The possibilities life affords us are endless. We can find them everywhere, at the micro and macro levels and across all fields. Do you see them? Look closer: they are there every time we use our curiosity and imagination to explore and try new things. For a second year, TED and Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, have partnered to explore t...

David Li is the founder of Shanghai-based hackerspace XinCheJian. He shares his take on life and work in the fast-paced Chinese city with Alex Gallafent. In 2005, at the start of my first visit to Shanghai, the city clothed itself in a growling thunderstorm. When dusk fell and neon began to score the sky, the city was more Blade Runner-y than...

For the ninth session of TED2017, hosted by TED's Editorial Director Helen Walters and Curation Director Kelly Stoetzel, we look into ourselves with seven speakers who take on subjects ranging from parenting to social interaction and heartbreak, revealing nuggets of wisdom that just might help you lead a better, more fulfilled life. The l...

The world’s problems demand bold, new solutions, so today’s children need to develop open, agile minds. Composer Anthony Brandt and neuroscientist David Eagleman tell you how to nurture them. Our children spend many of their waking hours in the classroom. It’s where their aspirations are nurtured and where they get their first sense of what the...

Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, is proud of her company’s emphasis on sharing. But now, a decade later, “it’s really time to push the envelope,” she says in today’s talk filmed at TEDGlobal 2012. Chase’s latest venture, Buzzcar, provides an online platform for people in France to rent cars from their friends and neighbors. “Instead of inve...

The rise of droids Andrew McAfee starts his TED2013 talk by making a forecast: "In the world that we're creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs." It's clear, he says, that big technology-driven changes in employment are coming. For ...

In his TED Talk, The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot, Daniel Suarez described the rise of drones, automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools. Here, he goes further, describing no less than a coming “automation revolution.” Drones are in the news these days. More than any other technology, they capture the zeitgeis...

The growing desert Allan Savory has dedicated his life to studying management of grasslands. And if that doesn't sound exciting, just wait, because it touches on the deepest roots of climate change and the future of the planet. "The most massive, tsunami, perfect storm is bearing down on us," is the grim beginning to Savory's talk. Thi...

Plus: Why you shouldn’t give probiotics to your dog. You are never really alone. On your skin, in your nose, in every inch of your personal space, you are accompanied by trillions of tiny organisms. Collectively, these microorganisms are known as the microbiome -- the complex ecosystem of microbes that share and shape our world. Yet the quest t...

Aziz Abu Sarah explains how he recovered from the murder of his brother and learned how peace and love can be potent tools of activism. “You are responsible for the terror attacks” said a man after a lecture I gave about religion and violence at an interfaith event in New Jersey two years ago. "Your people are trying to kill us." He was frus...

For most of us, trying to picture the future is a futile exercise that leads at best to some bad ideas that should likely never be shared out loud. For people like TED Fellow Chris Woebken, it's why the present exists. Along with Elliott Montgomery, Woebken runs The Extrapolation Factory, a studio devoted to imagining future scenarios. One re...

TED science curator David Biello exposes the odd couple behind the de-extinction movement: scientists and hunters. What does this say about our ambivalent attitude toward animals? Our world is the setting of a great murder mystery: Where did all the big animals go? Although Earth is the scene of the crime for many deaths -- it is estimated that...

With just two weeks to go before the 2012 presidential election in the US, eyes around the world are on the contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. As shown in last night’s debate, the election may well come down to a few key issues. So what matters most to Americans? The TED Blog read this Gallup poll on the issues that citizens want ...

Should the government act like a venture capitalist? It might seem crazy to some, but in today’s eye-opening talk, economist Mariana Mazzucato shows why it might just work -- and how it has, in fact, been working for decades. In this talk, Mazzucato flips the script on the image of a big government meddling in economic affairs, and instead s...

Early one morning, hours before the sun would rise, Lebanese-Egyptian artist, activist and historian Bahia Shehab was alone on the streets of Cairo, spray-painting a stenciled message that spoke out against the stripping of veiled women. It's a campaign she discussed in “A thousand times no,” her inspiring TED Talk, and it was not only a beaut...

