As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Flip the switch. Sangeeta Bhatia is the senior author on a paper that makes the genome editing power of CRISPR responsive to ultraviolet light. As detailed in academic journal Angewandte Chemie, the researchers developed a system where gene editing oc...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A subway line with museum-worthy art. After 45 years of construction and $4.5 billion spent, the first section of New York City’s Second Avenue subway line opened on January 1 with four stations. Maybe the best feature of the new line? The amazing art...

Among many TED Conversations, below we are highlighting some of the TED.com community's most-discussed ones: Technology doesn't create loneliness, it reveals it -- Join the conversation here >> Willis Phu: "When relationships become out of balance, would technology really fill the void or is it a vapid substitution? Like Dr. Turkle s...

The great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude, says public-interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson. It was the ideology of white supremacy used to justify it -- and it’s an ugly part of our history we need to acknowledge. Today in America we are not free. We are burdened by a history of racial inequality and injustice. It compromises ...

She’s best described as the modern-day Indiana Jones. Using infrared imagery from satellites, she identifies ancient sites lost in time. In Egypt, she helped locate 17 potential pyramids, plus 1,000 potential forgotten tombs and 3,100 possible lost settlements. That’s in addition to her discoveries throughout the Roman Empire. Sarah Parca...

Join us on Facebook Live for another episode of TED Dialogues, our response to current events, adding insight, context and nuance to the conversations we're having right now. Join us Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 1–2pm on TED's Facebook page. Our speakers are two historians who will try to help us make sense of what's going on in Washington:...

What is the city of the future? What will it look like? How will it come to be? This weekend, from Taipei to Melbourne to Mexico City, over 100 local organizers will offer their answers at TEDx events in honor of TEDCity2.0, a day-long TED event celebrating urban innovation. TED challenged organizers to remix the official TEDCity2.0 posters, ...

Psychologist Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works, studies the nature of pleasure. At TED Global he gave a witty and riveting talk on how knowing the history of an object (or a relationship with a person) can profoundly affect our enjoyment of it or them. After the conference, TED's Ben Lillie caught up with him to talk about why that is...

In the 1820s, books were a rare and precious luxury for most Americans. The radical idea of free knowledge access for all ages --  aka the public library system -- had yet to flower in the United States. Still, there were voracious readers on the frontier -- including an impoverished young Abraham Lincoln, notes Doris Kearns Goodwin (TED Talk:...

Got a car full of restless kids and miles of road ahead of you? These 8 TED-Ed lessons will entertain and amaze them -- and teach them a thing or two along the way. Go here now to watch the entire playlist. 1. TED-Ed Lesson: Why do we itch? Why to watch: Sometimes it’s an allergic reaction, other times it’s a bug bite, and there just might be...

TED Talks often get 100 or more comments -- usually a mixed bag of kudos, critiques and questions. Looking back on the year, we’d like to share a few comments that wowed us. These intelligent, observant contributions took the talks beyond their 18 minutes and into an ongoing conversation. Every speaker appreciates a “Great job!” but here’...

Architecture and microbiology may seem like an odd couple, but TED Senior Fellow Jessica Green would beg to differ. In today’s talk, she reveals what’s teeming all over the surfaces around us, and how it can help us build smarter, healthier buildings. As the founding director of the Biology in the Built Environment Center at the University of...

To commence TED Fellows Session 2, multi-hyphenate Paul Rucker takes the stage with his cello. (Spoiler alert: you will see him later in this writeup showcasing another artform.) Inspired by his mother, who learned to play the organ through a mail-order course, Rucker taught himself how to play this instrument. But right here on the TED Fell...

Five powerful poems to commemorate this moment in time, as we look toward the 2017 US Presidential inauguration ceremony. Whatever your politics, poetry can help. As President John F. Kennedy put it, “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.” That's ...

If journalism is the first draft of history, whose draft will future generations read of the events surrounding Michael Brown's death? There is one fact that no one disputes: On August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a mother's 18-year-old son was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson. What comes next is up to all of us. 7 hours of ra...

