Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights. Jeff Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon (watch his TED Talk), made waves on Monday when it was announced that he will buy The Washington Post for $250 million. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to […]Read more
Inspired by the theme of TEDWomen 2013, “Invented Here,” we’ve created a killer playlist with songs about women who’ve innovated, made a difference, taken a stand and changed history in the process. Our mixtape of tunes include: a Swedish dance-pop tribute to Marie Curie’s research on radioactivity, Jane Birkin’s ode to the work and ideals […]
The old saying goes: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Folded into this truism is a nugget of wisdom: that women so often are the ones driving innovation, the creative powerhouses surfacing new concepts, and the active force crystalizing change in communities near and far. This is the spirit that TEDWomen 2013 will celebrate with […]
Yesterday, the first lab-grown hamburger was cooked. And eaten! And according to The Week, it didn’t taste too bad. This lab-grown patty took two years and $325,000 to produce. And as sources revealed, the money came from Google co-founder and TED speaker Sergey Brin. (Watch his talk on Google Glass, or his talk with Larry Page on the genesis of Google.) […]
Sight. Sound. Touch. Taste. Smell. We all know the five senses by heart and yet, points out designer Jinsop Lee in today’s talk, few products and experiences tick all five. And thus he created “5 senses graphs” to grade objects on how well they play to each of our assorted senses on a scale of […]
Most of JR’s projects — including his Instagram essay of Kim Il Sung’s 100th birthday celebration in North Korea last year — begin with him seeing a news report. This is what the street artist and TED Prize winner told Charlie Rose when he appeared on his show on Friday. “Most of the projects I’ve […]
TED Talks are available in 102 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our volunteer translators. So far, more than 10,000 volunteers have created upwards of 44,000 talk translations — and today, the TED Blog brings you a Q&A with one of them. Here, meet German translator Katja Tongucer. 1. Where […]
My last fight came after, of all things, the movie Pacific Rim. As my moviegoing companion and I walked out of the theater, he said of Guillermo del Toro’s latest, “That was awesome.” I, on the other hand, thought it was just okay, managing to slightly elevate its robots-versus-aliens premise. At first, we slightly disagreed. […]
Daniel H. Cohen argues for a good argument. In today’s talk, given at TEDxColbyCollege, Cohen asks us to set aside our goal of winning arguments in favor of gaining a greater appreciation for the legitimate points being made by the other person. In an effort to gain more appreciation for that argument, we asked Cohen […]
Ophthalmologist Anthony Vipin Das is working on a new toy for the blind, FITTLE, with Tania Jain, a designer from National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar. The toy will help blind children learn to read Braille while getting a sense of the shape of the world around them. We asked him to tell us all about […]
Insight from the interwebs the weeks of July 22 and 29: A poignant, funny, slightly heartbreaking story of a woman who doesn’t realize for many years that she has anosmia, no sense of smell. [The Millions] How do you get credible, nongovernment information about daily life out of North Korea? [Al Jazeera] How Geoff Dyer […]
In the spirit of today’s euphonious talk from Beardyman, and our companion piece of the weirdest sounds to grace the TED stage, celebrate all-things-music with this incredible audiation of Wikipedia. The world’s largest crowd-sourced encyclopedia got a little more melodious this week, when Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi of Hatnote turned the cacophony of information […]
This week, during a computer security conference in Las Vegas, researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller demonstrated how easily they could hack into the systems of moving cars using just a laptop computer. Illustrating that modern devices are worryingly vulnerable to hacking, Valasek and Miller showed their ability to jerk seatbelts, turn wheels and influence […]