By Kate Torgovnick, Morton Bast, Thu-Huong Ha The future. When it comes down to it, it’s not about flying cars, flashy robots, jetpacks, or awesome sunglasses. It’s about the little things we can do to advance healthcare, better education, create opportunities, improve connections between each other, and make lives just a little bit easier. In […]
Photographer Frans Lanting returns to TED for a short reminder of what’s happening outside the walls of our beautiful glass box. “Humanity,” he says, “takes center stage at TED, but I’d like to add a voice for the animals.” Lanting retells a story he once heard from a tribal elder not far from Vancouver, about […]
Billy Collins returns to the TED stage to join a recent trend contemplating the cognition and emotional life of dogs. With characteristic dryness and meditative drone — and, we think, the same red sweater — he shares “A Dog on his Master” and “The Revenant.” He reads, to big laughs: “I am the dog you […]
TED invites thinkers from every walk of life to share a compelling idea onstage. And this now includes AIs. During Session 9: Signals, Chris Anderson took the stage along with Peter Diamandis, the founder of the XPRIZE. “We’re here today to join forces and announce the creation of a new XPRIZE,” says Anderson. “Here’s the concept—it will […]
Louie Schwartzberg is fascinated with exposing the world’s wonders through photography. Three years ago, his talk, “Nature. Beauty. Gratitude,” demonstrated his uncanny ability to capture the captivating beauty of our natural world — the tiniest shake of a flower petal, the stirring complexity of a bee’s wing. At TED2014, he shows a portion of his […]
“We’re on spaceship Earth,” begins Will Marshall during Session 9 of TED2014. “It’s fragile and finite — and we need to take care of it.” He shows a satellite image of Earth. Yes, it’s beautiful, says Marshall, but it’s outdated. The information is old, and he says, “We can’t fix what we can’t see.” Satellite […]
Astronomer Andrew Connolly begins by telling us that in 1781, English composer, technologist and composer Sir William Herschel noticed something unusual, a little bit of data that was wrong. This was the discovery of a new planet, Uranus. (“A name that has entertained countelss generations of children.”) Just last week NASA announced 517 new planets, almost doubled […]
In 2006, Harold Ford called his friend Mellody Hobson, to tell her that he was running for US Senate in Tennessee and that he needed some national press. Hobson, an investor, in turn called a friend at a major media organization and organized a lunch. But when Hobson and Ford arrived at the lunch, they were taken to a […]
Cartoonist (and former NASA roboticist) Randall Munroe illustrates the questions that keep you (or at least him) up at night. Whether that’s “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?” or “How much of the Earth’s currently-existing water has ever been turned into a soft drink […]
“I study ants in the desert, in the tropical forest and in my kitchen,” says Deborah Gordon. An ecologist, she researches the behavior of ant colonies — which are systems that operate without central control. (While they have a queen, Gordon explains, the queen only lays eggs and doesn’t actually issue orders.) Gordon thinks that, from […]
Sara Lewis has managed to put herself in the center of a world of wonder by becoming a world expert on fireflies. Her obsession began in grad school, sitting in a backyard in North Carolina and watching the sparks light up around her. She wondered, “How do these creatures make light? Are they talking to each […]
Communication is fundamental to how we relate and interact. But we receive signals from everywhere — other living creatures, the ecosystem, the earth itself, and the space beyond. In this session six speakers will explore how we send, and more importantly receive, those signals. Here are the speakers who appeared in this session. Click below […]
Rick Ledgett is the deputy director of the National Security Agency. He’s here to give a response to Edward Snowden’s onstage/virtual appearance at TED earlier in the week. (See the talk, Here’s how we take back the Internet.) On Tuesday, the former NSA sysadmin made the case for open government and private lives, arguing that “we […]
Ray Kurzweil returns to the TED stage to explain his new (kind of old) theory of the mind. He first wrote his theory as a paper 50 years ago, but today there’s a plethora of new evidence to support it. First, a refresher on the story of the neocortex, which means “new rind.” Two hundred […]
As a child, Seth Godin played the clarinet. Or — he tried .. sort of. At TED2014, he explains how he trudged through lessons, never trying hard enough to produce a note that sounded like the ones he heard from “real” clarinetists. “I took lessons,” he says, “but I’m not sure I actually played the […]
Ed Yong begins by showing us beautiful images of animals gathering in large groups. And the reasons for them are fascinating and many. But Yong, an award-winning science writer, points out that most explanations “make an assumption about animal behavior — that they are in charge of their actions.” But many animals gather in groups, […]