Via the TED Fellows blog, the gorgeous text that Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo just spoke onstage at TEDWomen. "My name is Iyeoka Ivie Arabomen Okoawo. My father named me after my grandmother. My name means I want to be respected." She does not know her beauty She thinks her brown skin has too many flaws If she could see her image in the Unogbo R...

Courtney Martin: "Our generation is painted as apathetic. I'd say we're overwhelmed." Sheryl Sandberg: No one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side (instead of at the table). Columnist Mona Eltahawy says the conversation on Muslim women is usually this: "headscarves and hymens." ...

Jennifer Mascia reports on gun violence in America. For more than a year, at The New York Times, she and Joe Nocera wrote “The Gun Report,” a daily series telling the stories of people killed by gunfire in the US. The series was personal for her; one of the people she wrote about was a friend, Ali Eskandarian. But it turns out the subject hi...

Yesterday at TEDMED, TEDTalks favorite Paul Stamets gave an emotional talk about new medical uses for mushrooms -- including a variety that, he says, helped treat his mother's cancer. Stamets spoke about powerful medical uses for mushrooms and their extracts, from anti-tuberculosis effects (Agarikon) to Cordyceps, a treasure trove of potenti...

John Maeda still remembers a parent-teacher conference from when he was a child. Maeda beamed with pride as his teacher told his father, “John is good at math and art.” However, the next day, when Maeda’s father recounted the conference to a customer at his store, all he remembered was, “John is good at math.” Maeda, now the President of th...

The daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Hannah Brock started playing the drums at her school in Beijing at the age of 3. By 4, she had started the piano and the guzheng, an ancient instrument that looks rather like a large zither and is played with plectrums taped to the fingers. Now all of 13 years old, the young maestro is ons...

Kakenya Ntaiya was engaged at 5-years-old, her family members regularly whispering in her ear, “Your husband just passed by.” This was the traditional path that unfolded before girls in the Maasai village in Kenya where Ntaiya grew up. “In Maasai culture, the boys are brought up to be warriors, the girls are brought up to be mothers,” says N...

In today’s thrilling TED-Ed lesson, Bill Nye the Science Guy admits that he has S.O.D., otherwise known as Sundial Obsessive Disorder. But there is a good reason for it -- a sundial helped Nye’s father escape from a prison camp in China during World War II, launching a lifelong obsession that Nye eventually picked up himself. At an event s...

Stephen Friend wants your genes -- no, really. Today at TED2014 he announced  the Resilience Project, a new crowdsourced effort to understand the quirks and patterns of human genetic code that control -- and could help treat -- genetic diseases. Thirty years ago, the open-science advocate was working as a pediatric oncologist at the Children’...

In this super cool talk from TEDxTokyo, magician Kohtaro Fujiyama morphs ripped pieces of paper into butterflies, and then lets them take flight, controlling their motion by waving fans. (Fast forward to 1:43 to watch.) This fascinating display is an adaptation of tezuma, a classic form of Edo magic that fuses illusion, story and music. It’s ...

By Samantha Kelly TED University kicks off the TEDGlobal 2013 conference with purpose -- as a reminder that the people who attend TEDGlobal are not just here to watch, but rather, they're here to share ideas. At TED U, audience members brave the stage and give their own TED Talks that run the emotional gamut of emotional, funny, moving, innov...

TED speaker Rick Smolan is asking students between the ages of 13 and 18 to become “Data Detectives” for a new project he's unveiling today -- and that he will talk about at TEDYouth this Saturday. By answering a 20-question online survey, teenagers will help build a data set that will let then compare themselves to teens all over the wor...

The final session of TEDYouth 2014 focuses on what makes us human -- the way we talk, the way we walk, the words we sing, the waves we surf.  How jellyfish swim. On land, animals leave footprints that tell us a lot about their size, form and capabilities. Marine organisms do too—their footprints are “wake structures,” but they are hard to...

Zak Ebrahim is the son of a terrorist. Phyllis Rodriguez lost her son on 9/11. In an inspiring conversation, the two share their personal histories of lives devastated by violence -- and rebuilt by tolerance. Zak Ebrahim’s father was convicted of plotting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Phyllis Rodriguez’s son, Greg, worked in t...

George Takei played Captain Sulu on Star Trek -- the helmsman of the U.S.S. Enterprise who was good at everything from gymnastics to botany. In his TED Talk, Why I love a country that betrayed me, Takei gives some of his real-life backstory. Born in California in 1937, Takei recalls how, shortly after his fifth birthday, his parents woke him and...

