“We need a different view of the world,” says Chris Anderson, the host of Session 6: Radical Reframe, on the Wednesday morning of TED2015. Enjoy these recaps of the speaker in this session, who might just flip your thinking on things you thought you knew — from antibiotics to papayas. New metaphors, not new medicines. We […]
Pamela Ronald is here to talk about her work as a plant geneticist, about her work “studying genes that make plants resistant to disease and tolerant of stress.” But first, she’d like to introduce us to her husband. “This is Raoul. He’s an organic farmer,” she says. “People say, ‘Really? An organic farmer and a plant geneticist? […]
“Tonight, I’m going to make the case that inviting a loved one, a friend or a stranger to record a meaningful interview might just turn out to be one of the most important moments in that person’s life — and in yours,” says Dave Isay of StoryCorps, stepping to the TED stage to accept the 2015 TED Prize in Session […]
Life stories. Session 5 of TED2015 was dedicated to the kind of personal tales that would make for a great biopic. From the story of two Texans that calls into question what it means to be “American” to a talk from a tech pioneer who founded a software company for women in the 1960s, enjoy our recaps of these […]
Anand Giridharadas brings us to a Dallas mini-mart on the night of September 21, 2001. That night, a man named Mark Stroman walks into the store with a gun. He didn’t want money; he wanted blood in retaliation for September 11. He shot the Bangladeshi immigrant working at the counter, Raisuddin Bhuiyan, in the face. Raisuddin lived; Mark ended up […]
“We are going to Mars. Not just astronauts, but thousands of people are going to colonize Mars. Soon.”
“Are we alone? Is there life out there?” asks Sara Seager on the stage in Session 4 of TED2015. “These questions have been around for thousands of years since the days of the Greek philosophers. I’m here to tell you just how close we are getting.” Seager is a professor at MIT who has been referred […]
“When our ancestors looked up at the night sky, they saw tools for navigation. They saw myths, and they saw the heavens,” says June Cohen, the host of Session 4 of TED2015. “But technology has given us so many new clues. … Space exploration has never been as fascinating and relevant as it is today.” Here’s […]
Chris Anderson introduces Session 3 with a compelling idea: “Most of the new things happening right now that feel like magic — whether it’s self-driving cars or online translations suddenly getting much better — there’s machine learning behind it.” In this session we look at the issues around machines that learn. The challenge of teaching […]
A cat. A house. A plane. Most 3-year-old children can point at these and identify them by sight. Fei-Fei Li, the director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, has spent the past 15 years teaching machines how to see. Our most advanced machines are like toddlers when it comes to sight, Li says; […]
In this session of TED2015, five speakers explored the bounds of perception — from how babies form expectations to how vision is hardly needed to see. Short recaps of these bold talks … The logic of the young mind. Scientists have to make generalizations on tiny amounts of data – and so do babies. Laura Schulz investigates […]
From small samples, says Laura Schulz, we make large conjectures about the world. “From a few bones, we infer the existence of dinosaurs; from spectral lines, the concept of planetary nebulae; from fruit flies, an understanding of genetics,” she says. She brings it back to her own work at MIT’s Early Childhood Cognition Lab: “From […]
This morning, Chris Anderson announced that Rony Abovitz of the start-up Magic Leap, who’d planned to join us here at TED2015, has cancelled his appearance for, as Chris says, “Reasons unknown.” Up to now, Magic Leap has become known for two things in the tech world: 1) generating hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and […]
To build a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide gets released; to construct the same building from wood, 3,100 tons are saved, a difference of about 900 cars taken off the road in a year. Michael Green (TED Talk: Why we should build wooden skyscrapers) builds with wood because […]
The most important rule in our safety briefing on the “Bobsleigh Sport Experience”: Put your gloves on, hold on to the wire inside the sled walls, and DO NOT LET GO.
In Session 2 of the TED Fellows talks, we learn about the FBI’s use of informants in counterterrorism operations, how giant pouched rats are helping to save lives, laser-delivered HIV drugs, how Silicon Valley companies are working to protect our privacy — and that’s not to mention the piano solo, percussive dance and opera! Sri Lankan […]