With TED2012 still two days away, the media production team has already been here at Long Beach for three days setting up our operation, and a set of IT volunteers started work two days before that. Above is a photo of one small part of the TED Media Cave, the nexus of all video, audio, […]
Part of Bangalore-based art duo Pors & Rao, Aparna Rao (watch her TED Talk) embeds high-tech and humor in interactive, sculptural artworks that awaken us to our own subtle behavioral patterns and emotional responses. What’s your vision and motivation for making this art? I think it’s more a compulsion than a vision. It all started […]
Creating characters and stories richly inspired by Arabic tradition, Suleiman Bakhit is fighting to change how the West sees Arab youth — and how Arab youth see themselves — one superhero at a time. You started producing comics after you got attacked after 9/11. What happened? I was a student at the University of Minnesota […]
In a timely and incisive talk at TEDxWaterloo, Michael Nielsen made the case for open science — the idea that research data and results should be freely available to the public, and that scientists should collaborate more freely with each other and with the public. Since the talk, his book, Reinventing Discovery, has been released, […]
We are saddened by the news that ocean photographer, filmmaker and storyteller Mike deGruy died yesterday in a helicopter crash in Australia. Mike was truly one of the great teachers and advocates for the oceans, as you can see in his TED Talk, filmed aboard Mission Blue in 2010: [ted id=830] In this talk, as […]
Juliette LaMontagne’s Breaker offers millennials a unique, hands-on alternative learning opportunity — working on projects with serious social impact. Breaker teams take on such challenges as illiteracy and feeding the city, while gaining valuable real-world social entrepreneurship skills. Take us through the Breaker process — how does it work? Each three-month Breaker project convenes a […]
Yesterday, TED Fellow William Kamkwamba debuted an illustrated children’s version of his memoir The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, co-written with Bryan Mealer and illustrated by Elizabeth Zunon. Since its publication in 2009, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind has been printed in 17 editions internationally. For this Young Readers edition, for ages 6 and […]
Agriculturalist and social entrepreneur Su Kahumbu created iCow, a mobile app that supports farmers caring for livestock. Soon it will become an information-delivery platform that could help generate a whole new crop of young farmers. What does iCow do? The iCow application essentially reminds small-scale dairy farmers in Kenya of important periods in gestation. This […]
Today, several of our favorite websites are going dark or blacking out their homepages to raise awareness of two bills, in the US House and Senate, that threaten people’s ability to share on the web. In the past week, we’ve pondered what TED.com should be doing to help raise awareness of the PIPA and SOPA […]
As a companion to today’s TEDTalk from Alain de Botton, he sent us this FAQ, a brief introduction to the thinking behind Atheism 2.0: What do you think of the aggressive atheism we have seen in the past few years? I am an atheist, but a gentle one. I don’t feel the need to mock […]
Sonaar Luthra (watch his TED Talk) is packing water-safety analysis and mobile networking into the Water Canary — a handheld, open-source, and easy-to-use gadget accessible to all — hoping to save lives and gather information that will improve global water health. You have a background as a writer, educator and journalist. How did you end […]
Today marks the 2nd anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti. This morning the people of Port au Prince woke up to portraits of their own – locals and members of the Haitian diaspora – plastered around the city. From Cité Soleil to Petion-Ville, over 500 images, taken by Haitian photographers and printed by JR’s […]
Jodie Wu’s Global Cycle Solutions creates bike-run machines mounted on rideable cycles, transforming bikes into mobile business tools for rural Tanzania. How did you get interested in innovating solutions for problems in developing nations? I first went to Tanzania as part of MIT’s D-Lab, a multidisciplinary course on development of appropriate technologies, innovation, and creative […]
Two years ago, inventor Pranav Mistry demoed the SixthSense technology on the TED stage — and talked about open-sourcing the software behind it. SixthSense is a wearable interface that enables interaction between digital information and the physical world through hand gestures. (Watch his TEDTalk to see how it works.) As promised, Pranav and his team […]
All month on the Huffington Post, we’ve been counting down 18 great ideas from 2011 that we think will change the world in 2012 and beyond. Today’s post ends the countdown with a powerful idea: Kids save the world! Watch John Hunter’s TEDTalk on his World Peace Game and read his essay on the Huffington […]
A note from TED Prize winner Jill Tarter… At TED last February, Chris Anderson told the audience that without a White Knight stepping up to support my SETI observing program on the Allen Telescope Array, the antennas would soon be put into a safe hibernation mode in preparation for shutting down the array. That’s because […]