Just a few of the intriguing headlines involving members of the TED community this week: Advances in treating spinal cord damage. In Nature, Grégoire Courtine and a team of scientists announced that they had successfully used a wireless brain-spine interface to help monkeys with spinal cord damage paralyzing one leg regain the ability to walk. […]
“I make noises for a living, and on a good day it’s music,” says Peter Gabriel in today’s talk. “I work with a lot of musicians from around the world. Often, we don’t have any common language at all. But we sit behind our instruments and suddenly there’s a way to connect and emote.” This […]
Shhh … it’s time for Secret Voices, the 10th session of TED2013. Get ready to hear stories of the forgotten, marginalized, stigmatized and hidden. Our first speaker will make quite an entrance while the last will give a stirring finish, in spoken word. In between, thoughts on interspecies communication. Here, the speakers who appeared in […]
At TED2006, Neil Gershenfeld gave a fun and fast-paced introduction to the FabLab — a miniature fabrication plant for making pretty much anything. Gershenfeld’s pioneering FabLab at MIT cost a cool million bucks, thankyouverymuch. He’s been spreading the idea of smaller FabLabs around the world — from urban Boston to the Takoradi Technical Institute in […]
Today, we continue our schedule of archive gems as the media team continues their brief but necessary respite from the tough job of running TED.com. Over this two week break we are hand-picking vintage talks that are just as captivating as the day they were given, and sometimes more so, in context of our rapidly […]
T.G.I.M.B.O.E.J. stands for The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronic Junk, and it’s celebrating its first anniversary this week. Do think of it as partly a social experiment, but more so a free-range parcel service-based electronics grab bag that circulates among hardware hackers who are eager to discover useful, cool, old, or even rare treasures […]
MIT reports today on the work of professors Yet-Ming Chiang, Angela Belcher and Paula Hammond, who’ve developed a way to build tiny batteries about half the size of a human cell to power tomorrow’s equally tiny devices. The electrolyte of the battery is made of polymers stamped onto a rubbery film. On top of this, […]
If you were inspired by Neil Gershenfeld’s TEDTalk on the FabLab — where you can build just about anything you can dream of — read on: Larry Sass, from MIT’s department of architecture, is leading a team that’s building a digitally fabricated house in a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art in […]
Not to be outdone by the Time 100, the journals Foreign Policy and Prospect have together released a list of the Top 100 public intellectuals — with voting. Many TEDTalks favorites appear on the list, and you can help choose the eventual top 20 by voting for your very own top 5. From Foreign Policy‘s […]
Many TEDTalks speakers have answered the 2008 Edge Foundation question: What have you changed your mind about? Why? Among the more than 160 essays from leading thinkers — scientists, philosophers, artists — look for Wired’s Chris Anderson, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Juan Enriquez, Helen Fisher, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel Gilbert, Daniel […]
MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld talks about his Fab Lab — a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools. It’s a simple idea with powerful results.