 It turns out, many, many words in English don’t have a dictionary definition. Lexicographer Erin McKean and her team at Wordnik are on a mission to change that. Did you know that 52% of the unique words of English aren’t in major dictionaries? In 2010, Harvard researchers published findings in the journal Science that began to quantify the ...

The process for testing new drugs is clunky at best. As Susan Solomon reveals in her TED Talk, drug discovery on average takes 13 years, costs $4 billion, and has a 99% failure rate. Drugs are tested in the lab, then in animals, then in human trials that often aren’t big enough to be conclusive. (Human beings have a near infinite number of d...

A lyrical meditation on the quiet place within. The wait time at the Chichu Art Museum varies depending on the hour. According to the shuttle schedule, the white bus parks for as little as three minutes and as long as twenty-one before beeping, retracting its steps, closing its door, and driving back the way it came. But no matter the condition...

Some people say that creating true innovation is like capturing lightning in a bottle. Not so, says BCG managing director Martin Reeves. It’s actually a process that can be considered, managed and adapted. Picture this: Three children are given a LEGO set with all the pieces to build a fire department. All of them want to build as many cool new...

There are two things Africa-rising apologists are quick to cite as examples of the continent's ability to leapfrog past its challenges and end up with solutions that are far ahead of the rest of the world: mobile phones and mobile money. But the frequency with which these two are wielded have also rendered them well-worn. Is Africa’s ability...

Veteran environment writer John Carey looks at the reasons we don't seem to make meaningful progress on climate change — and issues a rousing call to arms for us all to step up and play our part. When I started covering climate change more than thirty years ago, the underlying science was already clear. Heat from the sun warms the Earth. Gase...

"We need a different view of the world," says Chris Anderson, the host of Session 6: Radical Reframe, on the Wednesday morning of TED2015. Enjoy these recaps of the speaker in this session, who might just flip your thinking on things you thought you knew — from antibiotics to papayas. New metaphors, not new medicines. We often think that ...

At TED2014, we asked speakers and attendees to riff off the conference's theme ("The Next Chapter") and tell us what might radically change society, life, technology and so on in the next 30 years. From funny and wry to deeply insightful, the answers will surprise you. "One of the things about learning how to read -- we have been doing a lot ...

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (TED Talk: Parrots, the universe and everything) This book makes me giggle out loud every time. Overshadowed by Adams’ more famous work -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series -- the Dirk Gently novels are a delightful read. They’re chock full of his trademark humorous writing and ...

Art so often seeks to capture the beauty of the natural world -- from cave drawings of animals, to paintings of landscapes, to sculptures of the human form in marble, bronze or wood. But in this playlist, find artists and designers who take this to the next level, making art based on the laws of nature and the invisible workings of biology i...

Let’s face it: it's hard to get stuff done. How can we, together, realize our most ambitious dreams? To celebrate the efforts of smart people who are changing the world while doing business as usual, TED has partnered with the Brightline Initiative, a non-commercial coalition of leading organizations dedicated to helping leaders turn idea...

By Kate Torgovnick, Morton Bast, Thu-Huong Ha The future. When it comes down to it, it's not about flying cars, flashy robots, jetpacks, or awesome sunglasses. It's about the little things we can do to advance healthcare, better education, create opportunities, improve connections between each other, and make lives just a little bit easie...

It's time for TED Fellows Talks, the Rio edition! Twenty TED Fellows and Senior Fellows opened the conference in the stunning Golden Room of the Copacabana Palace Hotel. In Session 1, learn more about a grassroots marine conservation movement in Madagascar, a vending machine that dispenses food staples in Chile and a new database of African ...

This tiny republic has the most startups per person and the fastest broadband speeds, and it offers something no other country does: e-residency. Estonia is aiming to create the ideal information society. Technology thinker and entrepreneur Andrew Keen goes there to find out how it works. The future sometimes appears in the unlikeliest of place...