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 […]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9APO9_yNbcg&w=560&h=315] The death of Jimmy Mubenga, a political refugee who died as he was about to be deported from the UK to Angola, has been declared unlawful, thanks in large part to an investigation by TED speaker Paul Lewis and his colleague Matthew Taylor. When Mubenga died aboard British Airways Flight 77 on October 12, […]
In the past week, we’ve noticed some fascinating TED-related news. Here, some highlights. Bryan Stevenson (watch his talk from TED2012) is asking the state of Florida to reconsider its case against 14-year-old Tremaine McMillan. On May 27, McMillan was wrestled to the ground and put in a chokehold by a Miami-Dade police officer who felt […]
“Imagine yourself standing on a beach, looking out at the ocean — waves crashing against the shore, blue as far as your eyes can see.” This is the opening line of Scott Gass’ TED-Ed lesson, “How big is the ocean?” But the animated video gives you much more to think about than sand between your […]
[ted id=1499] In January of 2013, TED Fellow Cesar Harada, inventor of an open-source sailing robot, set sail on a four-month, 14-country round-the-world journey with Unreasonable at Sea, a global innovation accelerator on board a boat. Here, he tells us about how this extraordinary voyage helped crystallize his vision for how his open source sailing robot […]
Ivan Krastev’s TED book asks probing and difficult questions about democracy in societies that do not trust their leaders. For example, while Americans cling to the belief that democray represents the highest form of political organization, they also rate members of Congress amongst the least trusted professions. In his book In Mistrust We Trust, Krastev […]