Boyd Varty’s talk brings together many fascinating moments: a tribute to Nelson Mandela (who passed away just hours before Varty took the stage at TEDWomen 2013 last week), incredible footage of animals shot on the Londolozi Game Reserve (which Varty’s family transformed from a hunting ground to a game reserve in 1973, and where Varty […]
To explore is human. It’s as basic as cooking and bathing, and as essential as song and dance. It’s not something that needs a lengthy explanation — whether you’re 3 or 103, it’s the tingly feeling you get in the bottom of your stomach when you venture into unknown terrain. Across ages and cultures, there […]
Architect Alastair Parvin came to TED2013 with questions that challenge our preconceptions about building. How about we involve everyone in the architectural design process, not just professional architects building for the super-wealthy? What about a world in which cities are built by citizens? Parvin isn’t merely being rhetorical, as he shares in today’s talk. He […]
Maker, innovator, and cottage industrialist Dominic Muren wants making to be open, global and modular. He’s just launched his latest project, Alchematter — an online open source platform that breaks down and spells out instructions on how to make, well, anything. He gives us the ins and outs of the site, covering everything from reverse […]
“We may not yet have the flying car that science fiction promised us,” says Catarina Mota in today’s talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012. “But we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.” As Mota demonstrates, smart materials will […]
One of the things we’re interested in exploring here at TED is … what happens after a talk? Most often, a speaker is telling us a story without an ending — a tale that’s just beginning rather than coming to an end. That’s certainly the case with TED2013 speaker Alastair Parvin, whose project, Wikihouse, is really just […]
Congratulations is in order for TED Fellow Jon Gosier. His mobile app, Abayima, has been awarded a $150,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, which funds innovative projects designed to get information to all corners of the globe. While smartphones may be the norm in the West, most mobile phone users in the world — […]
“This is my brain cancer. It isn’t nice,” says Salvatore Iaconesi, the engineer, artist and TED Fellow who recently opened up his medical files to the world, crowdsourcing cures of the medical type as well as those for the soul. In this just-released talk from TEDxTransmedia, Iaconesi explains why he made the decision to release […]
[ted id=1585 width=560 height=315] In the late 1800s, Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had a theory that yellow fever was spread by mosquitos — rather than by dirty clothing, as was the belief of the day. To test his theory, he asked living, breathing human beings to be voluntarily infected with the disease. It was devastating, […]
[ted id=1570]As computers have gotten more complex, even tech literate users have become detached from the basics of how they function. This is what Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan noticed with their computer science students in Israel. As Schocken explains in this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, the pair decided to have their students build a […]
In early September, data artist and TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi announced to the world that he had brain cancer. And he refused to let his medical records stay sealed. “They were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the […]
Every day, 450,000 people log on to TED.com. But where are they located? And what are they watching—our newest offerings or our classic talks? In the spirit of visual data artists like Hans Rosling and David McCandless, TED web engineer Alex Dean created a map of the United States which shows when and where TEDTalks […]
[ted id=1546] The open-source programming world has a lot to teach democracy, says Clay Shirky. In this fascinating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Shirky harkens back to the early days of the printing press. At the time, a group of “natural philosophers” (who would later adopt the term “scientists”) called the Invisible College realized that the […]
Watch this TEDTalk >> Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project. An interaction designer and an educator, the spirited Italian bounds onto the stage to tell us a story. “A few weeks ago, a friend gave a toy car to his 8-year-old son,” he says. “But instead of going to buy one, he […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Admiral James Stavridis is the Supreme Commander of NATO. He is a proponent of what he calls open-source security. He is looking at 21st century security in a very different way than we’ve looked at security before. From walls to bridges Looking back to the security paradigm of the recent past, he […]