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 […]
Yo-yo champion BLACK does, in fact, wear a special costume — all black, with a red sash. But he has not always been a superhero. In his very sweet talk from TED2013, BLACK reveals that as a young teenager he struggled with feelings of worthlessness — and that it was dedicating himself to the yo-yo […]
Tom Thum wowed at TEDxSydney this week by doing strange things with his mouth. With just a microphone and his charisma, Thum brings the sounds of Michael Jackson, fifties jazz and scratched vinyl to the TEDx stage. In this talk, he demonstrates his “innate ability for inhuman noisemaking.” Thum’s talk has amassed over 2 million […]
This week’s TED Radio Hour examines “Why We Collaborate,” exploring why, and how, millions of people come together to work on online projects, sometimes for free. The episode begins with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who spoke at TEDGlobal 2005, back when the site was still very new. The incredible growth of Wikipedia since […]
Evolution. The concept surrounds us — it’s a standard part of science class, it’s routinely thrown out as explaining our actions in relationships, business and behavior — and yet, so many people hold subtle misunderstandings of what Darwin’s theory actually means. In this animated TED-Ed lesson, educator Alex Gendler gives a primer on the hard-to-grasp […]
Jack Andraka is not your typical teenager. The high schooler spends his free time in the science lab concocting better, cheaper ways to spot disease. One such project — a test for the early detection of pancreatic cancer — won Andraka first place in the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. As Andraka explains […]