Business
Jeff Bezos on TED.com
The dot-com boom and bust is often compared to the Gold Rush. But Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says it’s more like the early days of the electric industry.
The dot-com boom and bust is often compared to the Gold Rush. But Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says it’s more like the early days of the electric industry.
Green-minded architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “all children, all species, for all time.”
A happy song about global warming, from Jill Sobule.
Caroline Lavelle plays the cello like a sorceress casting a spell, occasionally hiding behind her wild mane of blond hair as she sings of pastoral themes. She performs “Farther than the Sun,” backed by Thomas Dolby on keyboards.
Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don’t we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.
Scientific discoveries, futurist Juan Enriquez notes, demand a shift in code, and our ability to thrive depends on our mastery of that code. Here, he applies this notion to the field of genomics.
Al Seckel, a cognitive neuroscientist, explores the perceptual illusions that fool our brains. Loads of eye tricks help him prove that not only are we easily fooled, we kind of like it. Read the transcript >>
Biologist Sheila Patek talks about her work measuring the feeding strike of the mantis shrimp, one of the fastest movements in the animal world, using video cameras recording at 20,000 frames per second.
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh‘s work with bonobo apes, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching, forces the audience to rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology — and how much by cultural exposure.
Musician Nora York gives a stunning performance of her original song “What I Want.”
Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen argues that reducing humanity’s ecological footprint is incredibly vital now, as the western consumer lifestyle spreads to developing countries.
Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister takes the audience on a whimsical journey through moments of his life that made him happy — and notes how many of these moments have to do with good design.
Oxford philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom examines the future of humankind and asks whether we might alter the fundamental nature of humanity to solve our most intrinsic problems.
Showing a series of inspiring, unusual and playful products, British branding and design guru Paul Bennett explains that design doesn’t have to be about grand gestures, but can solve small, universal and overlooked problems.
In this stunning slideshow, celebrated nature photographer Frans Lanting presents The LIFE Project, a poetic collection of photographs that tell the story of our planet, from its eruptive beginnings to its present diversity. Soundtrack by Philip Glass.
Nobel laureate James Watson opens TED2005 with the frank and funny story of how he and his research partner, Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA.