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made a stir earlier this year with an intriguing working paper relating economics and language — a paper that is yet unpublished, Bruno is careful to note onstage.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,” […]
A new word for a new profession Laura Snyder begins with a scene from June 24, 1833. It’s a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elderly man stands up to make a comment. It’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He stands up and demands, “You must stop calling yourselves Natural Philosophers.” He […]
Sarah Slean has made eight albums, the latest of which is a double album, Land & Sea, featuring original scores composed for a 21-piece string orchestra. She hasn’t brought quite that many musicians with her to TEDGlobal but together with the local Cairn String Quartet she starts off with a quiet piece for piano, a string quartet […]
Brief: Radical Openness through open source motion graphics. Welcome to be re-used and remixed. Director’s statement: “Motion graphic animations based on colors, patterns and schemes. Project these onto various surfaces which break the light coming from the projector. Think mirrors, glass, water etc. All the moving images we use to build our films are available […]
Click to view (and remix) the session-opening animation Progress comes, often, from forging ahead, striking out in a direction and discovering the unknown. But sometimes it comes from looking at a familiar problem, or a familiar solution, and looking at it in a new way. In this session we’ll look at a variety of familiar […]
The director of the Design Museum in London, Deyan Sudjic arrives onstage with a confession. “Designers have a tendency to answer the question they haven’t been asked,” he says. As such, he’s going to overlook the theme of the session, “The Upside of Transparency,” and instead focus on other aspects of the term. After all, […]
Heather Brooke starts her talk by telling us a fairy tale. It’s a tale of children, scolded for daring to question the authority of their parents. Then a man comes to town and shares some secret documents stolen from the parents and revealing — shock! — that the parents are terribly badly behaved themselves. It’s […]