Does listening to music generate colors in your mind? Do bright, lively songs sound yellow or orange while darker, more somber ones sound dark blue and grey? Well, for artist Neil Harbisson, this happens the other way around. Colorblind since birth, Harbisson has sported an electronic eye since 2004 that fits over the top of […]
This week TEDx celebrated the birthday of Rosalind Franklin, the pioneering scientist who helped our fundamental understanding of the structure of DNA strands. Sixty years after her famous Photo 51, Czech designer Vit Zemcik created a video to showcase his own understanding of the geometry of life. Zemcik explains his video, which showed at TEDxHradecKralove […]
“By inspiring ourselves, we inspire others.” These are the words of tightrope walker Philippe Petit in this week’s TED Radio Hour from NPR, “To the Edge.” hosted by Guy Raz. The episode overflows with speakers who have gone to the edge in some way: rowing across oceans; exploring caves as deep as Mount Everest is […]
Did you go outside and smile for the camera last Friday, like Carolyn Porco (watch her talk) asked you to, while the Cassini probe snapped a photo of Jupiter with Earth in the background? In this hyper-detailed post from Diary of Numbers, the author calculates the odds that one of your photons is in the […]
Reading fiction is an escape, something transportative that pulls you out of everyday life. But don’t we also read fiction to learn more about ourselves — to see our hopes, aspirations and fears reflected in the pages, to gain insight into the confusing mechanics and meaning of love, family and community? On Thursday night, we […]
For many, the summer means a different kind of work — gardening. Whether you have twenty acres of lush meadow, a rooftop oasis in the city or a few potted plants on a balcony, when it gets hot outside it’s time to get planting. In the TED-Ed lesson above, Mary Koga explains the science behind […]
“That is a part of you up there. That’s your water that helps to make the cloud, that becomes the rain, that feeds the plants, that feeds the animals.” These were the words Camlile Seaman’s grandfather said to her on a hot summer day when she was young. Inspired by her Shinnecock Indian heritage, and […]
This week, the world celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday. For the participants of TEDxSoweto — which took place in April in Johannesburg, South Africa — it was time to publish the results of a campaign started at the event. During the event, a group of volunteers — including many designers — wondered how they could […]
The TED2014 theater will be something audacious: a theater designed specifically for talks. TED stages in the past have had thrusts and three-quarter rounds, but have largely been determined by what existed in the venue. For TED2014, however, as we celebrate our 30th anniversary, we are building a temporary, pop-up theater designed just for us […]
[ted id=1792] Today’s incredible talk contains insane beats, bizarre sound effects, voiceovers in the style of multiple eras and instruments like the didgeridoo, sitar, trumpet and double bass. And yet, only one person is on the stage. As beatboxer Tom Thum puts it in this talk from TEDxSydney, “All the sounds you just heard were […]
In our three-dimensional world, all we can experience is length, width and height. Unless one of your friends is a hypercube, it’s hard to imagine just what it would look like to live beyond the 3D. Would you like it? Would you understand it? Would you even believe it was real? In this spunky TED-Ed […]
Writer Elaine Morgan has died at age 92. Perhaps best known for her book The Descent of Woman, at TEDGlobal 2009 she made her case for the “aquatic ape hypothesis” — an admittedly non-standard idea about human origins. Earlier this year, in The Guardian, Erika Milam offered a compelling new take on Morgan’s place in […]
Carl Kasell of NPR hosts the show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. And in the video above, he uses his classic radio voice to narrate LOLCats, reading lines like “I can has cheezburger?” and “I tried to hang up your laundry — that’s when I realized I didn’t have thumbs.” The audio in this video […]
The TED Android app has long let you watch more than 1,500 TED Talks, with subtitles in 102* languages. But with the launch of version 2.0 today, our award-winning app is now localized in 20 languages — from Spanish to Swedish, Chinese to Czech, Arabic to Korean. This means that fans in more than 100 […]
The world of athletics is brutal. Athletes put themselves through grueling workout schedules and intense competitions, pushing their bodies and minds to the limit. But because part of being an athlete is constantly going up against (and sometimes with) faster, stronger and/or younger competitors, by far the hardest test any athlete faces is their internal […]
“Your lifestyle is the future of marketing,” Bob Lord told a group of young New Yorkers at the TED Annex (our new spillover office) on Tuesday night. About 80 interns and young professionals from local marketing firms came together to eat pizza and hear Lord’s advice on merging creativity and digital know-how, during a conversation […]