Our photographer Duncan Davidson loves to shoot timelapses; before every TED, you can find him behind the scenes hiding cameras to snap away for hours and days. In his latest piece, he tracks the construction of a custom robot arena for Raffaello D’Andrea, whose TED Talk was posted just last night. The TED Blog asked […]
What would the world be like if it were run by city mayors? Benjamin Barber will pose this question as part of Session 8 at TEDGlobal, themed “State of the Nations.” The quirky yet powerful figure of the local mayor — cycling to work while battling civic corruption — inspires Barber in his upcoming book, If Mayors Ruled the […]
There’s a time and a place for the big picture; there’s a time and a place for the tiny one. This week, watch the playlist “The world of tiny things,” all about viewing the unseen and looking at the world on a very small scale. In this playlist, E.O. Wilson makes a plea for insects […]
Below, find some interesting and insightful pieces from around the web this week that have the TED staff intrigued: The second installment in the smart, darkly funny “Damsel in Distress” series, a three-part analysis of female tropes pervasive in video games. Contains game spoilers and violent images. [YouTube] You can also watch Part 1. We think Jackson’s Katz’s […]
At Opower, Alex Laskey and colleagues are running what they describe as “the largest behavioral science experiment in the world.” Laskey explains some of the thinking behind it in his TED Talk, “How behavioral science can lower your energy bill,” and he shared further insights into the importance of the field in this discussion with Harvard […]
Dolphins are “natural acousticians,” according to marine mammal behavioral biologist Denise Herzing. Individuals have signature whistles, just as we have names, and they can also send buzzes and tickles across long distances to physically signal one another. Echolocation clicks help them navigate in the water, and they erupt in bursts of squawks during fights. They […]
Anas Aremeyaw Anas is known for, as he calls it, the “naming, shaming and jailing” of criminals all over Ghana – yet few people would be able to pick him out of a crowd. The undercover journalist, who gave today’s talk, has brought smugglers, mob bosses and pimps to justice with an unshakeable determination to, […]
“For the past five years we’ve been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world,” says Alex Laskey in today’s TED Talk, given at this year’s 2013 conference in Long Beach. “And, it’s working.” Laskey’s company Opower partners with utility companies to deliver personalized home energy reports, all based off the insight that people are […]
The average person takes about 150 million steps in a lifetime. What if we could turn all that movement into energy? Two innovators are working on it — including a TED@London speaker. While one has built a system to capture the energy of foot traffic, the other is harnessing the power of smooth dance moves. […]
This morning’s TED Talk from Andrew Solomon asks a deep question about parents and children. Inspired by his own upbringing, Solomon wondered how parents form bonds with extraordinary children — or, in his words, when the “vertical culture” passed from parent to child is different from the “horizontal culture” of the child’s own self-identity. As […]
Check this out: a rather cool visualization of a TED Talk, courtesy of the Brazilian culture and science magazine Superinteressante. Each month, the magazine’s editors will take one of TED’s talks and give it to their graphic wizards to interpret in any way they see fit, adding a visual design element to presentations that have […]
Anyone who lives in a major city, where pollen-thick summer air seems incompatible with the dearth of trees, it can be easy to forget the fact that plants make the world go round. Here to remind you is a playlist of 10 TED Talks on the majesty and awesomeness of plants. Hear from not one […]
A heads-up, if you happen to be near Rotterdam, in the Netherlands — ornithologist Kees Moeliker (watch his TED Talk) and friends will be celebrating the annual Dead Duck Day on June 5, at 17:55, on the lawn outside the glass-enclosed wing of Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum. Attendance is free. At this year’s event, Moeliker will […]
A few fun links from this week’s Internet, so you don’t get bogged down with all that summer reading you’re about to do » [Video] A Numberphile video explains a recent breakthrough by a relatively unknown mathematician, on pairs of prime numbers that differ by two. [YouTube] A beautiful meditation on the reality of dreams […]
Anita Doron’s first feature film, The Lesser Blessed, is a love story that takes place in a remote community in the Northwest Territories. This moving film is being released theatrically in Canada today, and will arrive in the U.S. on June 13th. As it opens, we asked Doron to tell us about the film, her path from poet […]
Sequencing an extinct genome is no longer a pipe dream, says evolutionary biologist and ancient DNA specialist Hendrik Poinar in today’s talk. It’s a modern reality, and we’re not too far from seeing a revived extinct species walking the Earth again — maybe even a woolly mammoth. In this talk from TEDxDeExtinction, Poinar talks about how […]