Hurricane Sandy is currently hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, threatening a large swath of the United States’ East Coast, from North Carolina to Maine. With coastal areas evacuated, wind and rainfall picking up quickly and many transportation systems shut down in anticipation of flooding, millions of people are currently at home, just waiting for roughest […]
[ted id=1595 width=560 height=315] Rory Stewart opens this talk from TEDxHousesofParliament with a joke: “Little Billy goes to school and his teacher asks, ‘What does your father do?’ Billy replies, ‘My father plays piano in an opium den.’” But when the teacher confronts the father about his occupation, she gets a different answer. As Stewart finishes […]
Tech and social entrepreneur Jon Gosier launched the Apps4Africa competition in 2009 to reward and jumpstart African innovators and entrepreneurs. As the competition enters its third year, Jon is finding ways to help provide long-term, holistic support for winners, helping to scale sustainable businesses across nations and the continent. Tell us a bit about yourself […]
[ted id=1602 width=560 height=315] On the TED stage, illusionist Marco Tempest has explored the nature of truth and lies, brought a stick figure to life, charted the meaning of magic and told the sad tale of inventor Nikola Tesla. In his latest performance, given this summer at TEDGlobal, Tempest turns his eye to a magician’s […]
[ted id=1598] Air conditioning used to be a luxury — but as Doris Kim Sung points out in this talk from TEDxUSC, modernized society has become thoroughly air-conditioning reliant. This is largely a problem of materials, says Sung, a professor at the USC School of Architecture. Many new buildings — especially skyscrapers — are built […]
Just by living our plugged-in lives, each of us is producing a constant stream of data. Little snippets are left behind of what we search, what we buy, where we go, what we tweet … This endless flow of numbers is referred to as “big data,” data sets so large that they require sophisticated parsing […]
Dennis Hong shared seven species of robots in his talk at TEDxNASA 2009, from the soccer-playing DARwIn to the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR. In this new video, Hong — the director of the Virginia Tech robotics lab RoMeLa — introduces us to CHARLI, a lightweight robot designed to walk and move like a human. Or, you know, […]
For anyone watching the three presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, two words were surprisingly absent: “climate change.” It’s a strange omission given that 73 percent of Americans shared in a recent poll that dealing with environmental concerns, particularly global warming, was “extremely important” or “very important” to them. Not to mention that […]
[ted id=1596 width=560 height=315] Harry Potter, Pip of Great Expectations, Superman, Cinderella, Lisbeth Salander, Batman, Jane Eyre, Matilda, Moses, Luke Skywalker, Oliver Twist, Celie of The Color Purple. As Lemn Sissay points out in this powerful talk from TEDxHousesofParliament, literature and popular culture is rife with characters who grew up without their biological parents. “Writers […]
At the AICP Conference in New York this morning, TED announced the third cycle of Ads Worth Spreading, our initiative to find the 10 most compelling ad campaigns of the year. We also released a report to share insights from the creatives behind the winning ads and the nomination teams that picked them. The paper […]
Every week at TED’s New York office, one media team staffer shares a handful of things on the web that intrigued, shocked or amused them. We call this session: Previously on the Internet. Here are this week’s finds, from me, Thu-Huong Ha, TED’s editorial projects specialist. A tale of two very different empires The Ottoman Empire […]
With just two weeks to go before the 2012 presidential election in the US, eyes around the world are on the contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. As shown in last night’s debate, the election may well come down to a few key issues. So what matters most to Americans? The TED Blog read this […]
[ted id=1597 width=560 height=315] A plate of food overrun by roaches. A blood-encrusted scab. The squish of dog poo under one’s shoe. In this talk from TEDxEast, David Pizarro explains that each of these images elicits disgust, a visceral emotion that serves a good purpose — to keep us away from harmful substances. But disgust may […]
Just two Tuesdays from today, Americans will head to the polls and vote for their President. But why is Tuesday the anointed day? In this hilarious TED-Ed talk, Jacob Soboroff shares that Tuesday was made the official voting day in 1845 because, back then, voters traveled to the county seat by horse and buggy. They […]
[ted id=1593 width=560 height=315] Pankaj Ghemawat coined a new phrase in his talk from TEDGlobal: “globaloney.” In other words, Ghemawat takes issue with the idea that national borders are eroding and that we are all just living in “one world.” It’s a notion Ghemawat says was first floated in the 1850s by David Livingston, the Scottish […]
Last Sunday, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a helium balloon from over 24 miles in the sky, and shattered world records by freefalling from an altitude of 128,100 feet to Earth. With the jump, Baumgartner became the first human to break the sound barrier, reaching an astonishing peak speed of 833 mph and […]