Hyeonseo Lee saw her first public execution at age 7. A child growing up in North Korea, the moment affected her, but she didn’t have the frame of reference to understand the government repression going on around her. “When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet,” she says in […]
Can a person disappear in plain sight? That’s the question Liu Bolin‘s remarkable works all seem to ask. The Beijing-based artist is sometimes called “The Invisible Man” because in nearly all his art, Bolin is front and center — and completely unseen. Bolin aims to draw attention to social and political issues by dissolving into […]
Once, Lakshmi Pratury says, she was deeply troubled by the public lives of young people on the Internet, but now she has hope — because the same kids who post their party pics online are also posting their political outrage. Her talk turns to a sad and shocking recent event: the gang-rape and torture of […]
The internet connects people all over the world. But could the internet also connect us with dolphins, apes, elephants and other highly intelligent species? In a bold talk in Session 10 of TED2013, four incredible thinkers come together to launch the idea of the interspecies internet. Each takes four minutes to talk, then passes the […]
Eleanor Longden did well at school, and gleefully entered student life at university in England. By all appearances, she was a happy, typical student … but it wasn’t true. Underneath it all, Longden was “fundamentally frightened,” and while she did a good job of concealing her fear, she was about to come undone. She started to […]
On Sunday night, Ben Affleck accepted the Academy Award on behalf of his film Argo as it was named the Best Picture of 2012. And today, he appeared on the TED2013 stage kicking off Session 10, “Secret Voices.” “This is not a TED Talk. I will not be interesting or funny. This will not be exciting in […]
Shhh … it’s time for Secret Voices, the 10th session of TED2013. Get ready to hear stories of the forgotten, marginalized, stigmatized and hidden. Our first speaker will make quite an entrance while the last will give a stirring finish, in spoken word. In between, thoughts on interspecies communication. Here, the speakers who appeared in […]
Anas Aremeyaw Anas can’t show you his face, but his name carries enough weight. Famous in Ghana for his investigative journalism, Anas’ stories like “Enemies of the nation,” about corruption at customs in the Port of Tema, have blown the cover on crime all over Africa. He started 14 years ago, when he had just […]
Cybersecurity specialist James Lyne takes the TED2013 stage to show us some of the newest and nastiest creations that cybercriminals have designed to steal data, make off with billions of dollars, watch people through their webcams and target power and utility companies. Every day, he says, about 250,000 new pieces of malware are created and 30,000 websites infected. “People think […]
“If you’re middle-aged and North American, you probably learned to dance when you were in a gymnasium in junior high.” Allison Hunt didn’t get that training, because her mother was always chaperoning the dances, and worse than that: dancing. What could be more embarrassing to a teenager? She says: “You know the expression, dance like no one is […]
Humans have sex like apes Christopher Ryan begins his talk with a strong reminder, “We didn’t descend from apes. We are apes.” A special kind, but we are one. We’re closer to chimps and bonobos than they are to any other primate. But he wants to know, “What kind of ape are we? Particularly in terms […]
Imagine driving through a downpour and coming out with a dry car. Mark Shaw produces Ultra Ever-Dry, a liquid-repellent coating that may sound mundane but makes for one astonishing demo. The superhydrophobic coating acts as a shield against pretty much any liquids. When the coating is applied to a surface, it coats it with nanoparticles, […]
In 1995, the Natural History Museum Rotterdam got a new wing made of glass. It was beautiful for humans — but not so much for birds. Many of them lost their lives flying into the invisible walls. “I developed an ear for identifying birds just by the sound of the bang they made on the glass,” says Kees […]
A trip to a public bathroom stall several years ago inspired journalist Rose George to think. “I asked myself the question: Where does this stuff go?” George remembers. “With this question, I found myself plunged into the world of sanitation, toilets and poop. And I have yet to emerge.” Many people don’t think much about toilets. As […]
This session, delicately titled “Indelicate conversation,” took a look at some topics not meant for the dinner table with talks by speakers not afraid to ask: What’s really on your mind? The speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a recap of their talk: Rose George “talks shit” to raise awareness […]
Denise Herzing has spent more than 25 years studying dolphins in the wild, living each summer on a boat in the Bahamas for better access to our finned friends in their natural habitat. Today, in Session 8, she shared her work in using an interactive device to communicate with the dolphins — and let them […]