Presentations are tricky beasts. That is, giving a really good one is much, much harder than it looks. Here at TED we think about this a lot, working with speakers to help them give the best talk possible. Irritatingly, the most important lesson of all is that there is no formula for success. What works for one person would make another look lik...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Angie Miller was the New Hampshire Teacher of the Year in 2011. She has three children, and she shares a box in which she keeps all her teaching paraphernalia. It's filled with the thank-you notes you might expect, but it also includes some of her less savored moments, including letters of reprimand from admin...

As always, many members of the TED community have been popping in the news this week. Below, some highlights. Liu Bolin uses paint to make himself disappear into backgrounds. In this video from The Creators Project, Bolin shows the next evolution—group versions of his signature work. Watch him turn his friends into money in the video above, ...

Every week at TED’s New York office, one media team staffer shares a handful of things on the web that intrigued, shocked or amused them. We call this session: Previously on the Internet. Here are this week’s finds, from me, Thu-Huong Ha, TED's editorial projects specialist. A tale of two very different empires The Ottoman Empire was kno...

Crystal Giants by Giovanni Badino This book shows clearly how the reality of nature can go far beyond human imagination. Badino and the explorers of La Venta bring the reader on the exploration of one of the most astonishing places of the world, the Giant Crystal Cave of Naica, discovered in a silver mine in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 2000. This und...

As we crisscrossed the globe to find you fresh perspectives for TED2013 in our worldwide Talent Search, a common theme emerged: cultural heritage in the 21st century. The tangible, intangible and natural elements that define our ways of life touch every aspect of our existence — from language to landscapes to religion to architecture. And th...

MoveTVnetwork asked dancer and choreographer Galen Hooks, shown above in rehearsal with The LXD, about her favorite performing moment. In this wonderful 4-minute interview, she talks about what it was like to dance onstage at TED2010 -- and to receive the longest standing ovation in TED history: Watch the full video of The LXD at TED2...

In 2006, Jake Barton of the interactive media design firm Local Projects received a challenge unlike any other: to create the installations for the 9/11 Memorial Museum, which will open in 2014, with Thinc Design. September 11 is not a historical event made safe and sterile by the passage of decades and centuries. Today is just the 12th anni...

The day after the Brexit referendum, British journalist (and recently announced Pulitzer Prize finalist) Carole Cadwalladr went to her home region of South Wales to investigate why so many voters had elected to leave the European Union. She asked residents of the traditionally left-wing town of Ebbw Vale, a place newly rejuvenated by EU i...

Here's a list of specific steps you can take, as recommended by members of the TED community. Educate Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's New York Times bestseller How to Be an Antiracist is one of the most important books I've ever read. (Watch Dr. Kendi speak on "how to build an antiracist world" here.) He provides an empowering lens and language to unders...

TED2018, themed "The Age of Amazement," kicked off Tuesday with two eye-opening sessions of talks from this year's TED Fellows -- with tech and science demos, music, dance and comedy -- as well as the opening of exhibits and, of course, a memorable Session 1 full of bold ideas, tough truths and jaw-dropping creative visions. Here are some of ...

At TEDxSummit, Walters Art Museum curator William Noel gave this fascinating talk on revealing the lost codex of Archimedes. The TED Blog caught up with him to talk about the digital future of a traditionally closed institution: the art museum. As with the Archimedes codex, the Walters Art Museum’s online collection operates under the Cre...

In an experimental Session 6, Bill Gates hosted and guest-curated the speaker lineup. David Christian charts our course from the Big Bang to today: "To understand complexity, you have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it." Amina Az-Zubair on the UN Millennium Development Goals in Nigeria: "We are making p...

Erin Freschi, a California mom who has worked in education for nearly 25 years, has a nightly ritual with her 8-year-old son, Sawyer. Instead of bedtime stories or songs, Freschi and her son wind down by watching TED Talks. The name of their unique ritual? TED Before Bed. “It started when Sawyer was in first grade,” said Freschi. “He i...

In today's moving TED Talk, Jake Barton of the design firm Local Projects shares the idea at the core of the yet-to-open National September 11 Memorial Museum: that museum-goers need to be included in the telling of the story. "The event is so recent, somewhere between history and current events," says Barton, explaining that more than a third o...