http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThzdsnXeE28 Expedia’s remarkably moving short film, “Find Your Understanding,” tells the true story of man named Artie Goldstein and his journey to accept his daughter Jill Goldstein’s marriage to another woman, Nikki Weiss. As the world waits for the Supreme Court decision on the Defense Against Marriage Act, millions have viewed this socially-conscious ad online. […]
There are seven different words in Dothraki for striking another person with a sword. Among them: “hlizifikh,” a wild but powerful strike; “hrakkarikh,”a quick and accurate strike; and “gezrikh,” a fake-out or decoy strike. But you won’t find these words in George R. R. Martin’s epic series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is where Dothraki originated as the language […]
[ted id=1701] How do we negotiate when to sell a stock, whether to rat out a partner in crime, how to play a poker hand, or what to ask for when negotiating a job offer? In each of these situations, the actions of others will greatly affect our outcomes — and yet, we have no […]
Can a person change a world rife with problems — villages without basic healthcare, girls turned away from schools, hospitals unable to get life-saving vaccines to the people who need them? For three years, TEDxChange, a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the TEDx program, has said yes, by spotlighting people who […]
Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week. First, happy (late) World Poetry Day! Celebrate the occasion with 8 talks from spoken-word poets. Just when you thought Vijay Kumar’s robots that fly and cooperate were creepy enough, he and his team have developed a drone that can […]
Can real food be cooked on Mars? Thanks to the work of artist, biologist and space scientist Angelo Vermeulen (watch his TED talk), the answer may one day be yes. When the Universities of Cornell and Hawai’i put out a call for participants for their NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars simulation, investigating the feasibility of real food on Mars, Vermeulen — known for his […]
The world lost one of its literary giants today. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe has died at the age 82. For Nigerians, Achebe was a national treasure. He was the first African writer to attract international acclaim, and an outspoken leader with far-reaching influence on both politics and culture. Emeka Okafor, who produced the TEDGlobal conference in […]
Eric Whitacre has spent most of his career conducting traditional choirs. Then, in 2009, a fan video posted to YouTube sparked a crazy idea: could he take singers from across the globe, have them sing the same piece on video, and edit it together into a virtual choir? The results of this experiment quickly went […]
When you pop a pill, do you know how it works? Most modern drugs target specific molecules, interacting with disease at the molecular level. But while we know the molecular causes of roughly 4,000 diseases, a very slim 6 percent of those diseases have a safe and effective drug to treat them. Why? Because of […]
Today—March 21, 2013—the much-anticipated cosmological results from the Planck satellite have been released. In a recent blog post on her own website, TED Fellow and cosmologist Renée Hlozek describes why this is a big day for astrophysics and cosmology. We asked her to explain what the excitement is all about. “Planck is the ‘next generation’ satellite that measures the tiny fluctuations in […]
On Sunday, Oprah Winfrey revealed that she and TED speaker Brené Brown are “soul mates.” As the pair sat down for an in-depth discussion on Super Soul Sunday — part one of which aired last Sunday, with part two to air next Sunday — they excitedly talked about many of the concepts which Brown raised […]
TED Talks are available in 97 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 8,800 volunteers have created the upwards of 34,000 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 […]
North Korea is one of the most isolated countries in the world. So it’s exceptionally rare to hear a first-hand account of life there — in English, no less. In today’s brave talk, given at TED2013, Hyenseo Lee gives a riveting account of what it was like to grow up in North Korea. “I thought […]
“You ain’t gangsta unless you have a garden,” says Ron Finley. In this special video for CNN, Finley shares more about the idea he posited at TED2013 for improving health in his neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles — planting edible gardens wherever a strip of land is available. “What we do is literally put vegetable gardens […]
“I have the feeling that, by making it more and more ubiquitous, It’s going to be pretty hard to shut it down.” Vint Cerf helped design the Internet 40 years ago. Does he think it’s in danger now? A conversation onstage at TED.
At TEDxWhitechapel on January 13, 2013, Graham Hancock gave a passionately argued talk in which he described the transformative impact that ayahuasca (containing the drug DMT) had had on him and argued that responsible adult usage of such drugs was a fundamental right. The talk was viewed more than 130,000 times on YouTube. TED’s scientific […]