TED is always looking for new voices with fresh ideas -- and earlier this winter, we opened a challenge to the world: make a one-minute audition video that makes the case for your TED Talk. More than 1,200 people applied to be a part of the Idea Search program this year, and on Wednesday night at our New York headquarters, 13 audition finali...

More than 100 speakers -- activists, scientists, adventurers, change-makers and more -- took the stage to give the talk of their lives this week in Vancouver at TED2018. One blog post could never hope to hold all of the extraordinary wisdom they shared. Here’s a (shamelessly inexhaustive) list of the themes and highlights we heard throughout the...

TED2014 is our 30th-anniversary conference, and the speaker lineup is -- in a word -- thrilling. Speakers will touch on topics ranging from technology, entertainment, design and education to climate change, architecture, music, physics, parenting, typography, fireflies and the Golden Gate Bridge. Randall Munroe of xkcd will talk about his passio...

40+ TED speakers recommend the books you need to read right now. OK, so it's not summer everywhere right now. But whatever the weather, it's always time to read a good book. So we compiled summer reading recommendations from TED speakers, and then organized them according to the various situations in which you might find yourself now or through...

Polar explorer Ben Saunders took the stage at the TEDSalon in London on November 7 to ask the question: "If everything is being done somewhere by someone and we can participate virtually, then why bother leaving the house?" A journalist had posed this question to him weeks earlier. He addressed it onstage through both his own experience of skiin...

Astrophysicist, educator, and humanitarian Hakeem Oluseyi trounced race and class to become an important contributor to computer technology and space research. Back on Earth, he's doing all he can to give young and underfunded scientists a chance to reach for the stars. Yours is an extraordinary story. You grew up impoverished -- moving frequ...

Two years ago, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson graced the TEDWomen stage with a moving talk about why climate change is not only a threat to our environment, but also a threat to the human rights of many poor and marginalized people around the world. Mary is an incredible person who inspires me greatly. Besides being the first w...

In his classic Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote one of his most famous lines: "Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." TED is anchored by the belief that brilliance is a public good -- that inspiration, intellectualism, passion and the wond...

For the past four years, TED has held an annual evening salon in New York City to find talents, voices and ideas that the world needs to hear. At TED@NYC, an energetic audience gathers over dinner and drinks and watches a passionate lineup of speakers deliver short, rapid-fire talks and performances. The twist? For this event, we put out an op...

Can music be a medical instrument? In a moving talk from TEDMed, Robert Gupta reveals that it certainly can be. He gives as an example the work of neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug, one of the pioneers of melodic intonation therapy. Schlaug noticed that, while stroke victims with aphasia could not utter a sentence, they could still sing the l...

LEGOs are for building spaceships, crafting castles and getting lost in your couch. But what if they could be used not just to dream of lands long ago and times far away, but to inspire future scientists? That’s what writer Maia Weinstock had in mind when she made these STEM scientist action figures. Weinstock has turned TED Fellows Jedid...

Freeman Hrabowski is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), which has made an extraordinary name for itself educating students of all types in science and engineering. "What makes our story especially important," says Hrabowski, "is that we have learned so much from students who are typically not at the top of the ...

TED Talks often get 100 or more comments -- a mixed bag of kudos, critiques and questions. Looking back on the year, here are a few comments that wowed us. Do you know more about a topic than the speaker had time to share in their talk? Here’s a great example of how a knowledgeable commenter filled in some of the blanks. We know that for...

TED Fellow Lucy McRae (watch her TED Talk) is a body architect -- an artist who explores how technology and the body may someday meet and merge. Her latest project is a fantastical and frothy music video for "Dream a Little Crazy” by Australian band Architecture in Helsinki. Watch the mouth-watering video above, and then read all about how Mc...

In an incredible session, speakers and performers laid out the biggest problems facing the world -- from political and economic catastrophe to rising violence and deepfakes -- and some new thinking on solutions. The event: TEDSummit 2019, Session 3: The Big Rethink, hosted by Corey Hajim and Cyndi Stivers When and where: Tuesday, July ...

  Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he ...

