New Zealand is located on a continental plate boundary, so earthquakes aren’t unexpected. But no one was ready for the quake that hit at 12.51 pm on February 22, 2011. “Everyone in Christchurch will never forget that moment,” says Danny Squires, who lives in the city with his wife and four children. Even though they’d […]
Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues at Matternet are attempting to create a network of drones that operate like the internet, only for tangible objects. This company — which sprung out of an idea surfaced at Singularity University in 2011 — aims to deliver items wherever they are needed, even if no usable roads go there. […]
PW Singer studies the future of warfare. A political scientist specializing in international relations, he’s the author of the bestselling Wired for War, which explores the evolution of robotics in armed conflict; Children at War, about the spreading use of child soldiers; and the forthcoming Cyber Security and Cyber War: What Everyone Needs to Know. He is a senior fellow […]
By Thu-Huong Ha and Kate Torgovnick The morning session of TEDYouth “The Spark” was incredible. But in many ways it was just an appetizer. In the afternoon, Sessions 2 and 3 delivered talks on topics ranging from how to make an Easy Bake Oven gender-neutral to the mathematics of Pixar animation to the familial structures of […]
How did human emotions evolve to help us survive? For the last decade, cultural anthropologist Chelsea Shields Strayer has studied the indigenous healing practices of the Ashante people of Ghana, discovering that emotional pain serves useful purposes — including the relief of physical pain. In this conversation with the TED Blog, she tells the fascinating […]
Could unemployment be a factor that leads to terrorism? In today’s talk, peace strategist Mohamed Ali (not to be confused with the boxer) introduces us to the youth of Mogadishu, Somalia — 70 percent of whom are unable to find jobs. In this talk, Ali highlights just how appealing the messages of terrorist organizations and […]
Biologist and TED Fellow Juliana Machado Ferreira grew up just outside of São Paulo, and went to both university and graduate school in the megalopolis. [Read a profile of her life and work.] She prefers a more natural environment, but after a brief stint in the Amazon, she is back in the city, looking for an […]
Juliana Ferreira is not a city person. Although she grew up just outside of São Paulo — the largest city in the largest country in South America, with a population of 11.32 million — she prefers beaches, or parks or even the country’s vast savannas and forests, where she once spent 20-day stretches collecting blood […]
Autumn and Yuji are surfers who fell in love on the beach of Motoyoshi, a beautiful spot in Japan above Sendai where northern and southern currents meet. A month after Motoyoshi was hit by a tsunami in 2011, triggering a nuclear disaster at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the two made a startling decision […]
In South Korea’s “pressure-cooker” educational environment, 15-year-old Dong Woo Jang began to feel his caveman instincts kicking in: He needed to survive. And like his ancestors, he decided to arm up –- with a bow and arrow. As he shares in today’s talk, proudly holding up one of his handmade bows, he says, “Through bow […]
Early one morning, hours before the sun would rise, Lebanese-Egyptian artist, activist and historian Bahia Shehab was alone on the streets of Cairo, spray-painting a stenciled message that spoke out against the stripping of veiled women. It’s a campaign she discussed in “A thousand times no,” her inspiring TED Talk, and it was not only […]
Three years ago, Jennifer Brea, then a PhD student in political science, was struck down by what appeared to be a severe flu. It turned out to be the beginning of a long illness — including neurological dysfunction and extreme exhaustion — that she has yet to recover from. Discovering that the medical community did […]
After 25 years working in sustainability, Steve Howard made a surprising move: he went to work for IKEA. In today’s talk, he explains why by giving a sense of just how far IKEA is going to make sure it has a positive environmental impact. “Sustainability’s gone from a ‘nice-to-do’ to a ‘must-do,’” says Howard in […]
Alessandro Acquisti thinks we are about to have an Adam and Eve moment, where all of a sudden we realize that we aren’t wearing any clothes. Up until now, we have — for the most part — willingly offered up our personal information online without thinking too much about it. But as Acquisti puts it […]
Take a step back and consider the exquisite network of systems that sustain life on Planet Earth. The air we breathe, the food we eat and the ground we walk on are all carefully regulated by natural systems in an intertwined dance — which means that any change we make in our environment can set […]
“We can’t reliably distinguish true memories from false memories,” declares psychologist Elizabeth Loftus in today’s talk. She’s spent the past forty years studying the memory, and has reached some mind-blowing conclusions about what we know, and what we think we know. Here, she shares more detail about her work, and suggests further reading for anyone […]