This week, we've launched a new blog: TEDx Innovations. It's a space for TEDx organizers to share their passion and ingenuity, to reveal the things they're trying at their events and the ways they're evolving this global platform before our eyes. Bookmark it and look for lots more to come. Mastering the physics behind sailing in the Bosto...

Many of us are now working at home due to the pandemic. To our surprise, we’re seeing our coworkers more than ever before -- but as tiny heads on our laptops in video meetings. Instead of bringing us closer together, all this online togetherness can sometimes make us feel miles apart, literally and emotionally. On a recent episode of his TED...

On day two of TED2017, three sessions of talks -- one on Our robotic overlords, the next on The human response and the final on Health, life and love. Below, some key moments from it all. A TED Talk from ... the Pope. For weeks, we’ve teased a “surprise guest” on the program, a mysterious "world figure" with a unique message. Tonight, we reve...

Lars Jan, a TED Fellow, creates multimedia performances that probe the ubiquity of screens and propaganda in our culture. Today, his show ABACUS—billed as "a multimedia talking tour of our hyper-networked world to come"—opens at BAM's Fisher Fishman Space in Brooklyn, New York. It's a show delivered by his invented persona, Paul Abacus, abou...

This week, the world celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday. For the participants of TEDxSoweto -- which took place in April in Johannesburg, South Africa -- it was time to publish the results of a campaign started at the event. During the event, a group of volunteers -- including many designers -- wondered how they could mark Mandela’s b...

What’s next for Joshua Klein, the man who built a vending machine for crows? The versatile hacker is the new host of the National Geographic show The Link, in which he travels the world to research and reveal the origins of some of history’s most important technological innovations, like Greek fire and the Chinese long sword. The show premie...

Earlier today, TED curator Chris Anderson sat down for an online Q&A with the readers of Gizmodo.com. They asked a wide variety of questions, from “What’s your favorite TEDTalk of all time?” to “What will TED look like in 10 years?” Here, some highlights pulled from the discussion. What's your favorite TED talk of all time? Chris: Hard...

Until he was 19, Joshua Prager wanted to play professional baseball or be a doctor. After 19, he was just glad he could walk. For eight years Prager was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for his long-form pieces investigating historical secrets. In his talk at TED@New York -- one of t...

In an interview you should ask a movie star about her movies, an author about his books, a musician about her latest album. But Randy Cohen, the original New York Times Ethicist, hopes to bypass all those boring questions on his radio show "Person Place Thing" and find out what weird passions people of note are really harboring. In a talk at...

In today’s thrilling TED-Ed lesson, Bill Nye the Science Guy admits that he has S.O.D., otherwise known as Sundial Obsessive Disorder. But there is a good reason for it -- a sundial helped Nye’s father escape from a prison camp in China during World War II, launching a lifelong obsession that Nye eventually picked up himself. At an event s...

Conceptual artist Alicia Eggert uses words as found objects in her sculptural art -- a body of work that serves as an ongoing investigation of time. Here, she tells us about taking her neon piece "You are (on) an island" to various locations in the world, shares how childhood experiences in South Africa sparked her fascination with time, and rev...

Arthur Benjamin is perhaps the world's leading mathemagician and, in today's talk, he aims to show the creativity, beauty and wonder that is as much a part of math as logic. Stepping onto the TEDGlobal 2013 stage, Benjamin takes us on a spirited tour of the Fibonacci numbers, where the patterns to be found go far beyond simply adding two con...

Music comes in all shapes and sizes, as these talks illustrate. From an electric drum suit called "thunderwear" to an ancient stringed wheel to an arresting rare organ, the instruments featured in these talks reshape our soundscape and offer inspiration in the cacophonous world around us. David Holt plays mountain music In this amiable t...

Behold, your recap of TED-related news: A new Sundance grant helps indie films get seen. Making a film is hard enough -- but getting the film seen by an audience can be just as difficult, especially in this era of non-stop media shifts. To help, Sundance just launched the Creative Distribution Fellowship -- and among the first recipients ...

As usual, the TED community has been very busy over the past week. Below, a few newsy highlights. Overlooked treasures. A bed, a watch, a shoe: all mundane items unappreciated in the moment. But through history’s eyes, they gain new meaning. In this beautiful “Portraits in Creativity” documentary, Maira Kalman talks about curating the exhib...

