You may have heard of Google Glass — a new venture by Google, where a user wears a head-mounted display (think, futuristic sunglasses) that overlays digital information and images onto the physical world. Tom Chi was on the team that developed Google Glass, and spoke about the experience at TEDYouth. In this newly released TED-Ed […]
Artist Julie Freeman uses data as a source material to make biologically inspired artworks — giving musicality to the movement of fish and expressing city lights in the quiver of moths’ wings. Now she’s finding ways to translate data so that we may gain new perspectives on what it’s trying to tell us. What do […]
By Shyam Sankar and Gabe Rosen The Internet is the new Wild West, a frontier big enough for every pioneer and outlaw to roam free. Today, The New York Times revealed that hackers in China had spent the last four months infiltrating its computer systems and pilfering employee passwords. As in the old West, it’s […]
[ted id=1660] The glittering skyline of Doha, the capital of Qatar, has become famous in recent years. But as Fahad Al-Attiya points out in today’s talk, the ability for any city to grow in Qatar is surprising. After all, this is a country without any water. Al-Attiya, the chair of Qatar’s National Food Security Programme, […]
By Courtney E. Martin & John Cary Pregnancy is supposed to be about life. And yet, every day, 800 women across the globe die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In Malawi, which has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world, a shocking 1 in 36 pregnant women die rather […]
iO Tillett Wright remembers the moment she decided to start living as a boy — age 6 when the kids at school barked at her that girls weren’t allowed to play basketball. As a teenager and adult, Tillett Wright went on to fall in love with a woman, and then to fall in love with […]
Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he says, “but […]
In the next 30 years, two-thirds of our planet’s population will live in cities. Have you ever tried to envision the cities of the future? Cities are enlivened by people, and people enable change. So today, we are launching our redesigned website TheCity2.org, a gathering place for all urban denizens to share stories, videos, ideas […]
Al Gore posits an intriguing question in his newest book, on shelves tomorrow, January 29: can we change the future? But this book isn’t about peering into a crystal ball. In The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, Gore — who’s spoken at TED multiple times — breaks down the factors that are changing our […]
At TEDMED 2010, opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick told the story of a revolutionary, life-changing surgery — a double lung transplant. While a doctor had warned her that she would never sing again, she revealed what it felt like to get her voice back. “We need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams,” she […]
Two hundred years ago today, Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice, the classic tale of Elizabeth Bennett. Though the book has now sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, Austen (above) received £110 for the copyright from publisher T. Egerton, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. While Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, just […]
[ted id=1656] Some employees can work 9am to 5pm, five days a week. Others are available on evenings and weekends. But in today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, entrepreneur Wingham Rowan describes another type of worker — one who has a highly unpredictable schedule. “Think of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable […]
TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, three new playlists are available: “Close up and personal,” “The global power shift” and “Climate change: Oh, it’s real.” Close up and personal Talks from seven photographers, with stunning images from the […]
[ted id=205] Enjoy a sampling of the stories from around the internet that captured our interest this week: He’s already the creative force between Star Trek. Now it’s been confirmed that J.J. Abrams will also direct the next episode of Star Wars. [New York Times] See how Abrams’ mind works in his TED Talk, “The […]
Fashion designer and BioCouture founder Suzanne Lee harnesses the labor of microorganisms to grow clothing. Computational architect Skylar Tibbits — who’s setting up a lab at MIT focused on self-assembly technologies and programmable materials — examines biological systems to develop his methods. We asked them to discuss the directions they’re exploring, and the trends and […]
[ted id=1654] Leslie Morgan Steiner thought that she’d found true love in her early 20s. Instead, she found herself married to a man who repeatedly pointed a gun at her head and threatened to kill her. In today’s brave talk, given at TEDxRainier, Steiner tells the story of how she — a Harvard-educated magazine editor […]