As usual, the TED community has been very busy this past week. Below, some updates from TEDsters with news to share. Fresh takes on artificial intelligence. Machines that think: the best thing since the discovery of fire or the biggest threat to humanity since the atomic bomb? Responding to the annual Edge question, almost 200 […]
Many people feel a burst of inspiration after watching a TED Talk. Some take action by volunteering their time or making a donation. Nigel Gordon, on the other hand, has an individual reaction: He writes songs about TED Talks he loves. A singer and songwriter, as well as an entrepreneur, Gordon got his introduction to […]
We are thrilled to announce the new class of Fellows for TED2015. These 21 game-changing thinkers represent 15 countries—including, for the first time in our program, Vietnam, Romania and Tunisia. They work across disciplines, at the forefront of their fields. They include a South African physicist using lasers to target HIV and cancer; a German/Moroccan […]
We all lead lives that move 1,000 miles per minute. In his TED Book, The Art of Stillness, Pico Iyer posits a bold idea: that in our chaotic time, the greatest luxury is actually the ability to go nowhere and do nothing. To Iyer, it’s this time for quiet, inward, still reflection that snaps all […]
Buying gifts? It is HARD. Especially when so many gift guides offer up ideas for what to get your dad, co-worker or sister without taking into account what actually interests those specific people in your life. A better way to locate the perfect gift? Think about what captures a person’s curiosity, and then seek ideas […]
A few years ago, ethno-botanist Mark Plotkin injured his foot. A visit to a doctor at home had him feeling pain-free for a few months, but things changed when he headed to the Amazon rainforest for work. There, a local shaman noticed his limp and offered him a palm tree wrap along with a specially-brewed […]
Artist Zena el Khalil doesn’t have the family home she remembers from childhood. Her mother’s house in Lebanon was destroyed in a U.S. bomb attack in 1983, while her father’s house was occupied by the Israeli army for 22 years, until its withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. “Every home my grandfathers built was destroyed, bombed or occupied,” […]
Picture a classroom teacher without a lesson plan — a teacher who instead asks students an open-ended question to explore: Can animals think? Did dinosaurs exist? What is a soul? With the opening of Newcastle University’s SOLE Central on Monday, this vision is coming to life, in a research center where the concept can be tweaked […]
The “T” in TED stands for technology. So it might sound counterintuitive that we would release a book about the need to unplug. But we live in a madly accelerating world, where new technologies — for all their benefits — are making our lives more crowded, more chaotic and noisier than ever. There’s never been […]
When Anastasia Taylor-Lind found herself in Kiev at the height of violence during Ukraine’s Independence Square protests, the documentary photographer decided to record not the fighting itself, but the human beings involved. Setting up a makeshift photo studio in an alleyway inside the barricaded square, she beckoned passers-by — the protesters themselves, and later the women who came […]
Tuesday morning in the former East Berlin, the midcentury Kosmos cinema hummed with new ideas on business, technology and self, at an event called TED@BCG. The event was produced by TED Institute, a project that embeds within organizations and companies to help employees develop their ideas. Six hundred TEDsters, BCG’ers and guests filled the main hall […]
TEDGlobal 2014 has wrapped up — here, some highlights from the last day of the conference. Onstage and online, it’s been a busy and fantastic Friday. Word spreads of Malala Yousafzai’s Nobel Peace Prize. Excitement was high at TEDGlobal this morning when the news came out that the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize had gone jointly to Pakistani education activist […]
In the final session of TEDGlobal 2014, Mighty spaces, we take four journeys — three to great expanses in the world, and one into our minds and hearts: A low blue haze lights the stage as choreographer Aakash Odedra spins slowly. The light grows and his dance picks up — a mix of classical Indian […]
This session presents speakers who are at home in awe-inspiring places. These bold explorers come bearing discoveries from the tundra and the rainforest, from beneath the ocean’s surface, and even from that most elusive of mighty spaces — the happy human heart. The speakers who’ll appear in this final session of the conference: Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard has […]
Ten years ago, epidemiologist Chikwe Ihekweazu helped fight an outbreak in South Sudan. This TED Fellow now runs the health consultancy EpiAFRIC, writes about public health issues in his native Nigeria, and is soon to start a four-week rotation on the ground fighting the Ebola epidemic. So as the outbreak continues, he sat down for […]
This session is all about “Basic Needs.” Enjoy these talks on food, innovation, sanitation and more. Sipho Moyo puts two images up on her screen: a Ghanaian cocoa farmer using a primitive wooden rakes, juxtaposed with the glossy Godiva chocolates that would not exist without her. And yet, says Moyo, the Africa director of ONE, the […]