Please enjoy your roundup of TED-related news: This one’s for the boys. Mark Ronson takes a break from making music to have some fun in Charli XCX’s video for “Boys.” You’ll find him (suavely) combing his hair, amid scenes of other male celebs, such as Wiz Khalifa, Riz Ahmed and Joe Jonas having a pillow fight or cuddling with puppies, in...

This week has brimmed over with TED-related news. Here, some highlights: In 2011, Arizona legislator Gabby Giffords was shot in an assassination attempt. Now she and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, have founded Americans for Responsible Solutions, a bipartisan organization that has raised $6 million in six months for the creation of...

How a letter written in 1855 gave Kyra Gaunt a whole new perspective on slavery. White Americans aren’t the only ones who don’t like to remember slavery and its history. According to the Office of Minority Health, in 2012 there were 43.1 million people who identify as African-American. I could lay money that, next year, fewer than 1 percent ...

Next month, TED turns 30 years old. And to celebrate, we’ve put together a lightning round of trivia to test your TED Talk and speaker knowledge. For kicks, post your answers in the comments section below. We’ll post the official answer sheet today, February 13, at 1pm. Ken Robinson, who gave the most-watched talk in TED history, was deeply ...

The TED community has lots of news this week. Below, just a few highlights. NSA phone data collection ruled illegal. Yesterday, a federal appeals court ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records — one of the surveillance measures revealed by Edward Snowden — is, in fact, illegal. Today, Snowden commented. “This is signific...

In celebration of our billionth video view, TED reached out to some of our favorite players in the worlds of technology, entertainment and design, asking which TED Talks they find themselves going back to again and again. To see the famous faces who’ve told us so far -- from Bill Gates to Barbra Streisand -- head to our guest-curated playlis...

Stacey Abrams's 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia was watched across the world. The first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor, she lost after a hard-fought race. Now she's the surprise speaker onstage at TEDWomen 2018, where, in an electrifying talk, she shares the lessons she learned from her campaign, advice on ho...

With just one week left to go until TED2014, our speakers are putting the final touches on their talks. But that’s hardly all they’ve been up to. This week, check out which speaker has a bold prediction about artificial intelligence, which one put out a call for a more creative condom design, which one wrote about the science of goat arousal and...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Joshua Foer challenges the audience to close their eyes, and then he tells a very strange story. In summary: "Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. Notice the color of the door, the material it's made out of. Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles. They are competing...

The conversation around the upcoming US presidential election is full of frenzy, headache and noise. But elections are about more than divisiveness and disagreement -- they're civic events worthy of celebration, and, while it may seem unbelievable at the moment, they hold the promise of transforming governments for the better. At TEDNYC: ...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson Brené Brown is an expert on vulnerability who starts off her talk by describing the extraordinary impact of giving a talk in 2010 at TEDxHouston: The Power of Vulnerability. For starters, she says, the day after giving the talk, she woke up in a state of depression that she'd shared details of her own breakdo...

With just over a month until TED2014, themed “The Next Chapter,” this year’s lineup of speakers has been busy making music, writing books and, oh, trekking across Antarctica. Check out speakers who’ve made the news in recent weeks: On Monday morning, Arctic explorer Ben Saunders completed his 1,795-mile, 105-day trek across Antarctica. This...

Robert Sapolsky is "your basic confused human when it comes to violence." He's for gun control but loves shooting people in laser tag. He doesn't believe in the death penalty but has specific fantasies about how he would kill Hitler. He's also a neuroscientist who studies stress and its effects in primates. So, naturally, he wanted to figure...

A philosopher makes the case for a less than perfect union. Philosopher Yann Dall’Aglio (TED Talk: Love -- you're doing it wrong) believes that the quest to be the perfect lover is a distinctly modern delusion -- and he warns that it erodes the very relationships we seek to strengthen. “It leads to couples obsessed with performance who will bre...

Grégoire Courtine and the scientists in his lab helped a paralyzed rat learn to walk again, voluntarily, through a treatment that combined drugs, electrical stimulation of the lower spinal cord, the support of a robotic arm and a little bit of chocolate. When their study appeared in the June 2012 issue of Science, it sparked a lot of excitem...

What does it take to make an everyday object -- say, a toaster -- from scratch? And does anyone know how to make it, all the way from mining for iron ore to plugging it into the electric grid? Those are the questions designer Thomas Thwaites sought to answer when he engaged in the Toaster Project. Last Tuesday, November 2, he shared his hilar...

From a speaker helping to contain the ebola outbreak to an America lawyer standing up for rights in Afghanistan to a journalist cracking open the Nigerian media, Session 11: Fighters was filled with crackling talks. A recap: Fred Swaniker kicks off the day with a bold vision for Africa’s future, which, he argues, rests squarely in the han...

Three fascinating speakers have been added to the lineup for TEDGlobal 2013, which kicks off in Edinburgh, Scotland, June 10 to 14. First, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who exploded the conversation about women’s work-life balance with her July/August 2012 The Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” will join the conference to lend her e...

What do JFK, Venus Williams and Dan Ackroyd all have in common? All have been diagnosed with a rare disease. Today is Rare Disease Day, and here at TED2013, TED2012 Fellow C Jimmy Lin is marking the occasion by awarding $500,000 worth of research to help 26 different rare diseases, and launching a striking infographic that demystifies rare disea...

"I don't know how to introduce this, so I'll just say, 'Hetain Patel,'" says TED curator Chris Anderson. So no one knows what to expect, and that's as may be, because this is some crazy right here. Patel walks onstage and crouches in a chair next to the dancer Yuyu Rau. He speaks a few sentences in Mandarin, and Rau proceeds to translate....

The world of athletics is brutal. Athletes put themselves through grueling workout schedules and intense competitions, pushing their bodies and minds to the limit. But because part of being an athlete is constantly going up against (and sometimes with) faster, stronger and/or younger competitors, by far the hardest test any athlete faces is thei...

In the past decade, we’ve changed the way we collectively view the health of the 7 billion people who occupy this planet. Health issues were once seen as an isolated national or regional problem; now they are a global concern. In What's Killing Us: A Practical Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems, 2011 TED Senior Fellow ...

Most of us have been in its grip before -- the alarm goes off, our mind starts whirring away, and before we know it, we've done a freefall into worry. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has been there, too, and she tells us how we can stop the spiral. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piec...

A flat piece of plastic that can shape itself into a shoe? An orthodontic device that moves into position to straighten teeth? Computational architect Skylar Tibbits is shaking up the material world. Ever tried to assemble an Ikea table? Turning a two-dimensional pile of wood and plastic into a useful 3D object can be a challenge. Now imagine o...

Countdown is a global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. Watch the talks, interviews and performances from the Countdown Global Launch at ted.com/countdown. It's time to take action. This closing session of the Countdown Global Launch explored the road ahead: How to think urgently and long-term about climate change....

Last week, TED speakers Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson joined us for a live, one-hour debate on the future of the US economy.  It was a furious hour of typing, with both speakers contributing just over 1,500 words in response to a wide variety of user questions.  A few highlights: Ryan Zeigler asks: Mr. Brynjolfsson, you stated in your ...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Why there are still so few women at the top. Leanin.org, the organization created by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to help empower women, released its second annual Women in the Workplace report. The news is not good: Women have less access to senior le...

“Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland,” Lawrence Lessig begins today’s talk. “Of its 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester,” Lessig says. In Lesterland, this .05% of the population is granted extraordinary power. Each election cycle, there’s a general election, in which the people get to vote, and a Leste...

There are two ways to see a glass of water—some view it as half full, others refer to it as half empty. During the third day of TEDGlobal, the speakers fell into one of the two camps. While many spoke about the ways in which new technology and increasing global openness can bring people together in unique and fascinating ways, another subset of ...

"These are the times that try men's souls, and they're trying ours now," begins Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, quoting Thomas Paine, in an electrifying talk about how we can face the future without fear if we face it together. It's a fateful moment in history. We've seen divisive elections, divided societies and a growth of extremism -- all o...