An idea worth spreading doesn’t just magically appear out of thin air. Instead, it needs a long incubation period, a sometimes frustrating -- and often exciting -- trial and error of creation, failure and innovation. On April 18, TED welcomed its first-ever class of the TED Residency program, an in-house community of 27 bright minds who a...

Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the Internet: California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law yesterday making it legal for driverless cars to travel on public roadways. [Forbes] Watch Sebastian Thrun’s TEDTalk “Google’s driverless car” for a description of how such a thing works and Chris Gerdes’ talk “The future race car -- 150m...

Liu Bolin's images invite a game akin to Where's Waldo?. In some of the Chinese artist's incredible photos, it's clear where he is standing; in others, like the one above, it's much harder to spot the outline of his body at all. It’s for this that Bolin has been called “The Invisible Man.” In his talk from TED2013, Bolin shares the meaning be...

Percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra is creating virtual sanctuaries for real cities. Working in collaboration with local artists, historians, architects, city planners and musicians, Ibarra and her partner Roberto Rodriguez -- who together form Electric Kulintang -- have created a musical pilgrimage that takes the public on a sound walk ...

Click to watch the session-opening animation. We end TEDGlobal2012 with a session that steps back and asks, "How do we, as a society, communicate with each other?" The public sphere, the place where we engage with society at large, has undergone tremendous change -- driven and empowered by the digital revolution, but also, perhaps, by a dee...

Day five of TED2016 contained one session filled with big ideas, but also an opportunity to look back at the conference as a whole. Below, the major themes that ran through the course of the week. We’re ready for our moonshot moment. The most-evoked image of the conference? Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. Speakers including Dan P...

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. ...

Forty-three years ago this week, the number one tennis star in the world, 29-year-old Billie Jean King, agreed to take on 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, in a match dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes.” The prize was $100,000 -- which compared with today’s million-dollar-winning pots wasn’t much -- but it was the first time that women and men were offe...

TED's curator, Chris Anderson, gave a thoughtful interview via Skype to Tim Dick of the Sydney Morning Herald, just posted today, talking about the growing power of web video. From the story: Anderson thinks web video represents a fundamental shift ... the potential of which is unimaginable. ''There is something mysterious, magical and in...

Happy birthday, National Geographic. The intrepid magazine turns 125-years-old this month. Yesterday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation invited TED speakers Robert Ballard and Sarah Parcak on the air to discuss the notable anniversary. Ballard, who is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, talked about a recent expedition to the Black Sea, w...

UPDATE: Get details on online signups for events near you: list of opening dates for TED2013 auditions. The best moments at TED have often come from unexpected places. But this year, we're pushing that to an entirely new level. We're staging a global talent search to bring together the most remarkable lineup in TED's history. A series of ...

All photos: Ryan Lash After an amazing break (filled with beatboxing and Interesting Things) we reconvene for Session 2 of TEDYouth. "I'm not going to blow anything up," says Adam Savage. :( He's best known for his role as co-host of the TV show MythBusters on the Discovery Channel. (Watch his talk on TED.com) His work on TV is abo...

Fifty years ago, April 12, 1961, was one of the most extraordinary moments in human history: a spacecraft carried a passenger, Yuri Gagarin, into space, and back again safely. It's probably impossible to overstate the magnitude of that achievement, or the repercussions it would have. To give some context, here are three TEDTalks on the sp...

The work of artist Sanford Biggers walks a fine line between poetic and provocative, brilliantly sparking discussion about race, violence and fallen heroes. Sanford Biggers grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by works of the popular black artists his parents collected. His cousin is the famed African-American muralist John Biggers. But as a young...

The theme of TED2018 is The Age of Amazement, and these speakers’ books are bursting with wonders of every kind: intellectual, scientific, urban, technological, economic, historical, aquatic, even extraterrestrial. TED2018, our biggest conference of the year, takes place April 10 through 14 in Vancouver. The talks from the conference will be re...

