Mission: Radical spreading from a uniform block to a more freeform organic experimental shape. Director’s statement: “I wanted to create an explosion of vector abstract pop and colored animation. Organic and geometric shapes, characters growing around the central information.” — Superdeux Direction and design: Superdeux http://www.superdeux.com Animation and sound design: Friends Of Mine http://www.friendsofmine.tv Agency: […]
Click to watch the session-opening animation. We end TEDGlobal2012 with a session that steps back and asks, “How do we, as a society, communicate with each other?” The public sphere, the place where we engage with society at large, has undergone tremendous change — driven and empowered by the digital revolution, but also, perhaps, by a deeper […]
John Wilbanks arrives on stage with some bad news, some good news and a task. But first, he says, let’s be honest. We all get sick. We don’t always die, but quite reasonably we do try to find out what’s going on. In the late 1800s, Dr. Carlos Finlay had a hypothesis. He thought yellow fever was not […]
Imogen Heap bounds onto the stage wearing black, a glittering, cosmically ruffled jacket and some musical gloves. You know, as you do. The gloves are the way that she activates the music around her, while where she stands on the stage also impacts the treatments on her voice. “I have music in my hands,” she says, […]
“My task this morning is to summarize 35 years of work in less than 17 minutes,” says Mina Bissell. She is a cancer researcher with a background in chemistry, and as she tells us, the standard explanations for exactly what cancer was didn’t make sense to her. Her career has been driven by a tremendous question — what […]
Becci Manson is a high-end photographic retoucher who works with client like fashion magazines to tart up glamorous images. She and her friends, she says, are pale gray creatures hiding from sunlight in dark, windowless rooms. “We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, and we make the impossible possible.” The field comes under […]
In 1975, Maurizio Seracini met an art professor who asked him if he could help find a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci — the mural Battle of Anghiari, missing for five centuries. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of oportunity for a bioengineer in art, but he decided to take on the project. He […]
Click to watch the session-opening animation. We all know that things aren’t always as they seem, and in this session we do a double take, re-examining both issues we may have considered set in stone as well as the unintended consequences of some seemingly inconsequential decisions that continue to echo through the ages. In this […]
“We have something that will radically save the pharmaceutical industry,” says Susan Solomon in an interview on the social floor of TEDGlobal 2012, in Edinburg, Scotland. Solomon is the founder and CEO of the New York Stem Cell Foundation. She spoke with the TED Blog about the NYSCF’s new array of automatically created stem-cell lines, which […]
There are two ways to see a glass of water—some view it as half full, others refer to it as half empty. During the third day of TEDGlobal, the speakers fell into one of the two camps. While many spoke about the ways in which new technology and increasing global openness can bring people together […]
Keith Chen is a Yale economist who made a stir earlier this year with an intriguing working paper relating economics and language — a paper that is yet unpublished, Bruno is careful to note onstage. Chen is onstage at TED to hash over the question, which is sparking ongoing debate and refinement (read a key […]
The daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Hannah Brock started playing the drums at her school in Beijing at the age of 3. By 4, she had started the piano and the guzheng, an ancient instrument that looks rather like a large zither and is played with plectrums taped to the fingers. Now […]
After rescuing his equipment from UK customs, where it had been stuck for several days, Boaz Almog take the stage to demonstrate his remarkable research. It uses a well-known phenomenon of superconductivity — a state of matter where the electrical resistance drops to zero. Normally, electrons moving through a conductor collide occasionally, losing energy to […]
MIT professor Ramesh Raskar starts his talk by showing the classic Doc Edgerton photograph of an apple being shot by a bullet. It demonstrated an exposure of a millionth of a second. Wonderful, right? he asks us, to wide agreement. Only now, 50 years later, technology advances mean we can photograph a million times faster […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson As an architect, Michael Hansmeyer asks, “What is the origin of the forms we design?” And he asks: “What kind of forms would we design if we had no bias, if we had no preconception? What kind of forms would we design if we could free ourselves from our education?” “How,” he […]
When he was a child, John Maeda‘s father came to a parent-teacher meeting and was told that his son was good at math and art. His father nodded. The next day, at his tofu store, his father told a customer that his son was good at … math. “That’s stuck with me all my life,” […]