Fueled by personal conviction and in response to family tragedy, emergency physician Ola Orekunrin — one of the UK’s youngest qualifying doctors — takes to the skies to provide West Africa with its first air ambulance service. How did you end up running an air ambulance in Nigeria? I’ve been very interested in emergency trauma […]
Composer Mark Applebaum is bored by the standard rules of music. In a madcap talk given at TEDxStanford, the associate professor of composition shares how he began thinking far outside the box — as well as outside of the violin and piano — when writing music. But explaining Applebaum’s pieces in words won’t make very […]
Photo retouchers don’t have the best of reputations. As Becci Manson put it in a moving talk at TEDGlobal 2012, “We’re pale gray creatures who hide in dark windowless rooms and generally avoid light. We make skinny models skinnier and perfect skin more perfect.” But sometimes, a retoucher’s work is far beyond skin deep. In […]
Check out these fascinating finds from across the internet: Tavi Gevinson gave an inspired talk at TEDxTeen, “Just trying to figure it out.” This week, Gevinson — the founder of the online magazine Rookie— has been on a media blitz. First, Gevinson was heralded as the “Oracle of Girl World” in the Sunday New York […]
Much ado has been made in recent years over the quickly rising cost of healthcare in the United States. But the cost of college tuition and fees has skyrocketed at nearly twice that rate. Going to college today will cost a student 559% more than it did in 1985, on average. In an exciting talk […]
Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the internet: A great profile on TED Fellow Sanga Moses, who quit his job as an accountant in Uganda and set out to develop an eco-friendly cooking fuel. Why? So that girls in his country — for example, his young sister — wouldn’t have to spend all their time […]
Young musicians Yaruu Egshiglen get an A+ for their singing, dancing and costuming during this performance at TEDxUlaanbaatarChange 2012, held in Mongolia in April.
Some great reads from around the internet today: Journalist Joan Juliet Buck tells the story behind her infamous Vogue puff piece on Asma al-Assad (above), saying that the First Lady of Syria “duped” her. Buck now writes of al-Assad’s husband, “I didn’t know I was going to meet a murderer. There was no way of […]
. “Performance philosopher” Jason Silva creates brightly colored, fast-moving films about ideas. At TEDGlobal 2012, Silva delved into the concept of radical openness. In this new short film, Silva explores another big question: Is feeling awestruck good for us? In the movie trailer-esque video, Silva quotes recent research by three Stanford professors, which found that […]
When it comes to the internet, the Chinese government may have taken inspiration from the Great Wall of China and created the largest digital boundary in the world, blocking 500 million users from accessing the global-standard social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But blogger Michael Anti, whose real name is Jing Zhao, explains in […]
When Giles Duley left behind life as a music and fashion photographer and began criss-crossing the globe, photographing forgotten people — those with mental illness, living on the streets, residing in refugee camps and surviving in the crossfire of war — he felt a certain level of separation from his subjects. But then something happened […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_gUgirgJIg&w=530&h=298] . What kind of talk would a 9-year-old give? At TEDxKids@Sunderland, the first TED event held for those yet to celebrate their 10th birthday, we got to find out. With the help of their teachers, students at Thorney Close Primary School created their own TED talk, centered on a question they had often asked […]
Enjoy these great finds from around the internet: Kathryn Schulz, who gave the blockbuster TEDTalks “On Being Wrong” and “Don’t Regret Regret,” fondly remembers Encyclopedia Brown as the character who taught her “the crucial unity of these terms: intellectual pleasure.” The author of the series about a 5th grade detective, Donald J. Sobol, passed away […]
Architect Michael Hansmeyer is not one for the T-square. As he explains in a fascinating talk from TEDGlobal, this “computational” designer took inspiration from nature — specifically from morphogenesis, aka the splitting of cells — and created algorithms that help him design highly unusual shapes. Instead of the same old boring Doric, Ionic and Corinthian […]
Founder of Open Source Ecology Marcin Jakubowksi is creating open blueprints for the building blocks of civilization, starting with the Global Village Construction Set. This set of 50 low-cost machines will allow anyone to build all the infrastructure a community needs – including, at Factor E Farm, one of his own. The Global Village Construction […]
. At TED2007, artist Theo Jansen shared his work creating a new form of life — which can actually survive on its own — from plastic tubes and bottles. In this 3D-animation film, David Lance imagines Jansen’s creature walking through a park, morphing into metal and becoming a spider-like form that can jump cars, fly […]