I’ll never forget the first images of Sebastião Salgado’s that I ever saw. At the time, I was just getting into photography, and his images of the mines of Serra Pelada struck me as otherworldly, possessing a power that I had never seen in a photo before (or, if I’m honest, since). In the twenty […]
Photographer Camille Seaman sees the personality in elements of nature. The TED Fellow thrilled us at TED2011 with her haunting photos of polar ice — some glaciers timid, others proud and defiant — and, at TED2013, shared stunning images of supercell clouds, which she characterizes as “lovely monsters.” We are very excited that Seaman has […]
[ted id=484] “I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together.” Such was the kernel of an idea from one Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer working at CERN back in the 1980s. Working on this idea was a side project for Berners-Lee, one dubbed “vague but exciting” by his boss […]
[ted id=1727] Taylor Wilson has been called “The Boy Who Played With Fusion” by Popular Science magazine. At age 9, Wilson stunned tour guides at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with his complex understanding of rocket science. At 12, he set out to make a “star in a jar.” By 14, Wilson […]
In today’s talk, Nilofer Merchant gives a startling statistic: we’re sitting, on average, for 9.3 hours per day—far more than the 7.7 hours we spend sleeping. “Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don’t even question how much we’re doing it,” Merchant says. “In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation.” But there […]
A weekly round-up of interesting, weird and useful reads from around the interwebs. In “The wrong kind of Caucasian,” Sarah Kendzior critiques the media for its tendency to demonize an entire country based on the violent acts of a few individuals. [Al Jazeera] “The Internet: A Warning from History,” or how the Internet ruined everything. […]
On an unseasonably chilly Monday evening in Manhattan, hundreds stood in line in Times Square for up to two hours. As a city-dweller for seven years, I’ve seen queues this long for big Broadway openings or on New Year’s Eve. But this line was formed for a very different purpose — for people to have […]
Conceptual artist Alicia Eggert uses words as found objects in her sculptural art — a body of work that serves as an ongoing investigation of time. Here, she tells us about taking her neon piece “You are (on) an island” to various locations in the world, shares how childhood experiences in South Africa sparked her […]
David Pogue is a member of a very select club. As of today, he’s one of the few people with four talks featured on TED.com. (Two others who’ve reached this mark: Julian Treasure and Juan Enriquez.) Yes, we’ve shown you his talks on simplicity in tech design, cool phone tricks and the downloading wars. But […]
Jennifer Healey remembers totaling her car as a teenager. She was cruising down the highway, when she noticed the brake lights on the car in front of her go on. She assumed the car was slowing down, but it came to a halting, abrupt stop. Healey, now a research scientist at Intel working on mobile […]
TED Talks are available in 100 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 9,400 volunteers have created the upwards of 40,000 translated talks. To celebrate this huge accomplishment, every week the TED Blog will be bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific […]
Julian Treasure cares very deeply for your ears. That’s why he’s given TED talks like “The 4 ways sound affects us” and “Why architects need to use their ears.” Treasure is on a mission to make policymakers, engineers, architects and, well, everyone think more about what they hear around them — because the way things […]
TED is in the business of online videos. And so we were very intrigued by this question from Michael Stevens, the creator of the popular educational YouTube channel Vsauce: how much does a video weigh? In today’s talk, a TED-Ed lesson filmed at TEDActive, he answers. Watch it above to find out how to measure […]
TED Prize winner JR rolled into New York this weekend for the premiere of his documentary, INSIDE OUT: The People’s Art Project, at the Tribeca Film Festival. But that was far from the renegade artist’s only stop. With a photobooth truck in tow, he performed actions in Red Hook and the Rockaways, two areas hit hard by Hurricane […]
Was it a suicide? A homicide? Or an accident? Read and decide….
It’s been a hard week for many Americans, as the Boston bombings continue to raise more and more questions. Here is some weekend reading as you await answers. A poignant ode to the city of Boston, its annual marathon and the victims of the April 15 bombings. [NY Review of Books Blog] Far, far away […]