In his TED Talk, Gavin Pretor-Pinney urges us to look to the skies and appreciate the incredible shapes — a heart, fish or a hand waving goodbye — that can be spotted (or imagined) in clouds. But what if you want to take your cloud-spotting game to the next level? The technology and art collective […]
In today’s talk, Tania Luna shares her experience of immigrating to the United States from Ukraine as a little girl. Perfectly happy with her family’s outhouse and with chewing a single piece of Bazooka gum for a week, Luna found herself blown away by the wonders of her new country. From pizza to pennies to […]
TED Fellow Renée Hlozek — currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Astrophysics at Princeton University — recently established a fund and mentoring program to bring young South African female science undergraduates to the US for summer research. The mentorship’s first recipient, Julia Healy, just completed four weeks working alongside Hlozek at Princeton. […]
Each year, TED chooses 10 great ads to feature as part of our Ads Worth Spreading challenge. And this week, we’re featuring a whitepaper (PDF) that analyzes what makes some of those great ads great. The Ads Worth Spreading whitepaper chronicles the story behind this year’s 10 winning ads from their creative directors, and offers […]
Scientists in London have achieved a significant breakthrough on the road to curing blindness this week. Certain kinds of blindness are caused when photoreceptors — the cells in the retina that react with light and send an electrical signal to the brain — die off. Researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London have, […]
Francesca Fedeli had a hard pregnancy. But she and her husband, Roberto D’Angelo, thought they were in the clear when their son, Mario, was born in January 2011 and seemed healthy. However, just 10 days later, Mario was diagnosed as having had a perinatal stroke. The right side of his brain was damaged, leaving him unable […]
“Is there a reason for governments to be in charge of money?” asks Paul Kemp-Robertson in today’s talk. Judging by the new raft of alternative currencies—from digital coins to point systems that reward customers of a certain brand—the answer might someday be “no.” Again. As Kemp-Robertson suggests, many people seem to trust brands more than […]
It’s an alchemic question that’s very hard for us to answer: what makes a great TED talk? In this talk, which was given to a gathering of 100+ TEDx organizers from 43 countries during the TEDx Workshop at TEDGlobal 2013, our curator Chris Anderson stresses the incredible power of a well-structured, honest talk. “We’re giving someone […]
When Roberto D’Angelo and Francesca Fideli discovered that their 10-day-old son, Mario, had suffered a stroke, they were shocked. Maria was unable to control the left side of his body and, to help their son, they opted to participate in a pilot program for mirror neuron rehabilitation. As they explain in the talk, mirror neuron […]
Illusionist Marco Tempest (watch his cyber card trick and his electric take on Nikola Tesla) has a new assistant — Baxter the Robot. The star of this talk from roboticist Rodney Brooks, Baxter is a life-sized robot that has eyes that glance where he is about to move and arms that react to human touch, […]
John Searle studies consciousness — which, as he points out in today’s talk, is a “curiously neglected subject in our scientific and philosophical culture.” Curiously — because it is, after all, a pre-condition for anything else we think about. And yet neglected — because consciousness is a subject that makes scientists huffy (they see it […]
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. Moon Day is held every July 20 to commemorate this momentous feat. 43 years later, humanity is still looking to the sky, mesmerized by lunar bodies. However, it is not just Earth’s moon we’re studying anymore. With better satellites and […]
Some chewy food for thought this week on the Internets: The host of the blog Ask a Korean! responds to a chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers that links culture to frequency of plane crashes. (Watch an unrelated talk from Gladwell here.) Read the original post here and some updates here, which includes Gladwell’s response to […]
Biologist, poet and fledgling entrepreneur Ivana Gadjanski has worked on using animal toxins as a possible treatment for MS, and is growing bones and cartilage in dishes. She has also published two books of poetry in Serbia. Now she’s developing Pubsonic, an online research tool that allows users to access free medical journal papers via […]
Today may go down in history as The Day the Earth Smiled. Or, at least, that is what TED speaker Carolyn Porco (watch her talk) is hoping. Today from 9:27 to 9:42 pm GMT, the Cassini spaceship — an unmanned ship studying Saturn — will be taking a photograph of Saturn and its ring system. And […]
In 2007, journalist Andrew Mwenda took the stage at TEDGlobal in Arusha, Tanzania, and decried the symptomatic disease affecting his home continent: aid. The surprising take certainly got the goat of some members of the audience, including U2 frontman Bono, who has devoted so much time to promoting the need for African aid and who […]