On Thursday at TED2013, Chinese artist Liu Bolin talked about his remarkable photographic installations, in which he paints himself (and sometimes other people) with perfect camouflage to disappear into a busy background. His talk closed with a photo of Liu in the theater at Long Beach, disappearing himself into the stage with paint and pattern […]
Yesterday, Kate Stone charmed the assembled TED audience with her tales of failing exams, living on a sheep farm in Australia, and developing genuinely interactive paper. Today, she shared three simple skills she’s learned along the way–and described why she thinks these are actually critical life skills. 1. Know how to dig a hole. Stone […]
What do JFK, Venus Williams and Dan Ackroyd all have in common? All have been diagnosed with a rare disease. Today is Rare Disease Day, and here at TED2013, TED2012 Fellow C Jimmy Lin is marking the occasion by awarding $500,000 worth of research to help 26 different rare diseases, and launching a striking infographic […]
Sugata Mitra’s bold efforts towards advancing learning earned him the first-ever $1 million dollar TED Prize. At TED2013, Sugata asked the global TED community to make his dream come true by helping him build a “School in the Cloud,” where kids can tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Since Sugata is […]
Last night at TED2013, the Motion Picture Association of America hosted a nighttime discussion on the topic of how film has shaped some of modern day’s most cutting-edge technology. The prime example: John Underkoffler’s user interface inspired by his work on Minority Report. We were joined by Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects division of […]
Many of you have already watched Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize talk, posted on TED.com earlier today, calling for the building of the School in the Cloud. Others of you may have read our written recap of his talk. And now we get the talk, rendered by an artist, cartoon-style. This visualization of Mitra’s talk was […]
As the world’s population expands toward 10 billion people within the next 50 years, urban citizens face an unprecedented opportunity to build more vibrant, just and inclusive urban centers. Because we know that cities are powered by people, and people enable change, TED responded to the rapidly changing urban landscape by granting the 2012 TED Prize to […]
Blue whale researcher and TED Senior Fellow Asha de Vos unveiled her TED-Ed lesson today on the TED Fellows stage. The video — “Why are blue whales so enormous?” — stars a puppet version of de Vos, which she had been coveting for weeks. So Fellows & Community Director Tom Rielly presented her with it, hand-carried from […]
TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, two new playlists are available: Spoken-word fireworks and That’s absurd! That’s absurd! 5 quirky talks remind us that life is funny, weird, sweet, absurd. Watch talks by Improv Everywhere’s Charlie Todd and […]
Egyptian filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize in 2006 with a wish to bring the world together for one day using the power of film. Her most recent work, The Square, saw her heading back to Cairo to track events in Tahrir Square as the Hosni Mubarak regime fell. While there, she filmed a group […]
In his State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama teased the importance of mapping the human brain, hinting that it could be a good investment in the future. According to The New York Times, the president will soon announce a decade-long plan to support the comprehensive rendering of the brain as part of […]
Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week: In case you haven’t seen it yet, To This Day is a beautiful collaborative project that combines spoken word poetry and a flurry of eclectic animations to raise awareness about bullying. Soon you, too, will turn out to be […]
When CL Financial — the largest financial institution in Trinidad and Tobago — collapsed in January of 2009, its bailout was far more sweeping than those offered in other countries. “In an unprecedented fit of generosity — and I use that word carefully — the government of the day made a written commitment to repay […]
Economist Keith Chen starts today’s talk with an observation: to say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether […]
By Keith Chen How are China, Estonia and Germany different from India, Greece and the UK? To an economist, one answer is obvious: savings rates. Germans save 10 percentage points more than the British do (as a fraction of GDP), while Estonians and Chinese save a whopping 20 percentage points more than Greeks and Indians. […]
Miguel Nicolelis begins today’s talk by showing you what a brainstorm looks and sounds like. “This is 100 brain cells firing,” says Nicolelis. “Everything that defines what human nature is comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for […]