Members of the TED community sure were busy this week. Below, some highlights: Legendary biologist E.O. Wilson has come out with a bold idea: that we set aside half of Planet Earth for wildlife. If we don’t, he warns, he sees us hurtling toward a “biological holocaust” that could send us the way of the […]
Bosnian photojournalist Ziyah Gafić photographs the aftermath of conflict. (Watch his TED Talk, “Everyday objects, tragic histories.”) In his most recent book, Quest for Identity, he catalogs the belongings of Bosnia’s genocide victims, everyday objects like keys, books, combs and glasses that were exhumed from mass graves. The objects are still being used to identify the bodies […]
As always, many members of the TED community have been popping in the news this week. Below, some highlights. Liu Bolin uses paint to make himself disappear into backgrounds. In this video from The Creators Project, Bolin shows the next evolution—group versions of his signature work. Watch him turn his friends into money in the video […]
A while back, we told you about a big initiative underway in the TED office: Project Cleans. Essentially, we are taking each and every one of our 1,800+ talk video files and stripping them of the text and add-ons that were originally baked in, re-encoding the video, and saving the “clean” files in a new media […]
Fisher Stevens produced The Cove, the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary about dubious Japanese dolphin-hunting practices, and his latest film takes him back into familiar waters. Stevens co-directed the newly-released doc Mission Blue, spending the last four years trekking around the world—from the Galapagos Islands to the Chesapeake Bay to the Great Barrier Reef—with unstoppable oceanographer Sylvia […]
Global health expert Alanna Shaikh gave an unexpected and moving talk at TEDGlobal 2012, called “How I’m preparing to get Alzheimer’s.” In it, she told the story of her father’s struggle with the disease, and outlined some strategies she’d devised in case dementia struck her later in life, too. The TED Blog was curious: How is her experiment […]
Sylvia Earle is a fearless 78-year-old woman. In the new documentary Mission Blue, we watch her dive with sharks in the deep blue sea and fearlessly dodge fishing nets as she swims through the middle of a major fishing operation. The film offers a bold new view of the famed oceanographer whose relentless pursuit of […]
Adam Braun went to school in the US and now runs a nonprofit that builds schools in Ghana, Laos, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In contrast, Sugata Mitra—the winner of the 2013 TED Prize—went to school in India and now is a professor in the UK, where his research on self-directed learning routinely brings him into elementary […]
It’s 2008, moments before a BBC broadcast live from the stage at TED. But something’s gone wrong. The house lights are still up, the camera ops are looking at one another, official-looking folks are wandering at the stage apron muttering into headsets, and the panelists are sitting patiently onstage but looking, increasingly, baffled. Minutes go […]
This week, East African singer Somi releases her first major-label album, The Lagos Music Salon, in the United States. Already, it is #1 on the iTunes Jazz Chart, #1 on the Amazon Jazz Vocal Chart, and #1 on the Amazon Pop Vocal Chart. The TED Blog caught up with the jazz-soul vocalist and songwriter—who was was born in Illinois to Rwandan […]
Sara Lewis confirms that there are in fact more fireflies this summer, and that we are in midst of peak firefly season. Read more on that, and on other members of the TED community with news to share this week…
Fargo, North Dakota, has a skewed reputation. This city, which happens to be my hometown, rocketed to infamy thanks to the 1996 dark comedy by the Coen Brothers about a down-on-his-luck car salesman (William H. Macy) who plans to have his wife kidnapped, and the sheriff (Frances McDormand) who investigates what happens when the plan […]
By Olivia Cucinotta and Emily McManus Here, a look at just a few members of the TED community making headlines this week. Rob Knight’s American Gut project released its latest results this week, with data from the microbiomes (i.e., the microbial world inside each human body) of 3,238 participants so far. Some interesting facts they’ve called […]
Several members of the TED community had notable news this week. Below, some highlights: In 2010, Eben Bayer introduced a mushroom-based material that grows from agri-waste into any shape you want. It’s been used mainly as a packing material up to now, but this week, MoMA’s PS1 in Queens unveiled a soaring, sunny tower built […]
Below, just a few members of the TED community who made headlines this week. Longtime TEDster Steve Case is hitting the road this summer to find and invest in start-ups that may otherwise be overlooked. His “Rise of the Rest Road Trip” kicked off in Detroit this week and will continue on to Pittsburg, Cincinnati […]
[ted id=562] We want to remember Felix Dennis, who passed away this week at the age of 67, as he’d probably wish—with this trenchant, funny aside from his 2004 TED Talk. “You guys, you know, you’re going to totally transform everything. Cloning will transform everything. Voice navigation will transform everything … But human nature doesn’t change, […]