The phrase “truth or dare” is a false binary — facing the truth often requires daring action, and vice versa. That’s why, at TED2015: Truth and Dare, the two go hand-in-hand. TED2015 happens March 16-20 in Vancouver and Whistler, and we dare to think this will be the most provocative, invigorating, mind-shifting TED yet. The […]
High school senior Yash Khatavkar takes issue with the fact that, as he was learning Spanish, his elementary school only offered one hour of Spanish instruction per week. Even as he got older, he felt like Spanish classes in school just weren’t enough to move him past the point of having to translate between English and […]
Artist Bassam Tariq is determined to shine a light on the incredible diversity of Muslim life – and he does it by any means necessary. Known for his blogging project 30 Mosques in 30 Days, Tariq and a friend took a month-long road trip through all 50 states, breaking their Ramadan fast each evening in […]
“What makes you think that you have 80 or 90 years to live?” Laura Rozo posed this serious and almost morbid question to the audience at TEDxUNC in February 2013. She walked onto the stage confidently and calmly, soaking in the applause as the final, surprise speaker of the day. She wore a red turtleneck […]
Nature and investing. On the surface, these things do not sound like they have a lot to do with each other. But to TEDster Katherine Collins, the two are intrinsically linked. After 18 years at Fidelity Investments, and while enrolled at Harvard Divinity School to try to figure out what to do next, Collins found […]
By the TEDxYPU team In March, the ongoing conflict in Syria will enter its fifth year. Syrians have lost so much in that time — the Syrian who has not lost their life has lost several years of it because of a destroyed home, a faded business, or a family that has been torn apart by […]
Every day, emergency room workers use triage to prioritize patient care — but exhausted personnel in under-resourced hospitals can easily make deadly errors in diagnostic tests and symptom scoring. South African emergency room doctor Mohammed Dalwai witnessed such avoidable tragedy firsthand while working with Médicins sans Frontières in Pakistan. He resolved never to let it happen again. Dalwai urged MSF to […]
It’s a piece of cake. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Why add fuel to the fire? Idioms are those phrases that mean more than the sum of their words. As our TED Translator volunteers translate TED Talks into 116 languages (and counting), they’re often challenged to translate English idioms into their language. Which made […]
What if you could build a civilization from scratch, using tools that could also be built from scratch? In his talk “Open-sourced blueprints for civilization” at TED2011, Marcin Jakubowski introduced the Global Village Construction Set, open-source blueprints that would essentially allow anyone with a heap of scrap metal — and a few production tools — to make […]
The TED community has been busy in the past week. Below, a few TEDsters with news to share. Mapping by the millions. Frustrated by the inability to test his theories given the current technology, Sebastian Seung embarked on what many of his colleagues considered career suicide: he built a game to map all the neural […]
More than a million people took to the streets of Paris yesterday to show solidarity against extremism and terrorism. And their eyes were on the eyes of Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, who was killed in his office last week in a terrorist attack, along with 12 others. These eyes […]
Many people feel a burst of inspiration after watching a TED Talk. Some take action by volunteering their time or making a donation. Nigel Gordon, on the other hand, has an individual reaction: He writes songs about TED Talks he loves. A singer and songwriter, as well as an entrepreneur, Gordon got his introduction to […]
Did you know that across the United States, cameras are automatically taking pictures of your car’s license plate as you drive by, recording your plate number and your locations over time? In a chilling talk given at TEDGlobal 2014, civil liberties lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump called attention to the ubiquity of mass surveillance technology […]
The TED community has been very busy in the start of this new year. Below, a few TEDsters with news to share. Landing a rocket on a boat: simple enough. Putting a man on the moon and a rover on Mars are exceptional feats, but that’s in the past. Elon Musk is now attempting a […]
When architect Joshua Prince-Ramus redesigned the Seattle Central Library, he and his team didn’t try to pinpoint the future of libraries or books. Instead, they rooted their blueprints in two foundational ideas: books are a form of technology, and the library is a social hub, as much as it is a house for media. Prince-Ramus […]
They’ve helped us experience the thrill of jumping from 128,000 feet above the earth, showed us what it’s like to be a fireman saving a kitten, and let us hang out with lions in South Africa. TED is seeking a talk, to be delivered at our 2015 conference, about the increasingly common practice of documenting extreme sports and […]