The footage in this video — which shows a man, a woman and a teenager walking down paths, around curves, up stairs and across streets — may not at first viewing seem remarkable. But the people in this video are blind — and walking without a cane or guide dog. Instead, they are being guided […]
It’s not the norm to see pink balloons, brightly colored dresses and sequined shoes in the halls of the Richmond City Jail. But on March 16, a dozen girls ranging in age from 6 to 16 entered the facility to bring cheer to their incarcerated fathers. The occasion: the second father-daughter dance at the jail, […]
Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week: Happy Birthday, Upworthy! Here are 11 lessons our friends at Upworthy learned in their first year on the Internet. [Upworthy] Jay Horwitz, media relations director for the Mets, is the Barry Bonds of butt dialing. He frequently booty calls […]
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/62923489 w=400&h=300] Bryan Stevenson, who gave the powerhouse talk “We need to talk about an injustice” at TED2012, appeared on Moyers & Company this past weekend. In the episode, titled “And Justice For Some,” Moyers takes a hard look at systematic biases in the American legal system. The occasion for this episode — the […]
Through visual art, composition and performance, deaf artist Christine Sun Kim explores ways of transmuting sound and silence to come to terms with her relationship with it. In the process, she challenges the ways in which the hearing take sound for granted. Here, she talks about her work and career path. Did you always know […]
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 […]