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, […]
The Olympic motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius,” or, in English, “Faster, higher, stronger.” And as sports science reporter David Epstein points out from the TED2014 stage, “Athletes have fulfilled that motto — and they’ve done so rapidly.” Epstein investigates why it is that, year upon year, runners, swimmers, gymnasts, basketball players and so many others […]
In the middle of a tense morning session – you know, just waiting for NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett to come online, ain’t no thing — illustrator Maira Kalman comes up to tell a lovely family tale about music and pants. In 1932 when Kalman’s family left their village in Belarus (“you can say they […]
In 2010, the late security researcher — or as cybersecurity expert Keren Elazari would like you to call him, the late hacker — Barnaby Jack found a security flaw in two different models of automated teller machines (ATMs). Onstage at a tech security conference, he publicly demonstrated his ability to make these machines spit out […]
Techno-illusionist and veteran speaker Marco Tempest returns to the TED stage with a new friend: EDI (pronounced “Eddie”) the robot. EDI, which stands for Electronic Deceptive Intelligence, is Tempest’s latest techno-aide, a friendly Baxter robot who ponders the difference between artificial and human intelligence. “Robot,” the newly awakened EDI interrupts, was coined in 1921 in […]
What does a hacked future look like? What will our bodies — and minds — be capable as bioengineering becomes more and more ubiquitous? In Session 8 of TED2014, speakers take on the hacked world of tomorrow. Here are the speakers who appeared in this session. Click below to read a full recap of each […]
By Natasha Scripture Anti-corruption activist Charmian Gooch stood up on stage at TED2014 tonight and revealed her TED Prize wish: to get rid of anonymous companies once and for all by making who owns and controls them public knowledge. As head of Global Witness, a UK-based non-profit that has been campaigning for transparency for the […]
At the TED2014 Fellows talks, Janet Iwasa’s astonishing video — which showed the process of molecular self-assembly — went by very quickly, a flurry of green strands and fragments fluttering, before flying into the shape of a soccer ball. If you missed it, or if you’d like a more in-depth explanation of what is actually […]
Day 3 at TED2014 was dense with science, design, conversation. Here’s a quick recap of some highlights: Hugh Herr and Adrianne Haslet-Davis’s surprise dance Hugh Herr is a bionics designer and multiple amputee. He gave a talk that was half mind-blowing — full of extraordinary advances in prosthetics, like bionic designs that produce the same forces […]
Magician Helder Guimarães starts his performance at TED2014 by telling the crowd Sturgeon’s law: “90% of everything is crap.” Still, he says, “Sturgeon may be correct, but he doesn’t have to be correct forever.” And that is a philosophy he brings to his very narrative magic — wowing the crowd with card tricks that tell […]
Allan Adams “became a physicist to understand how the world works at its most fundamental level.” Adams, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT, points out that the things we’ve learned so far are pretty incredible: We know the universe began just 13.8 billion years ago, and have a pretty good idea how it’s going […]