Percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra is creating virtual sanctuaries for real cities. Working in collaboration with local artists, historians, architects, city planners and musicians, Ibarra and her partner Roberto Rodriguez — who together form Electric Kulintang — have created a musical pilgrimage that takes the public on a sound walk through 12 sites in Lower […]
A good story can make a campfire that much eerier. A good story can flip a conversation at a party from completely awkward to wonderful. A good story can glue your nose to a book. And, on screen, a good story can rivet generation after generation. So, uh, how do you tell one? Andrew Stanton, […]
By Robin Nagle When I teach classes about the anthropology of waste and discards, I always designate one 48-hour period in which my students and I keep all the trash we would otherwise throw out. (I kindly exclude recyclables and anything that normally gets flushed.) The effort teaches a few important lessons. It demonstrates that […]
Biologist and TED Fellow Juliana Machado Ferreira grew up just outside of São Paulo, and went to both university and graduate school in the megalopolis. [Read a profile of her life and work.] She prefers a more natural environment, but after a brief stint in the Amazon, she is back in the city, looking for an […]
Juliana Ferreira is not a city person. Although she grew up just outside of São Paulo — the largest city in the largest country in South America, with a population of 11.32 million — she prefers beaches, or parks or even the country’s vast savannas and forests, where she once spent 20-day stretches collecting blood […]
“We already knew this.” “It’s necessary for the War on Terror.” “Other countries are doing it too.” “But I have nothing to hide.” These are the most common reasons people express for not feeling outrage over the revelations this year that the United States’ National Security Agency has been involved in widespread surveillance. In today’s […]
Autumn and Yuji are surfers who fell in love on the beach of Motoyoshi, a beautiful spot in Japan above Sendai where northern and southern currents meet. A month after Motoyoshi was hit by a tsunami in 2011, triggering a nuclear disaster at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the two made a startling decision […]
Grégoire Courtine and the scientists in his lab helped a paralyzed rat learn to walk again, voluntarily, through a treatment that combined drugs, electrical stimulation of the lower spinal cord, the support of a robotic arm and a little bit of chocolate. When their study appeared in the June 2012 issue of Science, it sparked […]
When artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang first installed “Before I Die” — a public artwork that invites passers-by to share their life’s wishes on the side of an abandoned New Orleans building — she had no idea that the project would become a global phenomenon. Over the last two and a half years, people […]
“In this place, you can connect to people that have been drawn apart for years by nationalists and the war. You can put them together in the same room and … people are talking about the greater good.” This quote was recorded at the first regional Open Translation Project workshop held in Novi Sad, Serbia, […]
Rodrigo Canales begins today’s talk by bringing us to a very confusing peace march. After a battle between Mexican law enforcement and the drug cartel La Familia Michoacana turned the city of Apatzingán into a battlefield for two days in 2010, the mayor of the town decided to hold a march for peace. Thousands of […]
Nigerian astronomer Johnson Urama wants to promote the future of astronomy in Africa by looking deep into history. With his African Cultural Astronomy Project, he is gathering the lost ancient astronomical traditions and stories of indigenous Africa, hoping to show modern Africans that the science of the skies is relevant to their past, present and future. […]
In South Korea’s “pressure-cooker” educational environment, 15-year-old Dong Woo Jang began to feel his caveman instincts kicking in: He needed to survive. And like his ancestors, he decided to arm up –- with a bow and arrow. As he shares in today’s talk, proudly holding up one of his handmade bows, he says, “Through bow […]
In the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, 350,000 people were presented with the heart-rending decision: to stay in their homes and risk exposure to radiation, or to uproot their lives and move away. The overwhelming majority left. But in today’s powerful talk, Holly Morris introduces us to a group of elderly women who returned to […]
Bahia Shebab is an artist, activist, and advertising executive who has been living in Cairo since 2003. And she also has been known to head out on the streets in the middle of the night to spray paint stenciled series that protest injustice and reflect on the fast-shifting politics of the city. Of course, Shehab […]
Early one morning, hours before the sun would rise, Lebanese-Egyptian artist, activist and historian Bahia Shehab was alone on the streets of Cairo, spray-painting a stenciled message that spoke out against the stripping of veiled women. It’s a campaign she discussed in “A thousand times no,” her inspiring TED Talk, and it was not only […]