This week, the world's advertising and communication agencies have sent their top executives and creativites to Cannes, on the French Riviera, for the annual Festival of Creativity and the Cannes Lions awards. In the scope of a partnership with Starcom MediaVest Group, TED was in Cannes and presented two sessions. On Tuesday, on the main stag...

Alex Steffen, author and futurist, speaking at TED University during TEDGlobal 2011, July 11, 2011. Photo: James Duncan Davidson / TED Csaba Manyai, host of TEDxDanubia: To kick off TED University, Csaba Manyai introduces us to the Urania Scientific Theatre, a Budapest society devoted to sharing ideas from science and knowledge … starting...

Teenagers. They’re not exactly known for their listening skills. But over Thanksgiving weekend of 2015, high school students across the United States sat down with elders and asked them deep, meaningful questions about their lives. More than 50,000 people -- most in their teens -- took part in the Great Thanksgiving Listen and recorded an int...

Calling all self-proclaimed tech nerds! TED has long been known for demos that set everyone in the theatre a-buzz. Here's a look back at some memorable tech demos from TED and TEDGlobals past, to get you excited for those coming at TED2015. Hugh Herr: The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance On stage at: TED2014 Hugh Herr's ...

How does snow artist Simon Beck trace massive, intricate patterns in the snow? With a little math and a lot of legwork. Simon Beck (TEDxKlagenfurt Talk: Snow art) believes that anyone can make a “snow drawing.” Just tread a simple shape into the snow, again and again, until a spectacular pattern emerges. The geometry, he says, is the easy part....

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...

Amanda Fucking Palmer wants us to re-think how we think about paying for music. She is known for her music, first as half of the Dresden Dolls, now as a solo artist. But for 5 years after graduating, Palmer made her living as a living statue called the Eight Foot Bride. ("Everyone always wanted to know, 'Who are these people in real life?...

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...

Today’s talk isn’t so much a “talk” as a hilarious topsy-turvy performance by Hetain Patel that reflects on an identity forged as much from Spider-Man comics and Bruce Lee movies as by a father who emigrated from India to the United Kingdom in the 1960s. An excerpt from his latest stage work, Be Like Water, this talk introduces us to Patel’s...

Colin Stokes’ favorite part of being a dad is sharing movies with his two young children. While his daughter’s favorite is The Wizard of Oz, his son quickly became obsessed with Star Wars after catching a glimpse of the movie at age three. “It imprinted on him like a mommy duck does on its duckling,” says Stokes. “I wonder what he’s soaking in....

Try these five strategies to step out of your routine and wake up to the life around you, says urban explorer Eugene Quinn. 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. Boredom. Wanderlust. These feelings com...

It’s that simple. Making sure that girls around the world can go to school helps them and their families, of course, but also benefits the entire world. If I asked you to name one of the most effective ways to combat climate change, what would your answer be? Installing solar panels on rooftops? Building wind turbines? Driving electric cars? ...

This week, so much TED-related news hit the transom. Below, some of the highlights. Artist Olafur Eliasson (watch his TED Talk) muses on his latest work -- “Little Sun,” a miniature solar-powered lamp that puts five hours of sunlight in your pocket -- in this awesome video from our friends at The Creators Project. The best part: the video b...

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...

 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 ...

Around the world, right now, several countries are developing autonomous weapons that use artificial intelligence to locate, track and destroy their targets. AI professor Toby Walsh explains why that’s a problem. Artificial intelligence is in the news a lot, and it’s safe to say that it’s not always benign. That’s why the United Nations is host...

This session was all about cities. From speakers parsing the cycles of violence in them, to those thinking far outside the box on what they could look like, read up on these ideas for cities. Robert Muggah is troubled by our cities. Not urban success stories like Shanghai and Seoul, but those that he calls “fragile cities,” quickly urbani...

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 ...

Abandoned school turned maker space. Theaster Gates turns Chicago’s abandoned buildings into thriving hubs for art and education. His next project? Turning an old elementary school into a maker space. Gates heads Place Lab, a think tank that fuses the brainpower of urban planners, architects, artists and other diverse professionals to create...

Two years ago, as she put her 5-year-old son Aboody to bed, Manal Al-Sharif faced an unexpected question from him: “Mommy, are we bad people?” Earlier in the day, she had noticed bruises on his face. He didn't want to tell her why. Now, in the evening, he confessed that boys at school had hit him because they'd seen his mother on Facebook. T...

Today, Negroponte is back to open TED, to reflect on predictions he's made in the past and to spin some new ones for the future. His point is that when someone tells you that you are "dead wrong," that you just might be onto something. Negroponte takes us on a lightning-paced tour of his career, beginning in the 1960s when he worked on comp...

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 ...

Ron Finley describes himself as a "renegade gardener," and he's here to tell us all about his home, in South Central, or South Los Angeles, as city planners attempted to rebrand the area. Whatever you call it, the truth is that the area comprises liquor stores, fast food and vacant lots, and it epitomizes the stark reality that 26.5 million ...

In the past week, vast protests sparked by a bus-fare increase have rocked Brazil, taking its leaders – and the world – by surprise. TED Fellow and conservation biologist Juliana M Ferreira offers an insider’s perspective on what led to this transformational moment. With all the eyes of the world on Brazil due to the upcoming World Cup ...

New Delhi's streets are epic -- trucks, cars, cows and, especially, bicycle rickshaws, three-wheeled carriers that can zip through traffic, pedaled by a very, very hard-working driver. Growing up in New Delhi, Avani Singh passed them every day on her way to school. And her route also passed the city's slums. In this city of 17 million, the New 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...

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...

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 ...

What if one person could change the world? What if we could harness our collective talent, insight and wisdom? And what if, together, we could spark a movement with positive impact far into the future? For a third year, UPS has partnered with TED to bring experts in business, logistics, design and technology to the stage to share ideas fr...