For some of us, it’s easy to choose to be healthy — to eat well, to exercise, to live in a part of town with trees and parks. But for many more of us, it isn’t easy, and we don’t have that choice. We live in unsafe neighborhoods. Nutritious food is hard to buy. We don’t have strong families to help us through life’s challenges. A guest essay on building a culture of health.
[ted id=2222] Anybody with a smartphone can now be a part of the StoryCorps movement. As TED Prize Winner Dave Isay reveals in today’s talk, you no longer have to travel to a StoryCorps mobile booth to capture an interview with a friend, family member or stranger — because StoryCorps has created a free app. Now, if you can […]
Tucked into the northeast corner of the Vancouver Convention Centre, a podium was set up for the duration of TED2015. A small camera captured what happened behind it, with a panorama of Vancouver’s mountains and harbor in the distance, complete with sea planes skimming across the water. From this vantage point, classrooms around the world Skyped in […]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVSYsKH2AJA&w=560&h=315%5D Above, Christine Sun Kim and Renée Hlozek share a snippet of conversation using American Sign Language and the Big Words app. Christine has been teaching Renée American Sign Language so they can communicate more directly. Renée Hlozek is a cosmologist from South Africa who studies the cosmic microwave background, radiation left over from the Big Bang. Christine […]
There’s a quiet corner at TED, with two comfortable chairs, a table with some paper and pencils, and a well-placed box of tissues. And on Wednesday night, after Dave Isay of StoryCorps shared his TED Prize wish, TEDsters flooded into Citi Ventures’ The Art of Listening exhibit. This social space was an homage to Isay’s oral history project — which […]
A three-wheeled half-motorcycle half-car, the Toyota i-Road is imagined as a future for urban transportation — tiny, battery-powered and hyper maneuverable, perfect for zipping along tightly packed urban streets. The concept car was launched in March 2013, but there are only three i-Roads in North America right now, and all of them are at TED2015 this week. Which is why I found myself down in the loading dock of the […]
If a meet-cute is going to happen at TED2015, it will likely happen downstairs on the first level at the Harmonograph Swingset. This modern-day, hand-crafted timber swing, a take on a 19th-century invention, records harmonic frequencies as visual art. The swingset is made of two seats, set at right angles and connected to two poles […]
The glossy pages of magazines offer fascinating people, absorbing stories and photos that transport you to faraway places. During Session 8 of TED2015, a magazine will spring into three dimensions on the stage, thanks to Pop-Up Magazine. See, every now and then, we hand over the reins to a guest curator. At TED2011, Bill Gates and Juan Enriquez […]
Pico Iyer is a global travel writer whose stories have taken him to the snowy mountains of Japan and a film festival in Pyongyang, North Korea. But the author of the TED Book The Art of Stillness is also a champion of the art of “going nowhere,” a contemplative state of mind that makes a […]
There are a lot of great jobs at TED, but Colette Lynch and her Vancouver-based team might just have the best. They lead “food and beverage curation” for our conferences and, like our program curators, spend all year researching and prepping: sifting through food blogs, visiting farmers markets, meeting with culinary visionaries and, of course, […]
This week, Apple turned the iPhone into a medical research tool with the launch of ResearchKit. This open-source framework, described in the video above, lets a medical researcher set up a project to gather anonymous patient data on diseases like asthma, breast cancer and diabetes. Using their own smartphones, patients who join a project can […]
This morning, the Solar Impulse 2 — a plane powered only by the sun — took off from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, sailing past the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque on the first leg of its journey around the world. This flight is the culmination of 12 years of dreaming by TED speaker […]
“The White City.” “The City of the Monkey God.” “The Place of Cacao.” Rumors of a majestic city nestled in the remote rainforest of Honduras — referred to by all of these names — have circulated for centuries, wedging their way into Honduran national identity. They seemed to be the stuff of legend. Until a […]
On this weekend’s episode of Super Soul Sunday, Oprah Winfrey asks TED Books author Pico Iyer to explain more precisely what he means by the word ‘stillness.’ It’s not so much about meditation, he says. “It’s sanity and it’s balance, and it’s a chance to put things in perspective,” he says. Like so many others, […]
The core of StoryCorps is listening. It’s about honoring another human being by simply listening to them. The joke, of course, is that I’m a terrible listener. I really am — ask anybody. I’m just so easily distracted by my phone or email. I’m terrible. But that’s why StoryCorps is so important. It’s about learning […]
Please enjoy your weekly roundup of news briefs from members of the TED community: A 21st-century break-in. Security futurist Marc Goodman knows that technology can make both life and crime easier. In a post on Boing Boing excerpted from his book Future Crimes, he tells the story of an auto trading company that installed tiny remote-controlled boxes […]