Johan Rockström returns to the TEDGlobal three years after his talk on environmental development to talk about the -- hopeful! -- future of our environment in crisis. Life in the Holocene is full of problems, but it's not without unexpected turns of resilience and promise. Rockström grasps a piece of metal on stage, explaining that th...

“Economic development is of the people, by the people and for the people,” declared entrepreneur and economist Iqbal Quadir on the TED stage back in 2005. In his talk, he offered a bold vision for bottom-up development and shared a searing critique of foreign aid -- that it actually does more harm than good. His own story of innovation in his na...

For decades, scientists said that the human brain contains 100 billion neurons. However, when neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel hunted for the source of this often-quoted number, she couldn't locate one. So she set out to count herself ... by making brain soup. She brings a vial of brain soup with her onto the TEDGlobal 2013 stage. T...

When we come thisclose to triumph, we gain potent energy that we can use to fuel later success, says business school professor Monica Wadhwa. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here. When we daydream abou...

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would stretch 1,700 miles from Western Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas. And it has become a touchstone for the bitter fight over America's energy future. Opponents say the pipeline -- designed to bring oil from Canadian tar sands down through the United States -- would further bind future generations to outdat...

“I was excited to be a part of the ‘Dream’ theme,” says Al Gore as he walks onto the TED2016 stage. “But then I found out I was leading off the nightmare section.” He admits that what we’ve doing to our world is a nightmare, and that the consequences we’re seeing are quite scary: “Every night on the news is like a nature hike through the Boo...

On March 1 -- just two days after Elon Musk appeared on the TED2013 stage -- a SpaceX CRS-2 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission for the International Space Station. Two days later, after the righting of a glitch, its Dragon capsule delivered a half-ton of supplies for the astronauts on board. And four days after that, ...

Hassine Labaied is here to talk wind. Specifically, wind power. "Wind is clean, free, perpetually renewable and widely distributed across the globe," he says. "Yet the current main wind technology, the turbine, is still based on a windmill system." And existing turbines are terribly inefficient: 70% of wind power is simply lost, while the de...

Spiral galaxies are a stunning sight. As Don Lincoln explains in one of this week’s TED-Ed lessons, these galaxies were thought to rotate in highly predictable dances, with stars close to the center moving slowly and stars further away rotating quickly because they are pulled by the mass of the stars between them and the center. The stars loc...

Here’s a riddle for you: A plane flew for five days and nights, staying airborne for 118 hours. But it didn’t use a single drop of fuel. How? Because it’s solar-powered. Carrying some 17,000 solar cells, the Solar Impulse 2 plane ascends to 28,000 feet during the day to collect enough solar energy to charge the batteries attached to four electr...

Steve Howard has spent his life working toward sustainability. So on the TEDGlobal 2013 stage, he explains why he wanted to work for, of all places, Ikea. Howard, who now holds the delightful title of Chief Sustainability Officer at the Scandinavian furniture behemoth, says that the company is dedicated to sustainability because of three ...

From machine intelligence to post-subsistence economies, Google's Blaise Agüera y Arcas lays out 6 (okay, 7) ways everything is set to change. How will our minds be blown in the next 30 years? Well, that's quite a long time, given the acceleration in history. Still, I'll be brave and make six hypotheses. 1. Machine Intelligence I think that...

"The whole planet needs a lot of energy," begins Michel Laberge, in an understatement. So far, he says, we've been running on fossil fuels, and it's been difficult to find something as cost-effective to replace them. Laberge is a fan of nuclear power, which he thinks is the best solution to that problem in the long run.There are two ways to prod...

Skylar Tibbits makes things that assemble themselves, with potential large-scale applications from self-adjusting water pipes to self-assembling structures in space. At his recently founded Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, he's pioneering 4D printing -- using smart materials to make objects that change shape and evolve. Here, he explains how 4D print...

There's a particular occupational hazard associated with covering TED conferences: having your mind blown. University of Pennsylvania physicist and applied engineer Aaswath Raman does just that with his rethinking of air-conditioning. Now, as anyone who's ever escaped to the movies on a scorching day can attest, sitting in a room that has be...

