Advertising doesn’t have to be about convincing you to buy things. Great ads, just like great movies, can inspire thought. That’s why TED created Ads Worth Spreading, an initiative dedicated to advertisements that push the boundaries, from Chipotle’s stunning “Back to the Start” commercial to L’Oreal Paris’ spot starring model and athlete Aimee Mullins. As […]
TED Fellow Sarah Parcak is a “space archaeologist” who uses infrared technology coupled with satellite imagery to discover previously hidden ancient structures and cities. In this exciting talk from TED2012, she shares how she helped unearth an unknown Ancient Egyptian city through satellite imaging. Now, Parcak is turning her attention to Ancient Rome in a […]
Native American photographer Camille Seaman devotes years to her subjects, revealing the unfolding of reality over time. For the last decade, she has traveled repeatedly to the Arctic and Antarctic to take portraits of polar ice, witnessing the beauty and loss of a part of Earth most of us will never see. How do your […]
[ted id=1625 width=560 height=315] Spoken word artist Lemon Andersen begins today’s talk with the poem, “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” written by Reg E. Gaines in 1994. My Air Jordans cost a hundred with tax. My suede Starter jacket says Raiders on the back. I’m stylin’, smilin’ looking real mean, Cause it ain’t about […]
Great design doesn’t just look good — it has the potential to make lives easier and to enhance the public good. Public Interest Design, the website dedicated to examining how, has created a list of 100 makers, educators, connectors, policymakers and visualizers in the U.S. who are doing incredible work at the intersection of design […]
The TED stage features a red circular carpet and light-up letters, the look far more sleek than rustic. But at TEDxGuatavita, the stage was decorated with bales of hay, farming tools and boots with plants sprouting out of them. Guatavita, a small town in the heart of rural Colombia was the home of the first […]
The process for testing new drugs is clunky at best. As Susan Solomon reveals in her TED Talk, drug discovery on average takes 13 years, costs $4 billion, and has a 99% failure rate. Drugs are tested in the lab, then in animals, then in human trials that often aren’t big enough to be conclusive. (Human […]
New parents talk to their babies constantly — not because the babies will understand, but because they want to encourage brain development. Tiffany Shlain offers a fascinating idea in the TED Book Brain Power: does the global brain of the internet need similar prodding? In the book, which is accompanied by this short film, Shlain […]
Charles Eugster may be 93, but he has no less spring in his step than he did as a young man. In this talk from TEDxZurich, he brings us a powerful statistic: 92% of Americans over the age of 65 have one or more chronic diseases. While many clearly cannot be avoided, Eugster points out that […]
[ted id=1624 width=560 height=315] Jeff Smith was blown away by some of the brilliant business ideas he heard while spending 366 days in prison between 2009 and 2010. “[Prison] was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me […]
By Andy Robertson New art forms are polarizing. We love or hate Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde animals or Tracey Emin’s unmade bed but roundly understand that avant garde art has value, the artist trying to challenge us and make us think something. Video games draw similar fire. Detractors hem and haw that they’re all about shooting […]
You may remember Susan Cain’s revolutionary talk from TED2012, on the quiet, unseen power of introverts. Careful to acknowledge that many of us hold both extroverted and introverted traits, she points out that many of our most publically treasured figures have introverted tendencies — yet we still “favor the man of action over the man […]