This year TED says goodbye to its roaring twenties and hello to the big 3-O. To celebrate TED’s thirtieth birthday, I’m hopping in my DeLorean to take a look back in time. Has the world become a better place since we were introduced to the Sony Compact Disc at the first TED three decades ago, […]
Janet Echelman is installing her new sculpture as we speak. Not in a gallery or on a pedestal, but instead soaring over the middle of downtown Vancouver. The installation involves cranes, hard hats and anchor points engineered atop two buildings: a 24-story hotel and the Vancouver Convention Centre where TED2014 will be held. “After three […]
Today is World Rare Disease Day – an event launched in 2008 to galvanize public awareness and research momentum for rare diseases. In the United States, a disease is considered rare if it affects fewer than 200,000 people. Yet there are more than 7,000 known rare diseases. This ratio means that there’s little funding for […]
Growing up in the UK and coming of age in Pakistan, TEDIndia Fellow Asher Hasan observed a vast discrepancy: those with and without access to basic healthcare, and the devastating social consequences of this disparity. He tells TED Blog the story of how he witnessed a single health disaster ruin the hopes of his childhood […]
Eight months after my talk at TEDGlobal 2013, much progress has been made on the International Non-profit Credit Rating Agency (INCRA) concept. The progress, however, has not been in the credit rating agency world itself, which is slow to change, despite strong criticism from political officials and, occasionally, the media. You may recall the public […]
Ed Boyden is the head of the Synthetic Neurobiology group at the MIT Media Lab, where he works on tools to map, control, record — and maybe even someday build — the brain. Boyden has worked on optogenetics, a technique which deploys light-sensitive molecules to the brain and then applies light to them to “turn […]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_lk4Q-2x8I&w=560&h=315%5D This video features the work of TED Fellow Nina Tandon and Sarindr Bhumiratana, her colleague at Columbia University’s Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering and partner-in-new-business-crime. Together with a group of fellow bio-engineers, the pair recently founded the company, Epibone, which they describe as “a revolutionary bone reconstruction company that allows patients […]
The standard narrative of human sexual evolution says: men provide women with goods and services in exchange for women’s sexual fidelity. But is that really true or relevant today? Christopher Ryan, the co-author of Sex at Dawn with Cacilda Jethá, takes a deeper look and has quite a few bones to pick with this idea. Ryan […]
A persistent sight in David Sengeh‘s childhood, growing up in Sierra Leone: amputees. Losing a limb was an all-too-common fact in the civil-war-torn region. But as if the loss of a limb weren’t enough, the aftermath was almost worse, Sengeh saw, as he watched family members and friends struggle with ill-fitting, uncomfortable prosthetics that hurt […]
Think parents should be able to select their children’s talents and personalities? Or want to run and hide in the woods at the thought of it? Whatever your opinion, it is precisely the kind of question that Julian Savulescu wants you to take seriously. Professor of practical ethics at the University of Oxford, Savulescu thinks […]
Last year, MIT neuroscientists Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez manipulated the memory of a mouse. In a fascinating and mildly troubling breakthrough caused by a laser and the protein channelrhodopsin, they “activated” fear memories in a mouse. The impetus, says Ramirez, was the awful feeling of a break-up, the desire, Eternal Sunshine-style, to erase the […]
Biomaterials are substances — synthetic or natural — that can be used to improve health, minimize suffering and improve or correct the way the body works. A suture? That’s a biomaterial. The pacemaker? Indeed. Contact lenses? Yeah, you get the idea. As technology and science have advanced, so too have the sophistication of such biomaterials […]
Wolves will travel to drink from a river. But could the presence of wolves lead a river to change its behavior? In his TED Talk, George Monbiot poetically explains how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park after a 70-year absence set off a “trophic cascade” that altered the movement of deer, sent trees soaring to […]
TED Fellow Lucy McRae (watch her TED Talk) is a body architect — an artist who explores how technology and the body may someday meet and merge. Her latest project is a fantastical and frothy music video for “Dream a Little Crazy” by Australian band Architecture in Helsinki. Watch the mouth-watering video above, and then read all […]
Robby Novak seems like a regular ol’ 10-year-old boy with a big laugh and a tendency to fidget, if you ignore the fact that he’s also a YouTube superstar. The dynamo elementary student started making a series of motivational videos with his older brother-in-law when he was just 9. The videos went viral, and since […]
Here’s a treat for Valentine’s Day (in addition to this playlist of TED Talks about love): Below, take a close-up look at a decellularized “ghost heart.” This heart can serve as a scaffold upon which to grow a working heart from human stem cells. Researchers at the Texas Heart Institute created it by stripping all […]