Ah, wanderlust. Mild symptoms include obsessive airfare tracking and uncontrollable daydreaming about tropical beaches during conference calls. Severe cases can cause reasonable people to cash out their 401(k) to buy a camper van and hit the open road. These 9 TED Talks are guaranteed to ignite your need for travel. As a precautionary mea...

A few numbers to keep in mind: 3, 31, and 1 million. That’s because nominations for the 2016 TED Prize are being accepted through the end of the day on March 31, 2015. You have until then to nominate a mentor, a co-worker or a visionary leader whose work you admire from afar for this prestigious prize, which brings with it $1 million for a w...

Edward Snowden hasn’t forgotten about the remote presence robot that allowed him to speak on the TED2014 stage and roam the halls of the conference, chatting with attendees. While in exile in Russia, Snowden has apparently used this system, affectionately dubbed the “Snowdenbot,” on a semi-regular basis. Andy Greenberg writes in Wired abo...

Over the past week, 21 amazing names in the worlds of technology, entertainment and design have curated lists of their favorite TED Talks, to celebrate TED’s billionth video view. The talks they’ve selected have run the gamut from Ben Affleck, who loved Bryan Stevenson’s “We need to talk about an injustice” among others, to Alexis Ohanian of Red...

Henry Evans is an enthusiastic world traveler. In the past year, he has visited Vermillion, South Dakota; Sydney, Australia; and Qusar, Azerbaijan. He’s explored halls of the Smithsonian, gone scuba diving in California, and flown over Bora Bora. He is in the midst of finagling a trip to space. Evans, it should be noted, does all this trav...

This spring, TED headed on the road, visiting 14 cities across six continents on the hunt for untapped talent. The idea behind the sweeping search: to let you, the TED community, weigh in and vote on which speakers you’d like to see ascend the stage at TED2013. After holding one-night salons in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Doha, Johannesburg, Londo...

Watch this talk on TED.com Onstage at TED, Nancy Kanwisher starts by telling us one of the most surprising results from recent neuroscience discoveries: The brain is not a general-purpose processor, but a collection of specialized components, "collectively building up who we are as human beings and thinkers." Imagine, she says, walking...

Tania Luna, the CEO of SurpriseIndustries.com and a psychology instructor at Hunter College in New York, came to the United States as a 6-year-old immigrant from Ukraine. While she and her family thought that they were staying at a hotel when they first arrived in New York, upon returning years later, they discovered that it was actually a h...

TED2019 may be past, but the TED community is busy as ever. Below, a few highlights. Amplifying 2 million women across the U.S. Activist Ai-jen Poo, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and Planned Parenthood past president Cecile Richards have joined forces to launch Supermajority, which aims to train 2 million women in the United S...

The members of the TED community have been very busy over the past two weeks. Below, news briefs on what a few have been up to. We’ll start with a few funny bits, and work our way down from there. Talks, courtesy of SNL. We were highly amused to see that Saturday Night Live considered a sketch called “DEF TED Talks Jam” last weekend. Check i...

"Bobby Riggs was one of my heroes. I admired him," says Billie Jean King. "That’s one of the reasons I beat him — because I respected him." King's Q&A on the TEDWomen stage begins with a discussion of one of the greatest sports moments of all time: the Battle of the Sexes, a tennis match between King and Riggs, which she won on Sept. ...

Kids these days are “speaking” a new language, right under our noses and literally right under the table. But is texting making us dumber? No, says John McWhorter, Associate Professor at Columbia University and Contributing Editor at The New Republic. In his talk from TED@New York -- one of 293 talks given as part of the TED2013 Talent Searc...

I love asking questions. As a journalist, I don’t just ask people what they do -- I interrogate them, be they scientists or teachers or sculptors, to find out the terminology of their field, the kinds of characters that populate it, and the questions they think about that might never even occur to someone outside their orbit. That is: until I...

Turns out the fortune cookie that came with your chop suey isn’t actually Chinese … and neither is the chop suey. So where did they come from? In this TED Talk, journalist Jennifer 8. Lee shares the origins of some of America’s favorite “Chinese” food, and takes us on a culinary tour of Chinese restaurants around the world -- whose menus ofte...

When Ron McCallum was a child, he loved story time. But he was sad not to be able to read a book on his own. It was the 1940s, and McCallum was blind since birth. As his mom told him, "You can't feel the pictures, and you can't feel the print on the page." "Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would ma...