Nothing says “future” quite like humanity’s quest to understand our cosmic surroundings. The fourth day of TEDWomen Presents — an online festival featuring interviews with leading women, interactive workshops, specially curated film screenings and more — focused on science and the future, with a conversation between astronomer Heidi Hammel and science journalist Nadia Drake. Big […]
“We are going to Mars. Not just astronauts, but thousands of people are going to colonize Mars. Soon.”
“Are we alone? Is there life out there?” asks Sara Seager on the stage in Session 4 of TED2015. “These questions have been around for thousands of years since the days of the Greek philosophers. I’m here to tell you just how close we are getting.” Seager is a professor at MIT who has been referred […]
“When our ancestors looked up at the night sky, they saw tools for navigation. They saw myths, and they saw the heavens,” says June Cohen, the host of Session 4 of TED2015. “But technology has given us so many new clues. … Space exploration has never been as fascinating and relevant as it is today.” Here’s […]
When Justin Dowd worked as a food runner at a restaurant, he would sometimes doodle on the chalkboard in the kitchen. He had no idea that this skill — coupled with his ability to explain physics — would one day win him a trip to space. The science writer and animator who created the TED-Ed lesson “Could comets […]
Since the first teaser in late 2013, we’ve been in countdown mode for Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s new outer-space epic that promises to blast us through space and time and wormholes. If you’re as excited as we are but can’t clear three hours to go see the whole movie, here’s the plot we could figure out […]
Or, asks retired colonel Chris Hadfield to the crowd at TED2014, “What’s the most dangerous? And, why did you do it?” For Hadfield, an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency and a commander of the International Space Station for 3 months, it was to ride a rocket ship into orbit. Watch Chris Hadfield’s TED Talk >> […]
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. Moon Day is held every July 20 to commemorate this momentous feat. 43 years later, humanity is still looking to the sky, mesmerized by lunar bodies. However, it is not just Earth’s moon we’re studying anymore. With better satellites and […]
Today may go down in history as The Day the Earth Smiled. Or, at least, that is what TED speaker Carolyn Porco (watch her talk) is hoping. Today from 9:27 to 9:42 pm GMT, the Cassini spaceship — an unmanned ship studying Saturn — will be taking a photograph of Saturn and its ring system. And […]
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 […]
In her 2007 TED Talk, “This is Saturn,” planetary scientist Carolyn Porco blew some minds with images taken by Cassini, the robot spaceship launched in October 1997 to study and photograph Saturn and its accompanying moons. Gleaning “oohs” and “aahs” from the assembled TED audience, she concluded with a stunning shot of a backlit picture […]
A raspberry has now gone where no raspberry has (presumably) gone before. The photo of the Earth’s curvature above was not taken with an expensive camera aboard a rocket. No, it was taken using a Raspberry Pi — the $25 single-board computer — and a Raspberry Pi camera, a new low-cost peripheral that started shipping […]
Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who’s become a YouTube sensation aboard the International Space Station, has showed us why tears won’t fall in space and the dangers of clipping one’s fingernails in zero gravity. But he has truly outdone himself with his latest video. Scheduled to leave the space station tonight at 7pm – and […]
Today—March 21, 2013—the much-anticipated cosmological results from the Planck satellite have been released. In a recent blog post on her own website, TED Fellow and cosmologist Renée Hlozek describes why this is a big day for astrophysics and cosmology. We asked her to explain what the excitement is all about. “Planck is the ‘next generation’ satellite that measures the tiny fluctuations in […]
Huddle around the radio, all. TED Radio Hour’s second season is under way and episode two, “Peering into Space” premieres today. Host Guy Raz says that this episode may even be his favorite created so far. In an interview with the TED Blog, he said, “It totally changed my world … I think people who […]
TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, three new playlists are available: “Ancient clues,” “Planes, trains and automobiles” and “Are we alone in the universe?” Ancient clues Five fascinating talks by archaeologists and evolutionary biologists about humanity’s beginnings and […]