This beautiful blue marble, our shared earth: On a sunny morning in Vancouver, we pack into the darkened TED theater to learn more about its mysteries, its challenges, and how we might help it thrive. There's no shiny "nature porn" here (well, maybe a little bit) but a clear-eyed look at what's going right and wrong. The next renewable re...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Drawn into controversy Wearing his wide-brimmed hat, climate scientist James Hansen starts his TEDTalk by asking, "What do I know that would cause me, a reticent midwestern scientist, to get arrested in front of the White House, protesting?" Hansen studied under professor James Van Allen, who told him ab...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson "The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago," says MIT professor, Donald Sadoway, now on stage at TED2012 to talk power. "The way things stand, electricity demand must be in balance with electricity supply." The problem is: coal and nuclear plants can't address demand fa...

Lucianne Walkowicz, speaking at the TEDGlobal 2011 TED Fellows Talks, Monday, July 11, 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo: James Duncan Davidson / TED Lars Jan, transmedia director: Lars creates multimedia performances that questions the boundaries between truth and fiction. Collaborating with "Paul," a character that operates in the rea...

New York restaurants and grocers scramble to get their hands on fresh, local produce. So what could be better than veggies grown right in the city? On a rooftop in Brooklyn, Viraj Puri runs Gotham Greens, a hydroponic greenhouse that cultivates delicious, fresh produce -- using a fraction of the water and space needed for conventional agricult...

Last October, we posted this TEDTalk given at TEDGlobal 2011 by plastic engineer Mike Biddle, Founder and President of MBA Polymers, which has developed an incredibly energy and economically efficient method to recycle plastics -- by turning it into the raw material  again. The TEDtalk elicited over 1000 comments and questions on TED.com, Y...

Biomineralogist Damian Palin (watch his TED Talk) collaborates with bacteria to mine valuable minerals from desalination brine, the toxic byproduct of desalinating seawater -- creating wealth from waste while protecting the environment. You work in the field of geomicrobiology. What is it, and why is it becoming increasingly important? Geo...

Will the future of food look like the past? Past the muddy edges of Mace Chasm Road, live music rang out from a glowing white tent near the tiny village of Keeseville, NY, one recent Thursday night. A crowd surged around a brightly lit food truck and eddied near a tiny brewery built inside a barn. Dylan Badger, trained in sustainable agricult...

It can be easy to feel hopeless when it comes to the global climate. Meet three leaders who are actually making a difference. What does “making a real difference about climate change” mean, when clearly everything we've done so far hasn't been enough? Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 400 parts per million and rising. The Arctic ice cap hit...

Featured image: Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, who first developed the theory explaining the process of nuclear fission. Theoretical physicist (and TED Fellow) Shohini Ghose has two great passions: physics, and advocating for gender equity in the sciences. “There are still relatively few women in physics – and the higher up the ladder in ac...

The launch of Countdown, a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, is just a few weeks away. Initiated by TED and Future Stewards, Countdown is a global initiative that aims to mobilize millions to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Speakers will outline what a healthy, abundant, zero-emission futur...

Research-backed advice for what you need to do on your holiday break (and how long you should do it for) Most of us assume that the best way to recover our energy is to take a long, leisurely vacation. It’s as if we have a reservoir of mental energy we gradually consume at work, and we need time away from the office to refill it. According to t...

We've all heard of 3D printing. But what the heck is 4D printing? During TED Senior Fellow's Skylar Tibbits' talk at TED University on Thursday, he unveiled the concept -- 3D printed objects that seamlessly continue to expand, fold and harden into different forms (see video below). The talk has gotten a lot of attention. We spoke to Skylar a...

The Keystone XL pipeline, which has been proposed to transport oil the 1700 miles from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, is something of a Rorschach test in the United States. Advocates of the pipeline believe that it’s the holy-grail project that will create jobs for Americans and ensure the country’s oil independence. Opponents of the pipeline w...

Exploring space generates tons of data -- so much data that most of it is studied using algorithms, not human eyes. But algorithms are not very good at being creative. What happens when we let humans look at data? Sometimes, even amateurs find things that are surprising, remarkable and weird. Astronomer Tabetha Boyajian came to TED2016 with ...