Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal is here to talk about stress. In particular, she’s here to make the case that stress might not, in fact, be the enemy we tend to think it is. To do this, she asks those assembled in the conference hall in Edinburgh to indicate how much stress they’ve felt in the past year. […]
Standing on the TED stage looking stunning in a blue dress, neuroscientist and author Sandra Aamodt reveals that three and a half years ago on New Year’s Eve, she made a decision: She gave worrying about her weight. Instead, she learned to eat mindfully — and lost 10 pounds. For Aamodt, who had been dieting […]
Who inspires you with their large-scale vision for change? Who offers a bold, unique solution to a global problem — and the capable leadership to make it a reality? The TED Prize is a $1 million grant, awarded annually to someone who is both a dreamer and a doer. And the best candidates invariably come from you. Perhaps you […]
“I don’t know how to introduce this, so I’ll just say, ‘Hetain Patel,’” says TED curator Chris Anderson. So no one knows what to expect, and that’s as may be, because this is some crazy right here. Patel walks onstage and crouches in a chair next to the dancer Yuyu Rau. He speaks a few […]
The end of “Exquisite Enigmatic Us,” the last session for today at TEDGlobal 2013, is appropriately rounded out by a former student of psychology, English pop singer Natasha Bedingfield. (Did you know she studied psych at university?) Popular for her hits “Unwritten” and “Pocketful of Sunshine,” Bedingfield performs “These Words” and debuts a newly written […]
Elizabeth Loftus begins her talk at TEDGlobal 2013 with the tragic story of Steve Titus, who was arrested in 1980 because he sort of matched the physical description of, and drove a similar car to, a man who had raped a woman in his area. Looking at a photo lineup, the victim told police that […]
Neuroscientist Russell Foster opens a session of TEDGlobal all about … us, asking the question: Why do we sleep? Thirty-six percent of our lives are spent asleep, which means, if you live to 90, you’ll have slept for 32 years. But we don’t appreciate sleep enough, says Foster. He quotes Thomas Edison — “Sleep is […]
Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize story may soon be coming to a theater near you. Today during the TEDGlobal 2013 session “Exquisite, Enigmatic Us,” curator Chris Anderson named British director Jerry Rothwell as the winner of the first annual Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award. Rothwell earned a $125,000 grant to follow Sugata Mitra over the next 18 months as he builds […]
A lovely meditation on we exquisite, enigmantic people serves to open Session 3 of TEDGlobal. Olivia Bolles, better known as Olivia Bee, is a 20-year-old American photographer from Portland, Oregon. At 14, her work was featured in an advertising campaign for Converse. Her work has since been used in campaigns for Nike, Hermes and Fiat. […]
In the wilds of planet Earth, there exists a species so creative that it not only uses tools but is constantly rewriting the rules of what a tool can be, so cooperative that they build wildly complex systems to support each other and so consternating that its inconsistent behavior would make even the most seasoned […]
Greg Asner closes Session 2 of TEDGlobal 2013, “Those Flying Things,” with a very different vision of the Earth. We spend a lot of time, money and resources conserving nature, yet, as Asner points out, we know absurdly little about it. Which is why, in an effort to advance our knowledge about biodiversity, he founded […]
On a tablet, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes us on a walk through Edinburgh Castle, less than a mile from the TEDGlobal 2013 theater. With a swipe of his finger, we fly through the 15th-century castle — people and objects dissolving as we go — as if we were in a scene from a movie orchestrated by […]
You never would have guessed musical alchemist Elizaveta was fighting strep throat only days before her performance. In Session 2 of TEDGlobal, “Those Flying Things,” she steps out onto a darkened stage in an ethereal white dress and a magnificent lace crown and launches into a long, beautiful and flawless soprano note. Trained in opera performance at […]
Technology thriller author, most recently of the book Kill Decision, Daniel Suarez has been thinking about drones for some time. But as he says, as he stands onstage at TEDGlobal 2013, he’s not here to talk fiction. “I’m here to talk about very real autonomous combat drones,” he says, adding that he doesn’t mean remotely piloted […]
If you’re here from MetaFilter, hi! We’re planning to post this talk in November. –eds Andreas Raptopoulos wants to serve the 1 billion people on Earth with no access to all-season roads — the one-seventh of the world’s population that is too often cut off from critical medicines, supplies and goods. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, […]
At TEDGlobal 2013 environmental systems researcher Lian Pin Koh presents a new and unexpectedly benign use for drones: nature conservation. Nepal has natural landscapes that are beautiful — and in danger. But wildlife conservation is costly, and time- and labor-consuming. Behold: Conservation drones, a new tool being used in Nepal to combat wildlife crime. These […]