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 […]
At TEDxWhitechapel on January 13, 2013, Rupert Sheldrake gave a provocative talk in which he suggests that modern science is based on ten dogmas, and makes the case that none of them hold up to scrutiny. According to him, these dogmas — including, for example, that nature is mechanical and purposeless, that the laws and […]
On March 1 — just two days after Elon Musk appeared on the TED2013 stage — a SpaceX CRS-2 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission for the International Space Station. Two days later, after the righting of a glitch, its Dragon capsule delivered a half-ton of supplies for the astronauts on […]
We’ve been reviewing the response this past weekend to our decision to move two TEDx talks off the TEDx YouTube channel and over here onto the main TED Blog. We’d like to recap here what happened and suggest a way forward. UPDATE: To discuss the talks, view them here: The debate about Rupert Sheldrake’s talk […]
Danny Hillis registered the third domain name on the internet. You read that correctly — the third. In today’s talk, given at TED2013, he shares what a different world the online community felt like at that point in time. To underscore the point, Hillis brought a book onstage with him. It’s the ARPANET Directory, a […]
Maker, innovator, and cottage industrialist Dominic Muren wants making to be open, global and modular. He’s just launched his latest project, Alchematter — an online open source platform that breaks down and spells out instructions on how to make, well, anything. He gives us the ins and outs of the site, covering everything from reverse […]
Shanghai. New York. Tehran. Tokyo. Today, dozens of cities worldwide are each home to many millions of people. But those masses of humanity might not exist in such tight quarters if not for John Snow. (No, not that Jon Snow. This John Snow.) Snow was a 19th-century English doctor who’s credited with proving that cholera, […]
“We may not yet have the flying car that science fiction promised us,” says Catarina Mota in today’s talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012. “But we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.” As Mota demonstrates, smart materials will […]
In today’s talk, Bono — U2 frontman, founder of the anti-poverty organization ONE, and 2005 TED Prize winner — reflects on the past decade’s dramatic reduction in extreme poverty worldwide. “Exit the rockstar, enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist,” he says. Since 2000, according to Bono’s data, eight million more AIDS patients are getting antiretroviral drugs; eight […]
Today is March 14, otherwise known as 3/14. For any math enthusiast, these numbers will certainly set off a bell — they are the first three digits of Pi. To help you celebrate Pi Day, here are two TED Talks, starting with Daniel Tammet’s “Different ways of knowing.” Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia […]
Musician Amanda Palmer has spent her career seeking out connection: first as a living statue on the street, who traded intimate eye contact and a rose for a passerby’s money; then, as one half of the band The Dresden Dolls, who didn’t hesitate to ask fans for support, either in person or over Twitter. “I […]
Last night at SXSW, William and the Windmill was awarded one of the festival’s top two honors, taking home Grand Jury Award for Documentary Feature. The film tells the story of TED Speaker William Kamkwamba, who has come to be known by the title of his memoir, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. At age […]