Our own Thomas Dolby kicks off his Sole Inhabitant tour this week, with shows in Anaheim and L.A. He’ll hit just about every major TED city in the U.S., so there’s ample opportunity to watch him rock the house with an utterly intriguing blend of retro and high-tech gadgetry. The repertoire will range from his […]
Lots of buzz building around the upcoming Al Gore movie "An Inconvenient Truth". The documentary-as-disaster-movie trailer has just been posted online. It’s here on itunes. And here on YouTube. Watch it if you dare. (Select groups of TEDsters in New York and San Francisco Bay Area are attending special prescreenings of the full movie next […]
At TED2006, Alan Russell posed a provocative question; “If newts can regenerate a lost limb, why can’t we?” For Russell, director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburg, it isn’t an idle question, but one of many potential pathways to healing the human body. If you can understand the biological […]
At TED2006, Robert Wright proposed that humans are still evolving, culturally and morally — progress that picks up where genetic evolution left off. But some scientists now say we’re still evolving genetically as well. Though conventional wisdom says humans have remained essentially unchanged for 100,000 years or more, new evidence points to a faster-paced evolution […]
It seems we aren’t the only ones impressed by Al Gore and the clarion call he’s sounding on global warming. Gore features prominently in Vanity Fair‘s first-ever Green Issue, on newsstands this week. And his essay, “The Moment of Truth” hits the issue hard: “Today, there are dire warnings that the worst catastrophe in the […]
After designing “the iPod of toilets” this fall, Ross Lovegrove (TED05) introduced in Milan this week a solar-powered concept car, shimmering with Swarovski crystals, but lacking an engine … or wheels. “It’s a provocation,” he told the Washington Post. And to the Western Mail: “It is only the future if it can’t be made.”
In honor of yesterday’s thrilling announcement that scientists have discovered — in fossil-form — a missing link between fish and land animals, we offer you the commercial that kicked off our interstitial series at TED2006. The brilliant, catchy, multiple-view-worthy noitulovE, which rewinds several hundred million years in the course of a 60-second spot. Created by […]
What would it have been like if the von Trapps had played piano instead of sung? Well, for one, the hills would not likely have been quite so alive. That would have required a whole lot of piano lugging. But they still would have made a heck of a splash. While I’m not sure that […]
Here’s one straight from the In-Box: TEDster David Hornik emailing Joe’s Pub Director Bill Bragin, who introduces us to TED2006 stand-out Stew. From: David Hornik To: Bill Bragin Subject: Stew Hey Bill – Hope all’s well. If you have a second to pass on the word to Stew would you please let him know how […]
Each year at TED, we punctuate the program with interstitial videos: TV commercials, short films, music videos and montages that represent some of the best work of the year (or, rather, the best work of the year that can double as an interstitial). Over the weeks to come, we’ll share many of them with you […]
It’s a great month for following TED favorites online. First Malcolm Gladwell, and now Thomas Dolby has launched a blog. Of course, Thomas has always had a strong online presence, but a blog makes everything more personal. How else could we learn what happens in his garden shed?
Arranged marriages and online dating, political protests and pre-natal care: These are just some of the topics that surface when women in their 20s and 30s are asked to define their generation. The answers take the forms of stories shared — through prose, poetry, paintings, film — in Imagining Ourselves, a participatory online exhibit (and […]
Al Gore socked us between the eyes with his talk on global warming at TED. Nice to see that an organization that TED has supported in the past, Environmental Defense, has just released a couple of powerful PSAs (especially the second). They’re predicting they’ll get $100m worth of media time to run these, though I’m […]
When Jehane made her TED Prize wish to bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film, we decided the only way to do it was to really do it, in a big, noticeable way. We partnered with Steve Apkon of the Jacob Burns Film Center, America’s most successful non-profit […]
Last October, Chris put a challenge to the TED community, pledging $1000 to the person who created the most eye-popping proposition on Pledgebank. Lucy Hooberman took that prize with her global mentoring project, a plan to match professionals in the developed and developing worlds, which was originally hatched at TED2005. A BBC new media executive […]
Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and now CEO of SpaceX, spoke at TED2005. Today’s the launch of their Falcon 1.