TEDster Allison Hunt‘s five-minute talk finds humor and marketing strategy in the most unlikely of places — her own hip-replacement surgery. As the world scrutinizes broken health-care systems, this particularly timely clip shows how getting to the front of a two-year waiting list can have an altruistic effect. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, CA. Duration: […]
David Bolinsky and his team at XVIVO illustrate scientific and medical concepts with high-drama animation. These animators are true auteurs, carefully scripting and editing the story of cellular processes to show everyone — expert and amateur alike — the truth and the beauty of our bodies. You’ve never seen the life of a cell quite […]
Next week on TED.com, we’ll premiere the first talks from the TEDGlobal 2007 conference, held in Arusha, Tanzania, this June. Several bloggers from the conference will be posting here over the coming week. TEDGlobal 2007 Fellow Juliana Rotich has been keeping the influential blog Afromusing for two and a half years, writing and interviewing about […]
As Program Director for TEDGlobal2007, Emeka Okafor worked with TED Curator Chris Anderson and the TED team to assemble a list of speakers that spoke to the heart of the new Africa — the “cheetah generation” of inventors and investors, policymakers and bloggers, who are bringing new energy to the continent. We spoke to Emeka […]
The slam poet/tech artist/paper sculptor Rives does eight minutes of lyrical origami, folding history into a series of coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours: 4 o’clock in the morning. This elusive hour, both very late and very early, appears often in art and literature as a way to describe the most extreme states of […]
A technical virtuoso with boundless imagination, Will Wright has created a style of computer gaming unlike any that came before, emphasizing learning more than losing, invention more than sport. With his hit game SimCity, he spurred players to make predictions, take risks, and sometimes fail miserably, as they built their own virtual urban worlds. With […]
Africa Cookbook ProjectOriginally uploaded by betumi Fran Osseo-Asare is a sociologist who studies (and loves) the food of Africa — check out Betumi: The African Culinary Network, and her blog, BetumiBlog. She’s found that, on this continent with so many regional cuisines, authentic cookbooks can be hard to come by. Which may seem like a […]
Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, looks at the stats on AIDS in Africa — and comes up with a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is wrong. We look for root causes such as poverty and poor health care — but we also need to factor in, say, the […]
Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web — so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents “We Feel Fine,” a project that scours blogs to collect the planet’s emoti(c)ons, and the “Yahoo! Time Capsule,” which preserves images, quotes […]
It’s been a month since TEDGlobal 2007 rocked Arusha, Tanzania — bringing together Africans from all over the continent and the world, philanthropists and businesspeople, global citizens and key bloggers. The four days of the conference were up-all-night intense — and many bloggers signed off on the last day with promises to write more when […]
Alan Russell studies regenerative medicine, a breakthrough way of treating disease and injury by helping the body to rebuild itself. He shows how engineered tissue that “speaks the body’s language” has helped a man regrow his lost fingertip, how stem cells can rebuild damaged heart muscle, and how cell therapy can regenerate the skin of […]
Here’s one of those talks that can change your view of the world forever. Starting with the deceptively simple story of an ant, Dan Dennett unleashes a dazzling sequence of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of “memes” — a term coined by Richard Dawkins for mental concepts that are literally alive and […]
After lunch on Wednesday, 2:15pm-4pm, … AMD CEO Héctor Ruiz explained his company’s 50×15 initiative, which was established to enable affordable, accessible Internet connectivity and computing capabilities for 50 percent of the world’s population by the year 2015 … Herman Chinery-Hesse, founder of the software firm SOFTtribe … Nik Nesbitt founded KenCall, a call center […]
This week marks the one-year anniversary of TEDTalks — a year ago this Wednesday, our first five talks went live on TED.com. Since that time, more than 5 million people have seen a TEDTalk, either via TED.com, on this blog, through our video partners such as Google Video and YouTube — or through re-posting on […]
Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer and diver — who has invented robots and rebreathing equipment to let him plumb Earth’s deepest abysses — talks about his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. The plan is to send the droid to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid […]
In a follow-up to his now-legendary TED2006 presentation, Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software — which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. (Just days after this […]