[ted id=1633 width=560 height=315] Neuroscientist Molly Crockett has a secret to share: if you want to make better decisions, eat a grilled cheese sandwich. In today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, Crockett shares how she accidentally had a part in circulating this message. Several years ago, Crockett and her fellow researchers set out […]
When biologist E.O. Wilson won the TED Prize in 2007, he wished that we all “work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity.” With that, the Encyclopedia of Life began the outrageous task of cataloguing all of the Earth’s known species. Cynthia Parr spoke at TED2012 to give updates on […]
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: How to tell a story and A cure for cancer? How to tell a story How do you tell a good story? Does it need a beginning, […]
Enjoy this sampling of the stories from around the internet that captured our interest this week: Can a disabled form of HIV be used to fight cancer? A story in The New York Times delves into an experimental treatment. Earlier this week, Markham Nolan shared how his team verifies videos from war-torn regions to make […]
TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein makes us look at the painful social issues that we may otherwise ignore through his bold photography. His project, “Shadow Lives, USA,” documents the journey of Mexicans and Central Americans migrating to the United States, recording their struggle as they reached American soil. The image above shows Gabriela Cruz — who grew up in […]
Tech geek and entrepreneur Faisal Chohan builds online solutions and services with social value — including Pakreport, which crowdsourced disaster-mapping in response to Pakistan’s 2010 floods. His latest project, Saaf Pindi, won a $10,000 grant from TED’s City 2.0 initiative to map poor sewerage infrastructure in urban Pakistan, seeking solutions to the global sanitation problem. Tell […]
[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 […]