Paul MacCready‘s first try for the Kremer Prize for human-powered flight, in 1976, was his Gossamer Condor, a Mylar-covered aircraft powered by a very, very tenacious bicyclist. Filmmaker Ben Shedd followed MacCready’s team as they designed and built this elegant plane. Shedd’s resulting documentary, The Flight of the Gossamer Condor, won an Academy Award in […]
When she was awarded the 2006 TED Prize, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim expressed a wish: a global acceptance of diversity, mediated through the power of film. (Watch her speech.) The project is taking off, and its ambition level is spectacular. On May 10, 2008, Pangea Day, sites in New York City, Rio, London, Dharamsala, Cairo, Jerusalem, […]
2007 TED Prize winner EO Wilson wished to create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life. On May 9th of this year, it was announced that a consortium of institutions were starting the work to make it happen. (Check out the video that Avenue A/Razorfish made […]
This year at TED, TED Prize winner Bill Clinton wished for us to partner with his foundation, the Rwandan government, and Partners in Health to build a sustainable, high-quality rural health system for the whole country. The pilot clinic in the Rwandan district of Rwinkwavu has been a proven success and there is a lot […]
If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary “Manufactured landscapes“, which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today’s globalized industry […]
2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair’s wish resulted in the creation of the Open Architecture Network. In the five months since its launch at TED the OAN has been shifting the landscape around how architects work to create more sustainable projects. Almost 500 projects worldwide are currently be managed through the network. A number of […]
The last “Bill Moyers Journal“, the weekly report on PBS, featured a long interview (video – transcript) by Moyers with biologist and TED Prize 2007 winner EO Wilson. The focus was very much on Wilson’s career — “No one in our time has added more to our understanding of Earth’s ecology than Ed Wilson” is […]
In an extended run at the Film Forum in New York City (and now playing in Philadelphia), the film Manufactured Landscapes is in the spirit of Edward Burtynsky’s 2005 TED Prize wishes: to show the world the size, the devastation, the sheer astonishingness of the industrial landscapes we have created — and to create a […]
The photographer Kristen Ashburn, whose unforgettable images of the human impact of AIDS in Africa made a powerful impact at TED a couple years back, has just opened her first public exhibition in New York. It’s stunning. For a taste, take a few minutes to watch this. Better yet, check it out in person at […]
Encounter Point, an incredible documentary that follows a former Israeli settler, a Palestinian ex-prisoner, a bereaved Israeli mother and a wounded Palestinian bereaved brother who risk their lives and public standing to promote a nonviolent end to the conflict, is opening in select cities in the US and the Middle East tomorrow. The film is […]
Fifteen months after disseminating hints at TEDGLOBAL in Oxford, XPrize‘s Peter Diamandis and his posse are getting ready to annouce their plans for the first Rocket Racing League (RRL) races. The RRL is a racing competition akin to Nascar, with cars replaced by rocket-powered aircrafts called X-Racers that will zip around a virtual track in […]
This morning, Virgin CEO Sir Richard Branson offered the first public look at the rocketship expected to make space tourism a reality. The mock-up — revealed at WIRED/NextFest in New York — is based on the design of SpaceShipOne, the Ansari X-Prize-winning craft designed by Burt Rutan (TED2006). (Watch for Rutan’s TEDTalk later this fall.) […]
Even if there weren’t two TEDsters in the running, we’d be keeping a close watch on the race to succeed Kofi Annan as U.N. Secretary General, when he steps down at year’s end. One in a series of informal votes takes place today at UN Headquarters. In today’s New York Times, an Op/ED piece titled […]
San Francisco investor Peter A. Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) is putting $3.5 million into the antiaging research pioneered by TED speaker Aubrey de Grey (see past posts on him). The money will come in annual installments of $500,000 over the next three years for a pilot project, plus matching money for every dollar donated by […]
For a long time, TEDPrize winner Cameron Sinclair has encapsulated his philosophy in a slogan that recently turned into the title of his inspiring book: "Design like you give a damn" (see Cameron’s speech on TEDtalks – or if you are in New York see him live this coming Wednesday 20 at the NYPL). Now, […]
To TEDsters, Google.org – the philanthropic arm of Google – is mostly known for the inspiring speech its director Larry Brilliant gave at TED last february, outlining a very compelling plan for an Internet-based system to rapidly detect disease outbreaks (see the original post from the conference or Brilliant’s TEDprize speech in video). A story […]