Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery […]
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session twelve – closing session.) The session opens with the projection of will.i.am’s "Yes We Can" viral video based on Barack Obama’s speech. The two producers are in the audience. The video has been seen millions of times, a demonstration of the power of individuals […]
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session ten.) Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies romantic love — its evolution, its biochemical foundations, and its importance to human society. She gave a talk at TED2006 (watch the video). Her current research is on why we fall in love and how.In the jungle of Guatemala, […]
(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session nine) Jim Marggraff gives a demo of the Livescribe smartpen, which looks like a big pen but has two microphones to record sound, a speaker to play it back, a small display and the capacity to capture handwritten notes and drawings in digital form. […]
(Running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Second session.) The second session of TED2008 asks "What is our place in the universe?" and it cogently opens with a sneak preview of an amazing piece of technology under development at Microsoft: the World Wide Telescope, a powerful new web-based tool for exploring the universe […]
The New York Times reported yesterday that the UN’s agency on AIDS dramatically overestimated its count of current and new infections: The agency, Unaids, will lower the number of people it believes are infected worldwide, to 33.2 million from the 39.5 million it estimated late last year. Much of the difference comes from new reporting […]
Ever since we started putting TEDTalks online in July 2006, all of the talks and performances on TED.com — more than 160 so far — were recorded at a TED event: at our annual gathering in Monterey; at TEDGlobal in Oxford, UK, and Arusha, Tanzania; or during one of our TED Salons. Now we join […]
Biologist and futurist Juan Enriquez talks about the potential of bioenergy. Our current energy sources — coal, oil, gas — are ultimately derived from ancient plants — they’re “concentrated sunlight.” He asks, Can we learn from that process and accelerate it? Can we get to the point where we grow our own energy as efficiently […]
As congratulations for Al Gore, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, pour in from the TED community, we asked people who saw Gore’s TED2006 presentations to talk about the impact his talks had on them. This is the second in the series. When I facilitate a gathering of wild tiger experts next month in India, Al […]
The director of the award-winning documentary The War Tapes, Deborah Scranton makes films that help people tell their own stories. She talks about making The War Tapes, her 2006 doc that put videocameras in the hands of Charlie Company, a unit of the National Guard stationed in Iraq, for one year. Their raw footage and […]
This week, Steven Pinker releases his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, about language as a window onto human nature. We present two TEDTalks from Steve Pinker: his 2005 talk at Oxford, in which he offers the TEDGlobal audience an exclusive preview of the book, and his most recent talk, at TED2007, where he previews […]
At TEDGlobal2007, blogger Andriankoto Ratozamanana, of Harinjaka, gave a 3-minute talk on a developing environmental crisis: the “crazy slash and burn” of the Madagascar forest. (To grasp the size of the problem, see this NASA image of burning in Madagascar, taken from the Terra satellite.) This weekend, he emailed us to update the story: A […]
Amid TEDGlobal’s talk of our global connection and interconnection, it’s a fine time to present Bob Thurman, Buddhist monk and scholar, on the Buddhist view of the universe. In our hyperlinked world, we can know anything, anytime. And this mass enlightenment, says Thurman, is our first step toward becoming Buddha. When we can know everything, […]
Beijing-based blogger Jennifer Brea is one of 100 Fellows attending TEDGlobal. She’s the Francophonia editor for Global Voices, and a prolific and powerful blogger about Africa. I love what she wrote about rethinking media coverage of Africa. Just an excerpt below. Read the full post here. The first day’s speakers–Euvin Naidoo, Andrew Mwenda, Carol Pineau, […]
TEDGlobal’s attending bloggers offer great roundups of the two morning sessions, called “Tales of Invention” and “Health and Heroism.” Africa abounds in creative energy and innovation, a point made yesterday by Kwabena Boahen and elaborated today by two panels of inventors and health workers. As always, Ethan Zuckerman has the speaker-by-speaker accounts. Mweshi writes about […]
Stop wringing your hands over AIDS, cancer and the avian flu. Cardiovascular disease kills more people than everything else combined — and it’s mostly preventable. Dr. Dean Ornish explains how changing our eating habits will save lives. NEW: Read the transcript>>