Former Arizona State Senator Kyrsten Sinema built her political career by seeking shared values with her opposition, while looking out for the interests of families in need. Now newly elected to the US House of Representatives for Arizona’s 9th congressional district, the Democratic Congresswoman-elect, long a champion of LGBT issues, makes history as the first […]
[ted id=1552] To anyone who thinks of arts festivals as a fun bit of window dressing, David Binder’s rejoinder is: look again, and look more closely. In this spirited talk, given at TEDUniversity, the accomplished theater producer (he was behind the New York City phenomenon De La Guarda, a dance performance staged over the audience’s […]
TED speaker Rick Smolan is asking students between the ages of 13 and 18 to become “Data Detectives” for a new project he’s unveiling today — and that he will talk about at TEDYouth this Saturday. By answering a 20-question online survey, teenagers will help build a data set that will let then compare themselves to […]
“I make paper interactive,” says Kate Stone in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Because this description of her work “really confuses most people,” the best way to understand it is to see it in action. So in this talk, Stone demonstrates some of her very cool creations — like a poster that can pick the […]
Sean Caroll gives an unusual disclaimer for his new book, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads to the Edge of a New World, out yesterday: ”You should have no trouble reading and understanding it, no matter what your physics background may be.” Carroll has long […]
[ted id=1603 width=560 height=315] A letter — be it handwritten or typed — feels like an unpremeditated revelation, a glimpse into the writer’s subconscious. Letters are, also, often rooted to the place where they were written: a cozy armchair, a backyard hammock, the corner desk of a classroom, a train. It’s this physical and temporal […]
[ted id=1614 width=560 height=315] Arunachalam Muruganantham may not seem like the most obvious person to have started a revolution in sanitary napkins — after all, he is male. But in this funny and uplifting talk, given at the TED Talent Search in Bangalore, Muruganantham describes how he is enabling women in India to make their […]
[ted id=1613 width=560 height=315] Radio host Julie Burstein has found the perfect analogy for creativity—raku pottery. A Japanese art form in which molded clay is heated for 15 minutes and then dropped in sawdust which bursts into flames, what makes this pottery so beautiful is its imperfections and cracks. Burstein interviewed hundred of artists, writers, […]
This morning at the Mozilla Festival in the UK, Mozilla launched their new web tool Popcorn Maker. (A beta version of Popcorn Maker debuted here on the TED Blog a couple weeks ago.) With Popcorn Maker, you can choose a YouTube video and add notes, live links, Twitter feeds, photos, links out to Wikipedia … […]
In July, TED Fellow Jimmy Lin and his team discovered a gene mutation that might explain 4-year-old Maya Nieder’s rare developmental disease. After years of frustrating doctors and specialists’ visits, Maya’s family may be close to an answer, thanks to Lin’s brainchild — the Rare Genomics Institute. Lin began RGI as place for patients with rare […]
[ted id=1612 width=560 height=315] The average person lies once or twice a day. And as Cornell psychology professor Jeff Hancock shares in today’s fascinating talk, given at TEDxWinnipeg, the anonymity and ambiguity of technology give us a whole new arsenal of ways to fib. He and his team have identified three new types of lies […]
[ted id=1601 width=560 height=315] More than 8 million children live in orphanages worldwide. But as Georgette Mulheir shares in today’s brave talk, given at TEDSalon London Spring 2012, an estimated 90% of them are not true orphans. These children are sent to orphanages because a single parent is not adequately able to care for them, […]
Most people rarely feel compelled to stare at grains of sand. But when those same grains are magnified hundreds of times and rendered in three dimensions, they appear like individual pieces of colored glass crafted by a skilled artist — no two pieces the same. In today’s TEDTalk, photographer turned microbiologist turned inventor Gary Greenberg […]
“This is my brain cancer. It isn’t nice,” says Salvatore Iaconesi, the engineer, artist and TED Fellow who recently opened up his medical files to the world, crowdsourcing cures of the medical type as well as those for the soul. In this just-released talk from TEDxTransmedia, Iaconesi explains why he made the decision to release […]
[ted id=1608 width=560 height=315] Team Rubicon’s latest mission is called Operation: Greased Lightning. What does that mean, you ask? In this powerful talk, given at TEDxSanDiego in 2011, Jake Wood shares his experience co-founding Team Rubicon, a disaster relief organization that uses veterans to do the difficult work of search and rescue, supply disbursement and […]
It’s voting day in the United States. As Americans line up at the polls to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, eyes around the world are fixed on the contest, which predictions say will come down to a few key issues. So what has mattered most to Americans in this election? The TED Blog […]