Boaz Almog demonstrates “quantum locking” — which causes a small, supercooled superconductor to levitate above a magnetic track — in this amazing raw footage from TEDGlobal, shot by photographer James Duncan Davidson. Want to know when Boaz Almog’s full TEDTalk goes online? Sign up for an email notification >>
When it comes to time, there is the past, the present and the future. But during day four of TEDGlobal, speakers seemed especially concerned with the former and the latter. Kicking off session 11, the first of day four, art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini shared his 30-year quest to find Leonardo da Vinci’s missing fresco “The […]
An epidemic hidden in plain view Margaret Heffernan begins her TEDGlobal talk by telling us a story: In Oxford in the 1950s, there was physician named Alice Stewart who was fascinated with the new science of epidemiology. She realized, as a scientist does, that the way to prove herself was to find a hard problem […]
Amy Cuddy must be proud: Clay Shirky walks on stage and promptly strikes a power pose. Then he tells us of a 9-year-old Scottish girl who lives about 50 miles from here. Martha Payne started the foodblog NeverSeconds, for which she took her camera into school to document her lunches, using metrics such as “pieces of hair found […]
Where some people saw a social network too far, Daria Musk saw an opportunity. In the summer of 2011, she joined Google+ and decided to perform a live concert via its video chat feature, Hangouts. Her concerts can last up to eight hours, and in just a few months she turned from a self-described lonely […]
Architecture writer Andrew Blum has always focused on the physical landscape: our cities, our buildings, the places in which we live and work. Yet along with the rest of us, he says, he’s realized that over the past few years our relationship with the physical world has changed. We look at screens, a world with […]
In 1964 Bob Dylan was near the pinnacle of his career, pouring out now-classic songs at a near-miraculous pace. But a few critics claim that he is stealing other people’s songs. Could it be true? Ferguson plays “Nottamun Town,” a traditional folks song, then Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” and asks us to hear the […]
A sick brick “I want to make my friends understand: China is too complicated,” begins Michael Anti. “You can’t tell a one-size story.” According to some, China is a brick, helping the world economy. According to others, it’s a sick country, with no access to Facebook. (The second phrase was as claimed in the Facebook […]
Download the rushes used for the session titles created by Circus Family for Session 10: Reframing. These images were created by projecting motion graphics onto a tabletop installation — breaking the visuals and recording them again. Feel free to re-use under the Creative Commons Licence (Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike). Use this compact 600MB zip file […]
Mission: Radical spreading from a uniform block to a more freeform organic experimental shape. Director’s statement: “I wanted to create an explosion of vector abstract pop and colored animation. Organic and geometric shapes, characters growing around the central information.” — Superdeux Direction and design: Superdeux http://www.superdeux.com Animation and sound design: Friends Of Mine http://www.friendsofmine.tv Agency: […]
Click to watch the session-opening animation. We end TEDGlobal2012 with a session that steps back and asks, “How do we, as a society, communicate with each other?” The public sphere, the place where we engage with society at large, has undergone tremendous change — driven and empowered by the digital revolution, but also, perhaps, by a deeper […]
“My task this morning is to summarize 35 years of work in less than 17 minutes,” says Mina Bissell. She is a cancer researcher with a background in chemistry, and as she tells us, the standard explanations for exactly what cancer was didn’t make sense to her. Her career has been driven by a tremendous question — what […]
Becci Manson is a high-end photographic retoucher who works with client like fashion magazines to tart up glamorous images. She and her friends, she says, are pale gray creatures hiding from sunlight in dark, windowless rooms. “We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, and we make the impossible possible.” The field comes under […]
In 1975, Maurizio Seracini met an art professor who asked him if he could help find a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci — the mural Battle of Anghiari, missing for five centuries. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of oportunity for a bioengineer in art, but he decided to take on the project. He […]
Click to watch the session-opening animation. We all know that things aren’t always as they seem, and in this session we do a double take, re-examining both issues we may have considered set in stone as well as the unintended consequences of some seemingly inconsequential decisions that continue to echo through the ages. In this […]
“We have something that will radically save the pharmaceutical industry,” says Susan Solomon in an interview on the social floor of TEDGlobal 2012, in Edinburg, Scotland. Solomon is the founder and CEO of the New York Stem Cell Foundation. She spoke with the TED Blog about the NYSCF’s new array of automatically created stem-cell lines, which […]