[flickr video=5946922159 secret=ef69a57e7b w=525 h=394] What do you do with a giant robot seagull? Fly it into a flock of real seagulls, obviously. This video was shot by Flickr user ldrose two hours after the live demo of SmartBird inside the auditorium at TEDGlobal. Festo engineers brought the bird outside to Holyrood Park, in central […]
Creator of CellBazaar, a virtual marketplace that can be accessed via mobile phone, Kamal Quadir is on to his next mobile phone-based venture, bKash. This new company provides access to financial services through the mobile phone. Kamal divides his time between homes in America and Bangladesh, yet this nationally-recognized artist still squeezes in time to […]
Genevieve von Petzinger’s database of prehistoric geometric shapes in cave art reveals some startling insights. More than mere doodles, the signs used across geological boundaries suggest there may have been a common iconography before people first moved out of Africa. When did people begin graphic communication, and what was its purpose? Genevieve studies these questions […]
Paul Zak, a “neuroeconomist,” studies why we humans like and trust each other. And the answer, he’s found, is the compound oxytocin. In this photo, he’s brought a syringe loaded with the stuff onstage, and he creates a striking visual aid (and an outbreak of love and trust among the backstage crew) by atomizing it […]
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/26440850 w=525&h=294] TED Blog exclusive video: US astronaut Ron Garan is currently on board the International Space Station with five colleagues from the US, Russia and Europe. (This is Garan‘s second trip to the ISS.) For TEDGlobal 2011, he recorded a talk sharing the perspective from space and describing the wide range of scientific experiments […]
Nafissa holds her two favorite pins from the Physical Bar Chart. Photo: Robert Leslie / TED One wall of the simulcast room at TEDGlobal 2011 is festooned with what appears to be a massive bar chart. Closer inspection reveals it’s a row of vertical plastic tubes, about 2 meters high, each dispensing buttons of a […]
The Shape What’s to Come ambassadors, with Lakshmi Pratury from the INK Conference, talk in the journaling space — while behind them, visualization artist Sunni Brown doodles their ideas into shape. Photo: James Duncan Davidson / TED At TEDGlobal this year, we’re meeting three ambassadors of Levi’s Shape What’s to Come campaign — three Indian […]
Erik Hersman, onstage Thursday at TEDGlobal. Photo: James Duncan Davidson / TED On Wednesday, July 13, a bombing in Mumbai took at least 10 lives. At TEDGlobal, the TED Blog talked with Erik Hersman, one of the cofounders of Ushahidi, an online crisis mapping and response tool — as a new Ushahidi deploys today to […]
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/26377050 w=525&h=294] Coffee Common, the organization of small coffee roasters who are making great coffee at TEDGlobal, made this lovely video of the coffee-making and -serving in Edinburgh. Dive in …
Photo: Circe f. Ervina Announced onstage today at TED: JR, the street artist and the TED2011 TED Prize winner, has been working this week in Edinburgh on an Inside Out Project action in the home of TEDGlobal. Writer Celyn Bricker tells the story: That the UK uses the most CCTV surveillance in Europe is widely […]
Meklit Hadero’s soulful songs have launched her explosive rise in the music world. Her sound draws from jazz, West Coast folk, and her Ethiopian roots. Meklit’s performances and community outreach projects — in North America, Africa, or where the winds take her — continue to enrich her music and be an integral part of its […]
New York restaurants and grocers scramble to get their hands on fresh, local produce. So what could be better than veggies grown right in the city? On a rooftop in Brooklyn, Viraj Puri runs Gotham Greens, a hydroponic greenhouse that cultivates delicious, fresh produce — using a fraction of the water and space needed for […]
Alice Dreger gave a powerful talk at TEDxNorthwestern on how our changing perception of anatomical differences is also changing our democracy. She was in New York today, so we invited her to the TED office for a live Q&A, where she posed this question: The recent passage of gay marriage rights in New York demonstrates […]
As part of our 5th anniversary, we’ve rolled out some improvements to the Talk page on TED.com — the place where many people first encounter a TEDTalk. Most noticeable: in the right-hand column, you’ll see we’ve rearranged how we show you the talk description and the short speaker bio. Click on one of the little […]
Performer Joshua Walters is based in San Francisco; he capped a several-week road trip this spring by playing the TED Full Spectrum Auditions in New York. His wiry, thought-provoking comedy bit about mental illness earned him today’s spot on TED.com. TED’s Will True spoke to Walters just after he jumped offstage that night in Manhattan. […]
To help journalists and emergency responders, Jon Gosier is developing SwiftRiver, a platform that sorts massive amounts of web and SMS data for accuracy. With his Ugandan innovation hub Appfrica standing on its own two feet, Jon has moved back to the US. Co-Founder of metaLayer, a company that adds visual data to real world […]