  Summer: the season for cracking open a good book under the shade of a tree. Below, we’ve compiled about 70 stellar book recommendations from members of the TED community. Warning: not all of these books can be classified as beach reads. And we think that is a good thing. Picks from Elizabeth Gilbert, author  The Principles of Uncertainty ...

TED2015 featured more than 90 speakers, and more than 20 hours of talks. We turned our perceptions inside-out, saw some new technology, traveled to space more than once, heard astounding life stories, learned about unusual materials, rethought artistic expression and contemplated the divides of society, with an eye toward ending injustice. ...

We are thrilled to announce the new class of Fellows for TED2015. These 21 game-changing thinkers represent 15 countries—including, for the first time in our program, Vietnam, Romania and Tunisia. They work across disciplines, at the forefront of their fields. They include a South African physicist using lasers to target HIV and cancer; a Germ...

This year's annual TEDYouth event, themed "The Spark," is moving south. On Saturday, November 16, we'll bring together 400 middle and high school students at the Civic Theatre in New Orleans, Louisiana. Attendance is free, so if this sounds like something you'd be up for, you should apply to come join us » At the conference, more than 20 ...

Check out the concepts and projects from science, design and technology that will engage and inspire us in 2017. In science: Once-taboo drugs get respectable Magic mushrooms may help ease the fear of death in cancer patients; MDMA (also known as ecstasy) is being investigated to treat post-traumatic stress disorder; and ketamine, a horse tra...

CERN particle physicist Bilge Demirköz investigates everything from dark matter to the possibility of antigalaxies, trying to understand what we -- and the universe -- are made of. What is it about space and the investigation of dark matter and antimatter that captures your imagination? Well to me, the question is, Why are we here? Or, wh...

With TEDSummit 2019 just two months away, it's time to unveil the first group of speakers that will take to the stage in Edinburgh, Scotland, from July 21-25. Three years ago, more than 1,000 members of the TED global community convened in Banff, Canada, for the first-ever TEDSummit. We talked about the fracturing state of the world, the ...

Remember TED Talks by Joshua Prager, John McWhorter, Sleepy Man Banjo Boys and Hannah Brencher? All fantastic finds from previous talent searches. Now, we're running a similar event once again. Known as TED@NYC, the evening event will be held on October 8. It's a chance to find fresh voices to ring out on the TED main stage and be heard on t...

TED Playlists are designed to give you deep dive into the topics that fascinate you— like “Re-imagining school,” “The future of medicine,” and “How to live with robots.” To celebrate our billionth video view earlier this month, we also asked some incredible personalities in the areas of technology, entertainment and design -- from Bill Gates...

Daniel Suarez is a former systems consultant turned novelist who will speak in session two at TEDGlobal 2013. Officially subtitled "Those Flying Things," this is unofficially known as the drone session, and it will feature various speakers tackling the topic of unmanned aerial vehicles. For his part, Suarez will expound on some of the themes...

So, you might know me. I ran the digital side of The Onion for a long time; I’m the author of How to Be Black. People call me to do things like host White House events on innovation, do the wrap-up at TED salons, join semi-secret cabals at MIT, and comment on the teevee. The underlying constant in my multi-hyphenate life is running my creative c...

 CRISPR-Cas9 could change the human genome for generations. Here's why its inventor is trying to press pause. Should scientists edit the human genome, striking out undesirable traits like so many typos? “My own views are still forming,” says Jennifer Doudna, who with her research partner, Emmanuelle Charpentier, developed a powerful gene editin...

Are we alone? It’s a question with which we are all familiar. Jill Tarter says she started asking it “as a little girl, walking along the deserted and dark beaches of Manasota Key, Florida, holding on to my father's hand.” She went on to advanced studies in engineering, physics and astrophysics, to pursue a career searching for intelligent life ...

Pope Francis’ recent Encyclical has been widely praised for supporting the science on climate change. As Johan Rockström, who’s been involved in high level discussions between scientists and the Vatican explains, the story of how the Pope has integrated science and religion represents an important shift. On June 18, 2015, Pope Francis issued th...