding their business, seeming to notice nothing, in the stream of luxury and vice, but belonging far away, to something better and purer. Their poor, old, ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls make me weep.[…]All the mystery of womanhood seems incarnated in their ugly being—the Mothers! the Mothers! Ye are all one! Yes, Alice dear, what I love in you is only what these blessed old creatures have.

2. In 2009, after Barack Obama was elected for the first time, Bill Adler published a book of kids’ letters to their president. So much of the writing in this book is moving (or hilarious); one example comes from Kiana, a 12-year-old from Anderson, South Carolina.

As a Black female, I’m going to try to be the first woman president, and the first Black woman president at that—that is, if no one beats me to it.

3. In an 1897 editorial in New York’s Sun, journalist Francis Pharcellus Church (anonymously) replied to a concerned eight-year-old, who had written to ask whether Santa Claus exists. This letter has rightly become famous—and inescapable during the holidays, when it’s printed and posted every year.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. […]The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. […]Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

4. In 1882, several years before they married, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, from Vienna:

If only I knew what you are doing now. Standing in the garden and gazing out into the deserted street? Ah, I am no longer passing by to press your hand, the magic carpet that carried me to you is town, the winged horses which gracious fairies used to send, even the fairies themselves, no longer arrive, magic hoods are no longer obtainable, the whole world is so prosaic, all it asks is: “What is it you want, my child? You shall have it in time.” “Patience” is its only magic word. And in saying so forgets how things get lost when we cannot have them then and there, when we have to pay for them with our own youth.

5. On a book tour in 1942, the writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote letters to his wife, Vera Nabokov. In November, on a stop in St. Paul, Minnesota, he wrote:

Yesterday after the trip into the country I went, having got awfully bored, to the cinema and came back on foot—I walked for more than an hour and went to bed around eight. On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me—a passionate desire to write, and to write in Russian. And yet I can’t. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t experienced this feeling can really understand its torment, its tragedy. English in this sense is an illusion and an ersatz. In my usual condition, i.e. busy with butterflies, translations, or academic writing, I myself don’t fully register the whole grief and bitterness of my situation.

I am healthy, eating plenty, taking my vitamins, and read the newspapers more than usual now that the news is getting rosier. St. Paul is a stupefyingly boring city, only owls at the hotel, a bar girl who looks like Dasha; but my apartment is charming.

Arunachalam Muruganantham may not seem like the most obvious person to have started a revolution in sanitary napkins — after all, he is male. But in this funny and uplifting talk, given at the TED Talent Search in Bangalore, Muruganantham describes how he is enabling women in India to make their own pads — all as a gift for his wife, Shanti.

“What you did in your early marriage days — you tried to impress your wife. I did the same,” says Muruganantham in this talk, describing how he one day noticed his wife carrying something behind her back. “It was a nasty rag cloth — I don’t even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler.”

It was a moment when Muruganantham realized that his wife had to choose between buying feminine hygiene products and buying milk. And it launched a powerful idea — that making pads would be far more cost-effective then buying them. The problem: when his wife and sisters refused to test his creations, he had to devise a system to try them out for himself.

“That [experience] made me bow down to any woman in front of me and give full respect,” says Muruganantham. “Those five days, I will never forget — lousy days.”

To find out how Muruganantham created a machine that lets anyone make their own high-quality cotton pads — and why he decided to open source the blueprints — watch his talk. It’s a good reminder that innovation doesn’t just flow from developed nations to developing ones, but that amazing ideas can travel in both directions. After the jump, watch several more talks about innovation in India and how new solutions can be created if the resources of the community are taken into account.

Vinay Venkatraman: “Technology crafts” for the digitally underserved
Vinay Venkatraman is not your traditional designer. He has created a digital projector for a school out of a mobile phone, a lunchbox and a flashlight, as well as medical triage monitor from an alarm clock and computer mouse. In this talk from TEDxSummit, Venkatraman explains his idea of “technology crafts,” which use widely available parts to approximate technologies not affordable in rural India.

Anil Gupta: India’s hidden hotbeds of invention
“People may be economically poor, but they are not poor in the mind,” says Anil Gupta of the population in India. “The minds on the margin are not marginal minds.” In this talk from TEDIndia 2009, Gupta shares his work supporting entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas that are unable to flourish because of poverty. Gupta’s Honey Bee Network helps unsung inventors build the connections they need to market their products — from a coffee machine made out of a pressure cooker to a non-stick hot plate crafted from clay.

Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves lives
Premature babies are unable to stay warm. While these babies are kept in incubators in Western hospitals, far too many babies in rural and poor areas die without a chance. On a trip to India, TED Fellow Jane Chen found herself deeply upset by this phenomenon — and determined to create a solution. In this talk from TEDIndia 2009, Chen shares Embrace, a low-cost portable incubator that looks like a tiny sleeping bag … and that could save a million lives.

Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement
Bunker Roy has founded a very unusual college Rajasthan, India: Barefoot College, a university for the poor. Roy’s school takes rural men and women — many of them illiterate — and teaches them to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors. From there, they bring their knowledge back to their villages.

Nirmalya Kumar: India’s invisible innovation
India has become a hub for software development — and yet this innovation is rendered invisible because so many believe that innovation doesn’t happen in the country. At TEDxLondonBusinessSchool, Nirmalya Kumar seeks to peel back these erroneous beliefs and show what is happening underneath.

Marc Koska: 1.3m reasons to re-invent the syringe
In underfunded clinics in India — as well as in other parts of the world — syringes are routinely reused. This practice kills 1.3 million people each year. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2009, Marc Koska introduces a promising solution: low-cost syringes that can only be used once.

Nandan Nilekani’s ideas for India’s future
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani is often credited with making India a leader in IT services. In this talk from TED2009, he outlines what has helped India develop quickly in recent years — for example, a willingness to see people as a resource rather than a burden — and what needs to happen for economic growth to continue.

Anupam Mishra: The ancient ingenuity of water harvesting
The Golden Desert receives the least rainfall in all of India and, yet, centuries ago the local people devised an ingenious solution for harvesting water. In this talk from TED2009, Anupam shares how these feats of engineering are still used today — and may even be superior to our modern methods.

Earlier this year, TED headed on the road to 14 cities around the globe, on a hunt for untapped speakers for TED2013: “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.” Holding one-night salons in cities ranging from São Paulo to New York to Nairobi to Shanghai, TED invited a slew of speakers to give the talk of their lives in just 3 to 6 minutes. In the end, almost 300 speakers presented at these far-flung events, and their talks were posted at TalentSearch.TED.com. TED fans were invited to watch and rate the talks through the month of August, and leave comments letting us know which talks they found the most fascinating, the most moving and the most insightful.

We were blown away by the ideas and presentations given during the Talent Search. 33 speakers from these events will appear on the TED2013 stage. In the spirit of surprises, you’ll have to wait to find out who. But because we want you to experience these incredible Talent Search talks, starting today, we’ll be posting several great talks from the collection on TED.com.

Curious to explore more of our Talent Search talks? Here, some playlists:

• Playlist: Stories of survival from the TED2013 Talent Search
• Playlist: Thoughts on energy efficiency from the TED2013 Talent Search
• Playlist: Bathroom talks from the TED2013 Talent Search
• Playlist: Unusual materials described during the TED2013 Talent Search
• Playlist: Tales of cultural heritage shared at the TED2013 Talent Search

And here, highlights reels of the events:

1. From Arab sci-fi to war zone survival tips: Highlights from TED@Doha
2. TED Talent Search: Report from TED@London
3. From silent conductors to manta rays: Highlights from TED@Johannesburg
4. TED Talent Search: Report from TED@Nairobi
5. From homeschooling to ancient architecture: Highlights from TED@Tunis
6. From hand puppetry to teaching boxes: Highlights from TED@Shanghai
7. TED Talent Search: Report from TED@Bangalore 
8. From finger painting to intercontinental missiles: Highlights from TED@Tokyo
9. TED Talent Search: Report From TED@Seoul
10. From the plastic bag dilemma to water ballet: Highlights from TED@Sydney
11. From wooden skyscrapers to spoken word: Highlights from TED@Vancouver
12. TED Talent Search: Report from TED@NewYork
13. From counterfactual reasoning to iPhone art: Highlights from TED@SãoPaulo
14. TED Talent Search: Report from TED@Amsterdam

Faith Jegede would prefer that you not call her normal.

In today’s powerful talk, given at the TED Talent Search London stop, Faith Jegede introduces you to her two brothers — Remy, 22, and Samuel, 16 — who are both autistic and extraordinary.

“Remy’s speechless but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators cannot … When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I can remember, he reminds me of one thing — how little we know about the mind and how wonderful the unknown must be,” says Jegede. “Samuel has the most impeccable memory — though it is a selective one. He can’t remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four and Lady Gaga’s birthday.”

