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 […]
It’s one thing to watch a TED Talk online; it’s another experience altogether to be in a cinema together with your friends and fellow TED enthusiasts, watching speakers deliver the talks of their lives in real time. Last year, we shared the opening night of our annual sold-out TED Conference with more than 1,000 cinemas in 20 […]
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 […]
As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Man vs. machine? It took Danit Peleg just 100 hours to print the dress worn by fellow TEDster Amy Purdy in the opening ceremony of the Paralympics in Rio (if that sounds slow, consider that it took her 300 […]
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 […]
In Session 2, our speakers debunked received wisdom, looked critically at common knowledge — and restarted conversations we thought were closed. Here, our report: Antique lamps, new sound. Brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay opened Session 2 completely unseen. In near pitch-black darkness, broken antique lamps lit up one by one — each perfectly matched with an electronic musical […]
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 […]
Pat Mitchell, curator of TEDWomen, shares this report with the TED Blog: In April, I had the privilege of moderating a discussion at the Skoll World Forum on the subject of “Leading Through Adversity.” My panel consisted of four powerful women: Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president (watch Mary Robinson’s TED Talk); Halla Tómasadóttir, a good […]
The TED community has lots of news this week. Below, just a few highlights. Motherhood without maternity leave. Imagine going back to work only 20 days after giving birth, using up all of your vacation days in lieu of paid or unpaid family leave. In a two-part series for The Atlantic, Jessica Shortall shares how […]
Shai Reshef’s nonprofit University of the People — which offers nearly tuition-free, accredited degrees online — today launches its first graduate degree, an MBA program in 12 courses. Although there are no tuition or textbook fees, there is a $200 testing fee per course, which means students can expect to pay $2,400 for their MBA (compare this to the average cost […]
Day five of TED2016 contained one session filled with big ideas, but also an opportunity to look back at the conference as a whole. Below, the major themes that ran through the course of the week. We’re ready for our moonshot moment. The most-evoked image of the conference? Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. […]
So much of our world is determined by code — be it the code of life or a string of 1s and 0s. In this session, “Code Power,” we hear from Linus Torvalds, who changed how code is written, and from Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani, who wants to open up the field dramatically. And after examining the particular code […]
The second day of TED2016 brought wisdom for within and discoveries from without. Below, highlights for you following at home. Procrastination works … for some. Session 4 speakers Tim Urban and Adam Grant take two positions on procrastination: The former thinks it can be a huge, crippling problem; the latter realized his “pre-crastination” was getting […]
Session 5 starts with a talk from a 93-year-old television icon. But it goes back so much further in time than that. As astronomer shares the mystery of a star’s light that dimmed 1,500 years ago. A paleontologist walks us back more than 66 millions. And capping it off: the reveal of this year’s TED prize wish, from […]
Sarah Parcak is a space archaeologist, and has located multiple lost ancient sites. Still, she says, it’s easy to pick her greatest discovery: her husband, Greg Mumford, who she met on her very first dig in Egypt. He was her first lesson in “finding unexpected wonderful things,” she says, and a second lesson followed quickly. On that […]