[ted id=1629 width=560 height=315] Comedian Maz Jobrani has some advice for anyone who happens to be Middle Eastern and getting on a plane in the United States. “As a Middle Eastern male, I know there’s certain things I’m not supposed to say on an airplane in the U.S. I can’t walk down the aisle and […]
By Daniel Colón-Ramos I could not have designed a better experiment if I had tried. I am a neuroscientist and I am the father of two-year old triplets—two identical and one fraternal. As a professor at Yale University, I spend most of my time designing experiments, researching or teaching about the brain and the nervous […]
When an earthquake shook Costa Rica in September of 2012, it took 60 seconds for the tremors to travel 250 kilometers north to Managua, Nicaragua. And yet just 30 seconds later, the first message about the earthquake appeared on Twitter. In today’s talk, filmed at TEDSalon London 2012, Markham Nolan of Storyful.com shares why this […]
Sebastian Seung is one of the most influential explorers of our time — and his terrain is the human brain. You may remember Seung’s talk from TEDGlobal 2010, in which he uses the relatively new term “connectome,” to describe the connections between each of the hundreds of millions of neurons in our brains that make […]
[ted id=1627 width=560 height=315] The Wright Brothers’ flying machine took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. Credited as the first to successfully fly an airplane, the Wright Brothers were one of several in the early aviation game who were filing patents for their innovations and suing competitors who stepped on their […]
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: Work Smarter and Objects of Desire. Work smarter Business advice can be horribly rote and hackneyed. But not the advice given in these 11 talks, which come from […]
Can’t get enough robot demo videos? Neither can we. The new IEEE Robots app for the iPad is full of walking, grasping, tea-making robots. Each one gets a stat sheet, a 360-degree view and an action video. With games and a daily robot news feed, this app looks like it could entertain a robot-curious kid […]
Advertising doesn’t have to be about convincing you to buy things. Great ads, just like great movies, can inspire thought. That’s why TED created Ads Worth Spreading, an initiative dedicated to advertisements that push the boundaries, from Chipotle’s stunning “Back to the Start” commercial to L’Oreal Paris’ spot starring model and athlete Aimee Mullins. As […]
Native American photographer Camille Seaman devotes years to her subjects, revealing the unfolding of reality over time. For the last decade, she has traveled repeatedly to the Arctic and Antarctic to take portraits of polar ice, witnessing the beauty and loss of a part of Earth most of us will never see. How do your […]
[ted id=1625 width=560 height=315] Spoken word artist Lemon Andersen begins today’s talk with the poem, “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” written by Reg E. Gaines in 1994. My Air Jordans cost a hundred with tax. My suede Starter jacket says Raiders on the back. I’m stylin’, smilin’ looking real mean, Cause it ain’t about […]
The process for testing new drugs is clunky at best. As Susan Solomon reveals in her TED Talk, drug discovery on average takes 13 years, costs $4 billion, and has a 99% failure rate. Drugs are tested in the lab, then in animals, then in human trials that often aren’t big enough to be conclusive. (Human […]
Charles Eugster may be 93, but he has no less spring in his step than he did as a young man. In this talk from TEDxZurich, he brings us a powerful statistic: 92% of Americans over the age of 65 have one or more chronic diseases. While many clearly cannot be avoided, Eugster points out that […]
[ted id=1624 width=560 height=315] Jeff Smith was blown away by some of the brilliant business ideas he heard while spending 366 days in prison between 2009 and 2010. “[Prison] was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me […]
By Andy Robertson New art forms are polarizing. We love or hate Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde animals or Tracey Emin’s unmade bed but roundly understand that avant garde art has value, the artist trying to challenge us and make us think something. Video games draw similar fire. Detractors hem and haw that they’re all about shooting […]
You may remember Susan Cain’s revolutionary talk from TED2012, on the quiet, unseen power of introverts. Careful to acknowledge that many of us hold both extroverted and introverted traits, she points out that many of our most publically treasured figures have introverted tendencies — yet we still “favor the man of action over the man […]
[ted id=1611 width=560 height=315] Ludwick Marishane is the youngest person in South Africa to hold a patent. His invention? A “bath without water,” a lotion called DryBath. In today’s talk, filmed during the Johannesburg stop of the TED2013 Talent Search, Marishane shares how this unusual product came to be. When he was 17, he was […]