Yes, Jegede says that growing up with her brothers was full of challenges. But in the end she concludes, “When I cast my mind to the things they’ve taught me about individuality and communication and love, I realize these are not things I would want to change with normality.”

It’s a value TED holds dear – that even minds traditionally deemed disordered are full of beauty. For more speakers who express this idea, check out this 2011 playlist, featuring talks ranging from “Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds” to “Joshua Walters: On being just crazy enough.”  Or watch the wonderful talks from the TEDGlobal 2012 session “Misbehaving Beautifully,” all about the amazing things that can happen as a result of misbehaving neurons.

As we crisscrossed the globe to find you fresh perspectives for TED2013 in our worldwide Talent Search, a common theme emerged: cultural heritage in the 21st century. The tangible, intangible and natural elements that define our ways of life touch every aspect of our existence — from language to landscapes to religion to architecture. And they are in constant flux, with global cultural exchanges on the rise as our world becomes more interconnected. Below, unique narratives from Talent Search speakers about navigating the tensions between modernity and tradition in an ever-globalizing world.

Ihsan Fethi: Iraq’s destroyed cultural heritage
TED@Tunis
“Cultural destruction is a crime against humanity,” argues Ihsan Fethi, an Iraqi architectural conservationist. In this talk, he provides examples of the “cultural suicide” that Iraqis are committing by demolishing historical architectural gems in cities all over the country.

Chen Xi Huang: The ancient art of hand puppetry
TED@Shanghai
The ancient Chinese art of hand puppetry is alive and well in the capable hands of Chen Xi Huang, an 82-year-old puppet master. The art form is slowly falling out of practice, but a small part of this cultural heritage is now preserved in this explanation and performance.

Yasser Bahjatt: How Arab sci-fi could dream a better future
TED@Doha
If you want to advance science, you need to have a strong sci-fi culture. Computer engineer Yasser Bahjatt is creating an open platform for sci-fi writers and artists in the Arab world to collaborate in creating 21st-century sci-fi to revitalize the scientific and literary culture that has flourished throughout the course of humanity.

Joe McPherson: The meteoric rise of Korean food
Did you know that there 167 documented types of kimchi? McPherson founded the website ZenKimchi, a love letter to the food, and in this talk explains why it took Korean cuisine time to boom in popularity around the globe. His observation: that the American palate has had to adapt to Korean food, instead of the other way around.

Majede Najar: Why I wear a hijab
TED@Vancouver
“I am a proud hijabi,” proclaims Majede Najar in this talk from TED@Vancouver. This 16-year-old Iranian-Canadian describes the way she navigates her multiple identities — religious, cultural, ethnic — in her life in Candada.

Jiaojiao Chen: Forgotten stories from China’s history
TED@Shanghai
Photographer and storyteller Jiaojiao Chen is preserving the ordinary stories of daily life in a country that “selectively documents parts of its history.” By collecting photos, objects and stories from average Chinese citizens, she hopes to capture moments of China’s rich history and culture that are all-too-easily forgotten.

Gabriel Otsuka: An 11-year-old plays classical Brazilian piano
TED@SaoPaulo
Since learning to play the piano at age 7, Gabriel Otsuka has had great reverence for classical Brazilian technique. In this talk, he performs several of his favorite pieces.

Ira Trivedi: The case for arranged marriages
Indian novelist Ira Trivedi notes that a huge cultural shift has taken place in India, with the older generation espousing traditional arranged marriage and a younger generation idealizing love. In this talk, she talks about the hidden costs of the shift. While she once considered arranged marriage archaic, she now sees it an option.

Azzam Alwash: Lessons from Iraq’s beautiful marshes
TED@Tunis
Azzam Alwash calls for a “blue revolution” in the wake of the Arab Spring: for Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey to collaborate across boundaries to manage water resources of the Tigris and Euphrates river. Iraq’s marshes — commonly considered  the cradle of civilization — are being destroyed, and the citizens of these countries must come together to protect humanity’s environmental heritage.

Yunhe Liu: Expression through nunchaku
TED@Shanghai
Tradition and modernity come together in Yunhe Liu’s nunchaku performance that captures the essence of the ancient art while incorporating contemporary freedom and creativity.

Dong Woo Jang (age 14): Crafting the perfect bow
Dong Woo Jang is an 8th grader in Seoul, Korea, who discovered an unusual piece of bamboo in his neighborhood. The discovery led to a fascination with archaic Korean bows, a long lost art.

Check out more wonderful playlists from the TED Talent Search. Rating of these talks will close on August 31, also known as tomorrow.

Photo: Liz Jacobs