From the TED Prize blog: On Oct. 3, Gustavo Dudamel, protege of TED Prize winner Maestro José Abreu and new Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will kick off his inaugural season with a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. While the event is sold out, you can watch a live HD webcast of the […]
The TED Blog met with William Kamkwamba shortly after the publication of his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Here, he answers questions about his book, his life story, his plans for the future, and offers some inspiration to others who face poverty and struggle to achieve a dream. How does it feel to […]
School-lunch chef Ann Cooper (watch her talk from EG’07) has been touring the US this summer, asking locals to change their approach to food in schools. Her own revolutionary school lunch program, in which kids eat local produce and fresh bread, has taken hold in Berkeley, California; Cooper just moved to Boulder, Colorado, to revamp […]
Jennifer 8. Lee (watch her TEDTalk) and our friends from Reddit hosted a reading in New York tonight for one of the geekiest comics on the web: Randall Munroe’s xkcd. It’s a comic that once, we’re proud to say, namechecked TED; now the strip has been compiled into a printed volume. Aside from all the […]
Imogen Heap plays a powerful stripped-down version of “Wait It Out,” from her new record, Ellipse. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, in Oxford, UK. Duration: 3:58) Watch Imogen Heap’s performance on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ […]
Today, neurologist Oliver Sacks — who gave the classic talk, “What hallucinations reveal about our minds,” at TED2009 — revealed in The New York Times that he has terminal cancer. In a beautiful essay, he writes, “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in […]
Ray Anderson (watch his TEDTalk), the chairman and founder of carpet company Interface Inc., is part of a new industrial revolution: one that demands ecological awareness. Simply conforming to government regulations didn’t satisfy Anderson, who has made the march toward total sustainability an integral part of his company’s customer appeal. For Interface, being “green” is […]
Chris Jordan (watch his TEDTalk) is on Midway Atoll with a team of artists to document a shocking result of our love of plastic: thousands of albatrosses who mistake floating plastic trash for food — and are starving to death. Midway is near the apex of the Pacific Garbage Patch (watch Capt. Charles Moore’s TEDTalk […]
Via the Nature blog The Great Beyond: a “rather wonderful graphic” from Ben Fry that tracks the changes across all six editions of The Origin of Species, as Darwin refined and developed his idea in print from 1859 to 1872. Fry’s visualization of Darwin’s edits is called “On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of […]
Before Cary Fowler’s TEDTalk posted on Monday, the TEDBlog caught up with him in Norway, via phone. We asked the difficult questions and he provided calm, leveled answers on the food crises of today. He’s taken on a challenging role, as director of the largest seed bank in the world and the Global Crop Diversity […]
Maybe it was because of our 500th TEDTalk, but this weeks comments seemed especially meaningful. From people being amazed at Eric Giler’s WiTricity to people rethinking their life strategy thanks to Dan Pink’s talk on motivation. Here’s just a sampling of the reaction: On Natasha Tsakos’ talk: A multimedia theatrical adventure: This lady is amazing […]
Although preliminary results for Afghanistan’s presidential election will not be publicized until Saturday (and full results may not come until September 3), both President Hamid Karzai and second favorite Abdullah Abdullah are claiming victory. If neither candidate receives 50% of the vote, a run-off vote will occur. Voter participation was estimated at 40-50%, far lower […]
Last week, CERN announced that the world’s largest particle accelerator will power up again in November. However this time it will run on 3.5 trillion electron volts per beam, about half its expected energy level. Last year, the LHC shut down because of a fault between two superconducting bending magnets but recent tests have confirmed […]
The reception for this past wave of talks from TED Global 2009 centers around the theme of accountability. People seemed especially moved by Emmanuel Jal’s music on his life as a war child and Michael Pritchard’s revolutionary water filter. We even got a TEDGlobal speaker sparking a discussion on one of these highlighted talks (in […]
TED Fellow, journalist and expert on political aspects of the Internet Evgeny Morozov, who spoke at TEDGlobal 2009 on web censorship, cyber-activism and the fallacy if “iPod liberalism,” has a fascinating and thoughtful blog post about yesterday’s social networking outages. Responding to reports that the DDoS attack that downed sites such as Facebook, Twitter and […]
At TED2009, Stanford Professor and virus hunter Nathan Wolfe explained that most human diseases — AIDS, SARS, swine flu — originally came from animals. Today, Wolfe and his team announced an intriguing discovery that throws new light on an ancient disease, and provides new hope for its cure: Malaria, long believed to have evolved with […]