Kimberley Motley is an impossible woman: The former Mrs. Wisconsin, whose father is African-American and mother is a North Korean refugee, is the first foreigner to litigate in the courts of Afghanistan. Today she closes the penultimate session at TEDGlobal 2014 to send a message to the world: Our laws can protect us, as long as we know how ...

Zak Ebrahim is the son of a terrorist—his father helped plan the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In the forthcoming TED Book, The Terrorist’s Son: A Story of Choice, Ebrahim tells the incredible story of how he chose a different direction, toward empathy and tolerance. Preview Zak’s riveting story in the trailer above. This titl...

Hacking has always been an important component of healthy democracies. Despite the bad connotation the word often has these days -- indicating rogue criminals breaking into computer systems, stealing identities, spying or worse -- hacking is really just any amateur innovation on an existing system. And that “system” doesn’t have to be a tech...

Yo-yo champion BLACK does, in fact, wear a special costume -- all black, with a red sash. But he has not always been a superhero. In his very sweet talk from TED2013, BLACK reveals that as a young teenager he struggled with feelings of worthlessness -- and that it was dedicating himself to the yo-yo that pulled him through it. Again as an adul...

Marketing and brand strategist Steven Addis turns up to show the 15 most treasured photographs in his collection. But these are not the highly produced shots you might expect from one who works in visual communications. Instead, they are the father-daughter snapshots he started as a unwitting project when his child was born. Every year on the sa...

Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the internet: Scientists have discovered a geologic feature in Antarctica … that is the size of the Grand Canyon. [Atlantic Wire] . At TEDGlobal 2009, economist Paul Romer shared his vision of "charter cities." As the first one is being debated and planned in Honduras, the fourth-poorest count...

"I don't know how to introduce this, so I'll just say, 'Hetain Patel,'" says TED curator Chris Anderson. So no one knows what to expect, and that's as may be, because this is some crazy right here. Patel walks onstage and crouches in a chair next to the dancer Yuyu Rau. He speaks a few sentences in Mandarin, and Rau proceeds to translate....

Sanjay Pradhan was thrilled when, at age six, a cart full of sweets was wheeled to his family’s doorstep in Bihar, India. The gift, however, was intended as a bribe for his father, who was responsible for building roads in India’s poorest state. “My father had developed a firm stance against corruption, even though he was harassed and threa...

Jason McCue takes the stage wearing a T-shirt reading "Free Yulia in Ukraine." It's a reference to the 2011 imprisonment of Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko and a hint of what's to come in his talk: a discussion of terrorism and the law. "We are at war with a new form of terrorism," he says. The traditional perception of terrorism, t...

Family stories are a treasure. But when you hear the same ones over and over, they can get tarnished. Facilitator Priya Parker shares the simple trick that led to an unforgettable evening for her and her loved ones. In my own life and in my 15 years of designing transformative gatherings, I’ve discovered that the way we gather really matters. G...

Smart stuff from the comments: TED community member Phillip Farris shared this in response to the TED Talk by nuclear physicist Taylor Wilson: My radical plan for small nuclear fission reactors: "Despite the rampant assumptions regarding nuclear power and its perceived dangers, Wilson’s fission idea addresses many of the problems found in react...

The old saying goes: "Necessity is the mother of invention." Folded into this truism is a nugget of wisdom: that women so often are the ones driving innovation, the creative powerhouses surfacing new concepts, and the active force crystalizing change in communities near and far. This is the spirit that TEDWomen 2013 will celebrate with its them...

"The birds and the bees" and "the facts of life." These are the terms adults have come up with when it comes to talking to kids about sex. At TED2012, writer John Bohannon showed dismay at the fact that adults don’t feel comfortable talking to kids about sex, or drugs for that matter, without resorting to scare tactics. In an acrobatic perfor...

Leslie Morgan Steiner thought that she’d found true love in her early 20s. Instead, she found herself married to a man who repeatedly pointed a gun at her head and threatened to kill her. In today’s brave talk, given at TEDxRainier, Steiner tells the story of how she -- a Harvard-educated magazine editor turned businesswoman -- fell into ...

Have boys bottomed out? A new TED Book says yes. The culprit: the rampant overuse of video games and online porn. In their provocative ebook The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, celebrated psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan say that an addiction to video games and online porn have created...