I'm the director of The Story Collider, where people tell true, personal stories about science in their lives. I'm also a Contributing Editor for TED.com, a Moth StorySLAM champion and an ex-High Energy Particle Physicist.
Amanda Fucking Palmer wants us to re-think how we think about paying for music. She is known for her music, first as half of the Dresden Dolls, now as a solo artist. But for 5 years after graduating, Palmer made her living as a living statue called the Eight Foot Bride. (“Everyone always wanted to […]
Danny Hillis has a book. It’s a directory of everyone in the world who had an internet address in 1982, including the names, addresses and telephone numbers. And it was a very thin phonebook. That was the community. It was a tight community where everyone knew and trusted each other. Hillis has been a fixture […]
Richard Turere is 12 years old, and he lives in Kenya, in Nairobi National Park. It’s a park with lots of animals that roam freely, including lions. The lions kill livestock. So he say, “I grew up hating lions.” Turere, who took part in the Global Talent Search last year, tried to solve the problem. […]
Freeman Hrabowski is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), which has made an extraordinary name for itself educating students of all types in science and engineering. “What makes our story especially important,” says Hrabowski, “is that we have learned so much from students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder.” […]
Saskia Sassen thinks deeply about the world’s cities, and she’s on the TED stage to share some of her provocative theories about how we should think about urbanizing technology, that pervasive force that has impacted so much of the way in which we live and work. She starts by pointing out an amazing fact: there […]
Stuart Firestein begins with an ancient proverb, “It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat.” Firestein, the chair of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, thinks that this is a good metaphor for science. Generally we think science is orderly, a collection of knowledge. But real […]
We’ve heard a lot about robots at TED over the years. Demos of amazing specialized robots … talk about what robots can and can’t do … and will they take jobs from humans and is that a good or a bad thing? What’s missing is a concrete example of a multi-purpose robot that can indeed […]
Could US economic growth be over? That’s the provocative question that economist Robert J. Gordon begins with. And it’s a big question. He points to travel: In 1900 travel was via the open buggy, at 1% the speed of sound. Sixty years later we travelled at 80% of the speed of sound in a Boeing […]
In today’s TED Talk, Tyler DeWitt makes a fantastic case for a simple idea: make science fun. Educators and writers get caught up in the idea that science needs to be taken seriously, and forget that the best way to get kids interested is to… make it interesting. Too much emphasis on being accurate can […]
[ted id=1533 width=560 height=315] Business talks are boring. Among all the things I was certain of when I started writing for TED, that one was near the top of the list, just under ‘ice is cold’ and ‘brains are gooey.’ I worked as a physicist for a few years before switching over to writing (with […]
Can music be a medical instrument? In a moving talk from TEDMed, Robert Gupta reveals that it certainly can be. He gives as an example the work of neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug, one of the pioneers of melodic intonation therapy. Schlaug noticed that, while stroke victims with aphasia could not utter a sentence, they could still […]
At TEDGlobal 2012, Amy Cuddy gave a talk about the remarkable power of our posture to affect our mental state: Strike a powerful pose (in private) before a job interview, and your performance will improve. With the US election coming up, we asked Cuddy, an expert on nonverbal communication, for her insights into political posturing […]
[ted id=1566] Today’s talk is about surviving a brutal attack, and the extraordinary skill of the surgeons who saved Ed Gavagan’s life. It’s a remarkable story, but there is much more to it. Ed originally told part of the story at The Moth, a wonderful group devoted to true stories, told live on stage. In […]
Jon Ronson is the author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, an exploration of what defines a psychopath. At TED2012, he told a part of that story on stage — how he met a man named Tony who was held for years in a psychiatric prison because he faked mental illness […]
In today’s TEDTalk, director Kirby Ferguson outlines a bold vision of creativity — that it’s not about dreaming up a new song, a new piece of art or a new form of technology in a vacuum, but instead about remixing what has come before. In his fast-paced talk, Kirby reveals that many of our most […]
[ted id=1534] In today’s TEDTalk, Max Little tells you about a test — now in trials — that could help diagnose Parkinson’s disease with a 30-second phone call. But the first challenge: He and his team needed to record 10,000 voices from across the world to make sure that the technique is accurate and scientifically […]