In the video above, Marco Tempest and his collaborators onformative.com and checksum5.com show how they made the illusion in his latest TEDTalk. (More credits and info.) So we asked Marco Tempest: “What do our viewers need to know to appreciate ‘A magical tale…’?” Here is what he wrote … Magic has this unique ability to […]
When TED2012 Senior Fellow Nina Tandon (watch her TED Talk) isn’t researching how electrical stimulation encourages tissue growth at Columbia University, she’s teaching bioelectricity across town at Cooper Union. Now, with TEDinClass, she’s been connecting students to the TED community using TED’s Live Conversation platform – starting an exchange of ideas with the world at […]
Here’s something else fun to do with a 3D printer: Designers at Free Art and Technology have created an open-source template to connect all the different building blocks you used as a kid: Legos, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs and more (and maybe in the future: littleBits, from today’s TEDTalk…). It’s a fascinating project, both for the exciting new creatures […]
[ted id=878] Michael Sandel (who re-introduced TEDsters to the art of civilized debate in the talk above) makes a provocative argument in this month’s Atlantic: Without quite realizing it — without ever deciding to do so — we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: A market […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EQ3oqoD8Nw] Has an act of compassion changed your life? Share your story — and join the Charter for Compassion in a brand-new video initiative: Assignment Compassion. In the video above, actor Adrian Grenier gives the first assignment: Share a moment of compassion that changed your life. Record your video response to Adrian’s assignment and share […]
Update: This Storify tells the story of the descent in tweets from around the world … If all goes as planned, today James Cameron (watch his TEDTalk) begins an epic dive to the deepest point in the ocean — taking the director almost 7 miles down into the Mariana Trench. Follow the Deepsea Challenge expedition […]
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/36421901%5D This lovely new video, with lots of extreme closeups, walks us through the scientific facility that Jonathan Drori discussed in his 2009 TEDTalk “Why we’re storing billions of seeds.” For even more, the TED Blog’s Q&A with Drori, where he answers our detailed questions about saving and germinating the seeds that represent some […]
Armed with a good idea, some scrap metal, and plenty of determination, Alex Odira Odundo invented two low-cost machines that make it easy to process fibers from the drought-tolerant sisal plant – promoting stable incomes and improving lives in his subsistence farming community. How did you come to invent the Sisal Decorticator and Sisal Twinner? […]
[ted id=1390] Were you intrigued by “The $8 Billion iPod,” Rob Reid’s short TEDTalk about the new science of Copyright Math (TM)? We were. We needed to know more. More numbers, Rob! we said. And Rob (whose comic novel Year Zero comes out in July) sent us this treatise, a master class in creative mathematics: […]
Are we alone? It’s a question with which we are all familiar. Jill Tarter says she started asking it “as a little girl, walking along the deserted and dark beaches of Manasota Key, Florida, holding on to my father’s hand.” She went on to advanced studies in engineering, physics and astrophysics, to pursue a career […]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SWvDHvWXok&hd=1&w=560&h=315%5D This video comes from our new TED-Ed channel on YouTube. Now available as a full-length version (12 minutes): TED Curator Chris Anderson shares his obsession with questions that no one (yet) knows the answers to. An introduction leads into two big questions that Anderson (and all of us) pondered as a kid and […]
At the end of 2010, a researcher named Brené Brown gave a talk at her local TEDx event, TEDxHouston. That talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” has since become a web-video phenomenon — viewed and shared by millions of people, who write us to say that her words — on shame, vulnerability and honesty — moved […]
Musician, ethnomusicologist, author, and social media maven — Kyra Gaunt (see her TEDxChisinau talk here) won’t limit herself to one way of thinking. Using a variety of media, she works nonstop to help humanity see our own remarkable unity in diversity. Your work encompasses scholarship, musical performance, educational theory, race, gender, and more. How do […]
All photos by James Duncan Davidson, who writes: In the lower right photograph, there are twelve 12TB Pegasus R6 arrays. That’s 144TB total. It’s a tenth of a freaking petabyte of usable space. Backstory: During a TED conference, we create a lot of data — five days of high-res video from nine cameras, tens of […]
Socio-environmental artist Colleen Flanigan creates large, undulating metal forms and installs them in damaged coral ecosystems to help regenerate marine life — living sea sculptures that inspire awe and protection for our underwater world. What is the coral crisis about? We are at a critical stage in coral endangerment. Some predict that most corals will […]
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/37882880] On Vimeo, John Giannakos shares this fun recap of the Coffee Common experience at TED2012, backstage, behind the bar and relaxing after crazy long days. (Jump to Vimeo for a list of every barista.) And see Coffee Common’s gorgeous photos on Flickr >> Photo: Brian W. Jones / Coffee Common