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 […]
The Floating City is a rich multiplayer transmedia game within a living world based around Thomas Dolby’s latest musical endeavors. “The Floating City is set against a dystopian vision of the 1940s that might have existed had WWII turned out a lot differently,” says Dolby. A global energy experiment went haywire, the Earth’s magnetic fields […]
Sean Gourley analyzed real-time data from the Iraq war and discovered a precise mathematical model underlying it. Now he’s expanding on that research at Quid, his startup that maps trends in technology. Having unearthed such powerful information, Sean takes time to help kids understand the importance of math, even while he grapples with the eternal […]
[ted id=1167] JD Schramm came by the TED offices this week to discuss posting his important — but very personal — TEDTalk. The TED Blog sat down with him to talk about healing. Because it all starts with talking … If a friend of yours has survived a suicide attempt, it can be hard to […]