Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, James Nachtwey talks about his decades as a photojournalist. A slideshow of his photos, beginning in 1981 in Northern Ireland, reveals two parallel themes in his work. First, as he says: “The frontlines of contemporary wars are right where people live.” Street violence, famine, disease: he has photographed all these […]
When it comes to archaeological features, the Nasca Lines are celebrities. A giant monkey with a curled tail, an owl waving hello, a wavy geometric spider — these geoglyphs, carved into the soil of the high desert, were made between 200 to 700 AD and are still visible from overhead. First studied in the 1920s, […]
As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Farewell to Cassini — and here’s to the continuing search for life beyond Earth. In mid-August, PBS released a digital short featuring Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist and the leader of the imaging team for the Cassini mission to […]
A year ago, Sarah Parcak revealed her TED Prize wish: a citizen science platform for archaeology to let people around the world help find and protect ancient sites. Yesterday night, she returned to the TED stage to share what’s happened since. After a year of work with partners National Geographic and DigitalGlobe, GlobalXplorer launched in late January […]
The speaker lineup for the TED2017 conference features more than 70 thinkers and doers from around the world — including a dozen or so whose unfiltered TED Talks will be broadcast live to movie theater audiences across the U.S. and Canada. Presented with our partner BY Experience, our TED Cinema Experience event series offers three […]
Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant remembers the day in 1974 when, while working for the United Nations in India, a mother handed him her young son, who had died only moments earlier from smallpox. Brilliant also remembers the day, about a year later, when he traveled by speedboat to an island in Bangladesh and met a 3-year-old […]
On Wednesday morning at John B. Russwurm Elementary School in Harlem, students pointed excitedly at cat photos on the Internet. No, they weren’t goofing off. They were participating in a “self organized learning environment,” or SOLE, a teaching method where kids are given an open-ended, curiosity-stroking question and asked to research it in small groups. […]
On Tuesday, March 17, you’re invited to watch a full, unedited session of TED2015 for free — and join the world to hear the TED Prize wish given live online. Follow this link at 5pm PST on Tuesday, March 17, to watch a 90-minute TED2015 session live. The Session 5 program is full of powerful personal […]
So what went down at TED on day two? Well, a lot, as it happens. As curator Chris Anderson commented rather tiredly later, “that was the most intense day of TED I can remember, ever.” Here, a lightning round-up of some of the day’s key moments. Edward Snowden trundles onto stage The first big surprise […]
What powers the journey to a better future? Some really big wishes, and even bigger ideas. Our speakers in this session all have the tenacity, hope and relentless optimism necessary to believe that we can make progress in solving some of the most intractable problems of our time. Here are the speakers who appeared in […]
Artist JR’s latest project turns the floor of the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, into a swirl of bodies. For it, JR photographed the company’s dancers and assembled their portraits into a 6,500-square-foot mural that stretches the length of the lobby. Walking on the floor is surreal, as each […]
In a classroom in Ontario, a class of 9th graders learned the book Siddhartha, not by listening to lectures from their teacher, but by asking questions like, “How do you know when you’ve reached enlightenment?” Meanwhile, a group of 3rd through 5th graders in rural Georgia was posed a question in Spanish, even though they […]
The image above is classic Liu Bolin — the artist painted exactingly to blend in with the scene behind him. (Watch his talk from TED2013, “The invisible man.”) But if you look closely, you will see that the man in the picture is not actually Bolin—the tell-tale Ray-Bans reveal that this is JR, the artist […]
In the 1950s, 3 out of every 10 people on the planet lived in a city. Today, that ratio has nearly doubled — and the United Nations projects that by 2050, nearly 7 in 10 people will live in urban settings. Our population is gravitating towards cities, and this shift is creating amazing opportunities as […]
At TED2013, Sugata Mitra accepted the TED Prize for 2013 with a striking talk. His wish: for children to learn about any variety of subjects through self-organized learning. While this bold project will take form with a “School in the Cloud” in India, Mitra encourages members of our community to help with a global paradigm change […]
Where does education go from here? On Tuesday, Sugata Mitra accepted the 2013 TED Prize and offered a bold wish for the world: that we encourage children to explore questions about our world in self-organized learning environments. He proposed the founding of a School in the Cloud based in India, and encouraged TED community members, […]