[ted id=1631 width=560 height=315] Ben Saunders spent 10 weeks walking from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and around to the north coast of Canada. For a full 72 days in 2004, Saunders was the only human being within a span of 5.4 million square miles, surviving an average temperature of -35C […]
Kind of like skateboarding without the skateboard, parkour is a physical art form in which practitioners, run, jump, twist and flip off the landscapes around them. In this video trailer for TEDxYouth@Alexandria, several adventurous young TEDx’ers backflip their way through the Egyptian city, spreading the power of “x” as they show off their parkour maneuvers. […]
Marcus Byrne begins today’s talk with the words: “What I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you.” But before you delve into a Freudian analysis, you should probably know that Byrne is an entomologist who studies dung beetles, of which there are about 6,000 species across the planet. As Byrne […]
The Klong Toey Community Lantern — a community space in the oldest and largest of Bangkok’s slums — was built very quickly. Not quite as quickly as shown in this three-minute timelapse video, but construction for the project took just three weeks thanks to the help of the community. But while construction went fast, Norwegian […]
TIME Editor-at-Large Bobby Ghosh covers global affairs and the Middle East. For five years he served as the magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief and, by the end of his tenure, was the longest serving print journalist in Iraq. Most recently Ghosh wrote a cover story on Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, arguably the most important man in […]
[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 […]