As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Surface-level brain stimulation. The delivery of an electric current to the part of the brain involved in movement control, known as deep brain stimulation, is sometimes used to treat people with Parkinson’s disease, depression, epilepsy and obsessive compulsive disorder. […]
Picture this: Three kids are given a LEGO set with the pieces to build a fire department. All of them want to build as many new toys as possible. The first kid goes straight for the easy wins. He puts a tiny red hat on a tiny minifig: presto, a firefighter! In this way, he […]
Behold, your recap of TED-related news: The truth about couples. Ever wonder what goes on in couples therapy? You may want to tune in to Esther Perel’s new podcast “Where Should We Begin?” Each episode invites the reader to listen to a real session with a real couple working out real issues, from a Christian […]
Behold, your recap of TED-related news: A new Sundance grant helps indie films get seen. Making a film is hard enough — but getting the film seen by an audience can be just as difficult, especially in this era of non-stop media shifts. To help, Sundance just launched the Creative Distribution Fellowship — and among […]
Imagine a world where your car drives itself, your fridge does the grocery shopping, and robots work alongside you. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are turning that world into a near-future possibility. But what will that future really look like, and how will it change our lives? We spoke with three artificial intelligence experts at […]
Nation states are failing miserably on some of the more urgent global challenges of the modern age — especially climate change, predatory capitalism, terrorism and forced migration. Nations are increasingly closed, parochial and outdated, slow to respond to the pressures of a fast changing world. The three and a half long century experiment is rapidly coming […]
During the International Beer Exchange held on Day 2 of TEDFest, a screening event for TEDx’ers in New York City, bottles were lined up side by side like passengers on the subway during morning rush hour. A pale ale from Vail stood tall next to a stout from Kentucky that had been aged in oak […]
This year at TED, Target is all about building bridges and forging strong connections — literally and figuratively. The Commons — an open, airy minimalist structure — is a truly interactive space that allows TED attendees a moment to recharge away (and above) from the hustle and bustle of the conference. Made from sturdy wood […]
TED Fellow Lauren Sallan is a paleobiologist who analyzes “big data” — the fossil record — to study large-scale evolution. As she says: “I want to know why some fishes win and others lose.” Here’s the story of her talk, in amazing work from illustrator and animator Dennis Moore.
This post first appeared at BillMoyers.com. In the summer of 2014, one of the world’s top nature photographers was on an expedition in the far north to document the changing Arctic. Paul Nicklen was sailing around Svalbard, an archipelago halfway between Scandinavia and the North Pole. The largely uninhabited land sees 24 hours of sunlight […]
Along the remote, frozen coast of Hornstrandir National Park, photographer Chris Burkard (TED Talk: The Joy of Surfing in Ice-Cold Water) and his team were in search of the Shangri-La of ice-cold surfing. Instead, they encountered Iceland’s biggest storm to hit land in 25 years. The challenges and hardships that transpired over those few days, […]
As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A new civic gathering. To cope with political anxiety after the 2016 elections, Eric Liu has started a gathering called Civic Saturday. He explained the event in The Atlantic as “a civic analogue to church: a gathering of friends […]
Designers solve problems and bring beauty to the world. At TEDNYC Design Lab, a night of talks at TED HQ in New York City hosted by design curator Chee Pearlman with content producer Cloe Shasha, six speakers pulled back the curtain to reveal the hard work and creative process behind great design. Speakers covered a […]
As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A map to guide conservation. After almost eight years of airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, Greg Asner has finally mapped all 300,000 square miles of the Peruvian Amazon. Highlighting forest types that are reasonably safe and those which are in […]
In conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson at TED HQ in New York on Wednesday, New York Times columnist David Brooks and journalist Gretchen Carlson discussed how and why America has become so polarized — and where we can find common ground. Set between lively renditions of “America the Beautiful” and “Go Down Moses” performed […]
Timothy Snyder grew up in America, but as a historian of 20th-century Europe at Yale, he’s spent much of his adult life in, or thinking deeply about, Central and Eastern Europe. And what he sees there — especially in looking at the Europe of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s — is a pattern that may […]