Philippe Petit startled the world when he walked on a taut cable between the soaring twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1974. But even a death-defying high-wire artist has to start somewhere. In Cheating the Impossible: Ideas and Recipes from a Rebellious High-Wire Artist, Petit takes you on a […]
Photographer Aaron Huey set out seven years ago to capture images of poverty in America. The mission brought him to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where 90% of the residents live below the poverty line and life expectancy for men is just 47 years, largely because of violence. As Huey says in his […]
So what exactly, you ask, is augmented reality? As Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts explained in their exciting talk at TEDGlobal 2012, it’s easier to understand once you see it. So, please take out your phone or tablet. Download the app “Aurasma Lite.” Point it at the image of Robert Burns above. Now do you […]
This spring, TED headed on the road, visiting 14 cities across six continents on the hunt for untapped talent. The idea behind the sweeping search: to let you, the TED community, weigh in and vote on which speakers you’d like to see ascend the stage at TED2013. After holding one-night salons in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Doha, […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqsHPeFZlbA&w=530&h=298] . Colleen Flanigan, the coral reef sculptor and TED Senior Fellow, didn’t have time to get a haircut before TEDGlobal back in June. So in the spirit of the conference, themed ‘Radical Openness,’ she crowdsourced one instead, letting dozens of conference-goers each take one snip of her hair. (Wired UK hailed the stunt as […]
For years, Dana Nieder has been trying to figure out why her daughter Maya suffers from extreme developmental delays. Now 4 years old, Maya is unable to speak, and has already had multiple surgeries. Countless doctors told Nieder that “something genetic” was at the root of Maya’s problems, but six genetic screenings failed to confirm […]
The New York Times doubled-down today on articles about TED Fellows, running stories on Camille Seaman’s portraits of icebergs as well as on Skylar Tibbits’ toys that assemble themselves. The photography blog Lens turned its eye on Seaman’s work, marveling out how she captures the personalities of icebergs and glaciers in her stunning images. “They […]
TED headed on the road this spring, combing the globe for untapped talent to speak at TED2013. Holding one-night salons in 14 cities — from São Paulo to New York to Nairobi to Shanghai — TED invited a slew of fascinating speakers to give the talk of their life in three to six minutes. While […]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA “Science: It’s a Girl Thing!” That’s what is claimed in a goofy public service announcement, made by the European Commission, which aims to convince young women that science careers are in fact “cool.” Naturally, for a few days the Twittersphere has been atwitter over the very pink ad, which instead shows that girls can […]
A day at the beach means something very different to TED Fellow Asha de Vos, a marine biologist who has spent the past three years charting an unusual population of blue whales just 12 miles off the coast of Sri Lanka, the country where she was born. While most blue whales migrate from tropical waters […]
Boaz Almog demonstrates “quantum locking” — which causes a small, supercooled superconductor to levitate above a magnetic track — in this amazing raw footage from TEDGlobal, shot by photographer James Duncan Davidson. Want to know when Boaz Almog’s full TEDTalk goes online? Sign up for an email notification >>
When it comes to time, there is the past, the present and the future. But during day four of TEDGlobal, speakers seemed especially concerned with the former and the latter. Kicking off session 11, the first of day four, art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini shared his 30-year quest to find Leonardo da Vinci’s missing fresco “The […]
An epidemic hidden in plain view Margaret Heffernan begins her TEDGlobal talk by telling us a story: In Oxford in the 1950s, there was physician named Alice Stewart who was fascinated with the new science of epidemiology. She realized, as a scientist does, that the way to prove herself was to find a hard problem […]
Amy Cuddy must be proud: Clay Shirky walks on stage and promptly strikes a power pose. Then he tells us of a 9-year-old Scottish girl who lives about 50 miles from here. Martha Payne started the foodblog NeverSeconds, for which she took her camera into school to document her lunches, using metrics such as “pieces of hair found […]
Where some people saw a social network too far, Daria Musk saw an opportunity. In the summer of 2011, she joined Google+ and decided to perform a live concert via its video chat feature, Hangouts. Her concerts can last up to eight hours, and in just a few months she turned from a self-described lonely […]
Architecture writer Andrew Blum has always focused on the physical landscape: our cities, our buildings, the places in which we live and work. Yet along with the rest of us, he says, he’s realized that over the past few years our relationship with the physical world has changed. We look at screens, a world with […]