At TEDxUW 2011, economics professor Larry Smith gave a memorable talk titled, “Why you will fail to have a great career.” The hilarious talk takes aim at people and the incredible excuses they dream up for not pursuing their passions, from “It’s too hard” to “But I value human relationships more than my work.” His […]
On January 25, 2011, nearly 50,000 Egyptians took to the streets, occupying Tahrir Square. One of their most powerful weapons: cameras, both still and video, to share their story with the rest of the world. However, many of these cameras were captured during violent clashes. Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim — who won the TED Prize in […]
[ted id=1651]Journalist Janine di Giovanni has covered wars in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Iraq and most recently in Syria — and, yet, she has noted that they all seem to begin in the same way. “This is how war starts—one day you’re living your ordinary life. You’re planning to go to a party, […]
Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche can only be described as the mad scientists of food. These two pioneer unique food delivery systems — think maki rolls printed on flavored paper, a dessert disguised as nachos and a bleeding veggie burger — at their Chicago restaurants, Moto and iNG. At TED 2011, the pair spoke about […]
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: What doctors worry about and Can you believe your eyes? Can you believe your eyes? 7 talks filled with magic tricks, optical illusions, death-defying feats and digital […]
Millions of people, many of them children, suffer from “orphan” diseases — illnesses so rare that no infrastructure exists to investigate or treat them. Now C Jimmy Lin’s Rare Genomics Institute puts hope and empowerment back in patients’ hands by connecting them with researchers, doctors and community support, and a crowdsourced funding platform. What is […]
[ted id=1650]Colin Stokes’ favorite part of being a dad is sharing movies with his two young children. While his daughter’s favorite is The Wizard of Oz, his son quickly became obsessed with Star Wars after catching a glimpse of the movie at age three. “It imprinted on him like a mommy duck does on its […]
Thanks to the intrepid volunteers who translate TED Talks into 96 languages — and thanks to the incredible reach of the TEDx community — TED has truly become an international organization. Which means that many of you watching talks are more comfortable reading subtitles in your native language than listening to them in English. We […]
[ted id=1648]If you look at mortality data across the United Kingdom, a striking correlation materializes: the higher the latitude, the greater the relative risk of death. This is true even when controlling for risk factors like smoking cigarettes and eating bad food. So, what’s going on? The answer may lie in sunlight—there’s more in the […]
In 2006, Larry Smith issued a challenge to his online community: encapsulate your life in a six-word memoir. It quickly became a phenomenon, with people all around the world chiming in. Smith is still fascinated by the short tales people tell about themselves — especially those told by kids. And so he conceptualized the TED […]
[ted id=1647]Television schedules are packed with reality shows about the wild world of modeling. Tyra Banks’ America’s Next Top Model is casting for its 20th edition right now, and The Face, starring Naomi Campbell, Coco Rocha and Karolina Kurkova, will premiere in February. What are we supposed to learn from this addictive genre? Modeling isn’t […]
In his TED Talk, Steven Addis shared a tradition that he and his daughter have kept for 15 years, since she was just 1 year old. On a father-daughter trip to New York City, the pair asks a stranger to snap a photo of them on the exact same street corner. Addis calls these photos […]
TED Talks are available in 94 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 8,500 volunteers have created the upwards of 33,500 translated talks. To celebrate this accomplishment, every week the TED Blog is bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, […]
What is DNA barcoding, you ask? It’s a precise way of identifying plant species using their DNA (as opposed to external characteristics that might vary from plant to plant). In this video, Ellen Jorgensen — who gave today’s TED Talk “Biohacking, you can do it too” — heads to a remote region of Alaska to collect […]
[ted id=1568]“It’s a great time to be a molecular biologist,” Ellen Jorgensen says in today’s TED Talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012. The realm of biotechnology is growing fast, she says, and advances are coming down the pipeline at a rapid clip. And yet, scientists aren’t so good at communicating to the public what is going […]
Last weekend, TED curator Chris Anderson sat down with CNN Money and shared a bold idea with host Ali Velshi: that ideas can make for a better future, with more pie for us all to enjoy. “A lot of the talks are about ways of repatterning the future. We have these different words for it […]