Tania Luna, the CEO of SurpriseIndustries.com and a psychology instructor at Hunter College in New York, came to the United States as a 6-year-old immigrant from Ukraine. While she and her family thought that they were staying at a hotel when they first arrived in New York, upon returning years later, they discovered that it […]
Until he was 19, Joshua Prager wanted to play professional baseball or be a doctor. After 19, he was just glad he could walk. For eight years Prager was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for his long-form pieces investigating historical secrets. In his talk […]
We know other primates are a lot like us. But how close are they, and what can we learn about ourselves from them? Lauren Brent is a primatologist and evolutionary biologist who has spent years studying social bonds — particularly friendship — with an eye to learning how and why those behaviors evolved. We talked […]
Kids these days are “speaking” a new language, right under our noses and literally right under the table. But is texting making us dumber? No, says John McWhorter, Associate Professor at Columbia University and Contributing Editor at The New Republic. In his talk from TED@New York — one of 293 talks given as part of […]
It’s 2012. And many of us no doubt imagined that flying cars would be all the rage by now. While that hasn’t happened yet, some major driving innovations are on their way down the pipeline. In a new TEDTalk, Chris Gerdes of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (awesomely abbreviated as CARS) explains that […]
The word ‘microbe’ sounds scary — we associate them with the flu, ebola, flesh-eating disease, you name it. But microbiologist Dr. Jonathan Eisen has given an illuminating TEDTalk that will make you put down the hand sanitizer. As Eisen explains, “We are covered in a cloud of microbes and these microbes actually do us good […]
Game designer Jane McGonigal firmly believes that video games are not just about mashing buttons and getting to the next level. In fact, during her talk at TEDGlobal 2012, McGonigal gave several surprising statistics: that online gaming can be more effective than pharmaceuticals in treating clinical depression and that just 30 minutes a day is […]
When 21-year-old guitar whiz Usman Riaz was growing up in Pakistan, he often found himself entranced by videos of Preston Reed, one of the pioneers of fingerstyle guitar. As a longtime admirer of Reed’s unique rhythms and plucky sounds, Riaz calls the experience of actually sharing a stage with him at TEDGlobal 2012 “very surreal.” […]
Two years ago, a chance discussion with a group of Gulf of Mexico fishermen changed the course of Cesar Harada’s life. The TED Senior Fellow had landed his dream job at MIT in Boston, but after hearing first-hand accounts of the conditions in the Gulf following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of 2010, Harada […]
Do you have a 5-year plan? A 10-year plan? Even if you’ve mapped out your life 20 years into the future, chances are that multidisciplinary artist Raghava KK has you beat. Giving a laugh-inducing talk at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Raghava explained that he and his wife, Nedra, have drawn up a life plan that […]
For the past 12 years, global health advocate Alanna Shaikh has watched her father, whom she calls her “hero and mentor,” deteriorate from Alzheimer’s disease. In a poignant talk given during TEDGlobal 2012 last week, Shaikh — a TED Fellow and the author of the TED Book What’s Killing Us — told us that the […]
Download the rushes used for the session titles created by Circus Family for Session 10: Reframing. These images were created by projecting motion graphics onto a tabletop installation — breaking the visuals and recording them again. Feel free to re-use under the Creative Commons Licence (Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike). Use this compact 600MB zip file […]
TED’s Open Translation Project: 9,000 translators, 88 languages, more than 29,000 volunteer-contributed translations of TEDTalks. In this video, you’ll hear from some of TED’s language volunteers about why they choose to translate TEDTalks for the world. Learn more: http://www.ted.com/translate
From the TED Prize Blog: If you had asked the TED Prize team to predict the kind of work that would emerge from our call for urban innovation back in February, we never could have imagined the brilliant, wide-ranging projects that have emerged. The City2.0 awards, thus far, feature an eclectic mix of passionate urban […]
At TED2012, lawyer Bryan Stevenson made an impassioned case for confronting racial and economic injustice in the American justice system. And, he argued, confronting that means changing the way the system approaches child offenders. In his talk he says: “I represent children. A lot of my clients are very young. The United States is the […]
TED translators Dick Lundgren and Els De Keyser with the “21 untranslatable words” tray, at the Open Translation Project workshop before TEDGlobal 2012, June 24, 2012, Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo: Ryan Lash On the weekend before TEDGlobal began, 22 volunteer translators converged from around the world to talk all day about translating TEDTalks. Among them, these […]