TED’s river of ideas is a constant flow — and sometimes vital topics make their way onto our site far before they head into the mainstream. As part of the 10th birthday of TED Talks, we highlight seven Talks that foresaw big trends when they were only ripples in the pond. Wikipedia: Is it really a thing? At […]
Over the past 10 years, TED Talks videos have tracked our ever-tighter relationship with technology — including the tools we use to access it, our interfaces … from keyboards and mice to magic wands and sensory vests. For our guide to this evolving field, we start with MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte’s talk from […]
To celebrate 10 years of TED Talks, we went back through the archives to show you how fast biotechnology has changed over the past ten years, and some interesting moments along the way. We start with some history in a talk by James Watson, who co-discovered the first models of DNA’s structure with his partner […]
10 years of TED Talks show how the conversation around climate change has developed, from awareness-raising to dire warnings to a growing sense that we can actually do something about it.
In 2006, TED started putting talks online for free, a milestone in democratizing ideas worth spreading. Since then, the world has seen monumental shifts in history, including the rise and fall of revolutions, the roar of a deadly epidemic, the largest-ever leak of government secrets, an astronomical discovery predicted by Einstein and the election of […]
Update: As of January 25, 2016, the Coxless Crew made it to Australia, covering 8,446 miles over the span of 257 days at sea. Congratulations! Your 20s: are they an extended adolescence, or the critical setup for adult life? After watching Meg Jay’s TED Talk, “Why 30 is not the new 20,” 27-year-old Lizanne Van […]
Scott Drummond had been in the Air Force for eight years. It was 1994, and he was eligible to become a commissioned officer, the Air Force’s version of a manager. The average person gets the job after three interviews. Drummond interviewed 16 times over the next ten years before he got the job. Looking back […]
“Women’s health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay.” When Paula Johnson uttered this sentence on the TEDWomen 2013 stage, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. “At that moment, it said to me they got it,” she says. Johnson has been working for decades to raise awareness about how diseases behave differently […]
The watch looks both futuristic and retro at the same time. A swirl of visible gears and carefully calibrated dials, it charts time in an unusual way — the hour jumps into place at the top, the minute is marked in a semicircle along the bottom, and the seconds swoop above. It’s a statement watch, the […]
“What makes you think that you have 80 or 90 years to live?” Laura Rozo posed this serious and almost morbid question to the audience at TEDxUNC in February 2013. She walked onto the stage confidently and calmly, soaking in the applause as the final, surprise speaker of the day. She wore a red turtleneck […]
Nature and investing. On the surface, these things do not sound like they have a lot to do with each other. But to TEDster Katherine Collins, the two are intrinsically linked. After 18 years at Fidelity Investments, and while enrolled at Harvard Divinity School to try to figure out what to do next, Collins found […]
Before Jackie Hodges arrived for orientation at Tufts University School of Medicine, she got a gift from her soon-to-be med school: a free download of the e-book The Upstream Doctors by Rishi Manchanda. In this book, Manchanda — who has worked for a decade as a doctor in community clinics around South Central Los Angeles […]
One morning, as Anna Koukkides-Procopiou was rushing out of her house on the way to the office, her daughter said, “Mommy, I want you here. Why don’t you want me?” This set off a long period of contemplation, and eight months later, she left the business world and reinvented herself as an activist — and […]
“Thousands have lived without love; none without water,” said Sylvia Earle as she stood on the TED stage five years ago, accepting the 2009 TED Prize. Wearing a blue blazer and an aura of resolve, Earle quoted this verse from poet W.H. Auden as she laid out a bold wish for the world: that we […]
With Rosh Hashanah fast approaching, Sara Beth Berman of the Davis Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, wanted to create a lesson for the school’s middle school students around the ideas of empathy and forgiveness. “In the month preceding the Jewish New Year, we talk a lot about how to forgive, how to accept forgiveness, and how […]
It’s a challenge for anyone with a cause: How do you frame the issue so that people feel excited to get involved? For some causes, the answer is asking people to dump a bucket of ice on their head. For others, making that personal connection is even more tricky. This is exactly how a small […]