This November, we're gathering in New Orleans for three days of TEDWomen -- to share talks about bridging the world today and the world we all hope to build. Today, we're announcing the first speakers on our lineup, a mix of powerful voices, creative insights and committed activism that will set the tone for our time together. Read on to learn m...

"Success in creating Artificial Intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last."

The MacArthur Foundation revealed its list of 2015 Fellows this morning. Twenty-four people received the “genius grant,” a $625,000 no-strings-attached stipend -- and two of them are TED Fellows: Patrick Awuah and LaToya Ruby Frazier. Patrick Awuah founded Ashesi University, a college in his home country of Ghana dedicated to educating Af...

An extraordinary group-curated TEDx event is coming together around the tragic events in Japan in the past month: TEDxEarthquake9.0. From the site: A comprehensive journey from Japan's resilience and history of overcoming past disaster to the challenges the nation faces today -- passing by the actual response and relief efforts in the fi...

When art historian and scholar of Arabic script Bahia Shehab was asked to create a piece commemorating the centenary of the first exhibition on Islamic art in Europe, little did she know that the Egyptian revolution would ultimately transform her into a street artist and activist with a powerful and subtle voice of protest. How did your work ...

Back to school brings with it a slew of emotions. On the one hand, there’s the promise of seeing friends daily and the buying of new school supplies -- new possibilities encapsulated in shrink-wrapped blank notebooks. But on the other hand, there’s the end of summer and the transition back to structured days, not to mention the challenge of sw...

We've heard the statistics. Obesity has more than doubled worldwide since 1980. For the first time in history, being overweight is killing more people than being underweight. At least 2.8 million adults die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. Where do we begin to tackle such an immense problem? There is not one single solut...

Some chewy food for thought this week on the Internets: The host of the blog Ask a Korean! responds to a chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers that links culture to frequency of plane crashes. (Watch an unrelated talk from Gladwell here.) Read the original post here and some updates here, which includes Gladwell's response to the criticism. [A...

Glacier caves are noteworthy for many reasons, not least the fact that they're made from ice and snow instead of rock. Formed by glacier water that carves out caves in the ice, they're also impermanent. As a glacier slowly shifts, so too do the caves and tunnels inside it. Explorer Brent McGregor, 62, has documented three glacier caves he and ra...

A Piketty guide for lifelong learners. When Thomas Piketty’s "Capital in the Twenty-first Century” was published earlier this year, it was something of a sensation. That’s no small feat for a chart-heavy doorstop on “the dismal science” of economics. A fair portion of the book’s notoriety was due to its subject matter: wealth distribution, a...

Surgeon, author and speaker Sherwin Nuland died on March 3, 2014, at age 83. The author of a dozen books -- including the award-winning How We Die, a clear-eyed look at life's last chapter -- Nuland came to TED in 2001 to tell a story he'd never told before. The world-renowned surgeon, clinical professor of surgery at Yale and best-sellin...

Time is a global preoccupation -- we never feel like we have enough of it to accomplish all we want to accomplish in the world. Do we control time, or does time control us? In the opening session of TEDWomen 2016 at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, seven speakers explored how time and attention shape our lives, in talks ra...

"We're on spaceship Earth," begins Will Marshall during Session 9 of TED2014. "It's fragile and finite -- and we need to take care of it." He shows a satellite image of Earth. Yes, it's beautiful, says Marshall, but it's outdated. The information is old, and he says, "We can't fix what we can't see." Satellite imaging, says Marshall, is b...

Onstage at TED2011, physicist Janna Levin talked about how gravitational wave detectors are about to produce revolution in astronomy and cosmology: instead of simply seeing the universe, we'll now be able to hear it as well, the ripples of spacetime itself. In addition to being a groundbreaking cosmologist, she's a novelist, memoirist and ar...

On Sunday in New Orleans, the San Francisco 49ers will face off with the Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII. For the first time in Super Bowl history, the head coaches of the two opposing football teams are brothers. John Harbaugh, the older of the brothers, has been the head coach for the Ravens since 2008. Meanwhile, Jim Harbaugh -- younger ...