Sara Lewis studies fireflies. And it turns out they're not just a pretty flashing light on a summer night. She explains how a firefly glows -- and how humans are harnessing that glow for health and medical research (and even to make our food safer). The silent sparks of fireflies seem so magical, yet their lights arise from a carefully orchestr...

TEDWomen is a conference full of inspiring ideas, stories, visons -- but what do we do with that energy and inspiration? A first step: Write a letter. If you're watching the TEDWomen feed, watching live at a TEDx, following the news on Twitter and the TED Blog, and you feel a moment of deep inspiration to action -- write 50 words or so to the sp...

Rick Smolan enlisted an unusual partner for the release of his new coffee table book, The Human Face of Big Data -- FedEx. Yes, Smolan orchestrated a meeting with the shipping giant so that 10,000 copies of the book would be delivered simultaneously today, November 20, to a large group of influential people around the world, ranging from Barack ...

It’s just a teeny, tiny question: How did the universe begin? Today, TED-Ed has unveiled a new lesson that answers this in less than four minutes, “The beginning of the universe, for beginners.” This is the first of five animated lessons developed by CERN scientists and brought to life by TED-Ed’s talented animators. The other four animati...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Taylor Wilson is a 17-year old nuclear physicist. No, really. He charms the audience from the get-go, making the case that "you know, as a scientist, the glass is always 100% full, with water and air." But he's really here to make two cases: that nuclear fusion will be the energy of the future, and that kids c...

CERN particle physicist Bilge Demirköz investigates everything from dark matter to the possibility of antigalaxies, trying to understand what we -- and the universe -- are made of. What is it about space and the investigation of dark matter and antimatter that captures your imagination? Well to me, the question is, Why are we here? Or, wh...

Bertrand Piccard plans to fly around the world in a plane that doesn't use any fuel. Huh? Yep. This machine is equipped with 17,000 solar panels. He explains the logistics and mechanics -- and shares some hopes and fears for the upcoming voyage. Looks like 2015 will be a busy year for Bertrand Piccard. From March through August, the Swiss psych...

When the last blue pigment was discovered, Thomas Jefferson was in the White House. The recent creation of YInMn blue is a thrilling tale complete with expletives, accidents and invisible abilities. Just ask chemist and materials scientist Mas Subramanian. There are no new colors in the world to be discovered -- at least that’s what anyone who’...

Founder of Open Source Ecology Marcin Jakubowksi is creating open blueprints for the building blocks of civilization, starting with the Global Village Construction Set. This set of 50 low-cost machines will allow anyone to build all the infrastructure a community needs – including, at Factor E Farm, one of his own. The Global Village Constr...

Here, we take a closer look at the incredible place we call home, with a collection of speakers who celebrate the Earth's natural beauty as it is now -- or who are proposing (sometimes controversial) ways to keep it that way. In this session: Karen Bass has traveled the world to explore and capture footage from every environment across the...

June Cohen hosts TED University at TEDGlobal 2011, July 7-15, 2011, Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo: James Duncan Davidson / TED This afternoon at TED U, as the stage was being set up for a musical performance by Somi, host June Cohen (above) asks the audience at the Lyceum Theater: "What's a trend happening now that we should be aware of?" ...

Losing a passport shortly before an international flight probably wouldn't strike most people as an obvious moment to reflect upon alternative currencies. Jennifer Healey, a research scientist at Intel, would likely argue otherwise. She lost hers right before flying to TEDGlobal to speak at the TED Institute. Instead of panicking and mel...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Bike on the Seine … literally. Carlo Ratti Associati unveiled a concept for the Paris Navigating Gym, a boat that would use the energy from passengers’ stationary-bike workouts to propel itself through Paris along the Seine. Aboard the 20-meter-long v...

  Two years ago, a chance discussion with a group of Gulf of Mexico fishermen changed the course of Cesar Harada’s life. The TED Senior Fellow had landed his dream job at MIT in Boston, but after hearing first-hand accounts of the conditions in the Gulf following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of 2010, Harada tendered his resignation and...

But some jobs -- and industries -- will still require a human touch. Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson have a guess as to which ones. A surprising report published this spring projects that 30 percent of current jobs in the UK might be replaced by automation in the next 15 years. That number is 21 percent in Japan, 35 p...

It's time for organizations and individuals to stop focusing on dominating the competition -- and learn from them instead. By identifying a Worthy Rival and looking at their strengths and abilities, we can keep improving and innovating, says writer Simon Sinek. Professor James P. Carse has argued that there are two types of games: finite games ...

Have boys bottomed out? A new TED Book says yes. The culprit: the rampant overuse of video games and online porn. In their provocative ebook The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, celebrated psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan say that an addiction to video games and online porn have created...

“You have to start with an interesting question,” says neuroscientist Beau Lotto. We’re talking over Skype with collaborator Geneviève Laurendeau, the corporate PR manager at Cirque du Soleil, to discuss their year-long science project: an experiment to measure awe. When and how do we feel awe? And: Why does it matter? One great place to ...

Fever Picture is a collective of scribes and graphic facilitators who translate the words said in conferences into comic form. With this graphic method of note-taking, they've illustrated several talks given so far at TED2013, highlighting main points through speech bubbles and quotes. Here, we've gathered some of these illustrations from th...

Artist Jae Rhim Lee (watch her TED Talk) is asking us to rethink our relationship with death and the planet -- with the help of flesh-eating mushrooms, she's making human decomposition clean and green. You’re an artist and designer primarily concerned with how our bodies interact with the world. I’m concerned with finding alternatives ...

Cultured meat could be coming to our plates in the next few years. How is it made? And will it help, or hurt, the planet? Here's what we know so far. One day -- maybe not that long from now -- you might be able to go to the store and buy hamburger meat that didn’t require killing an animal or pretending that soybeans taste like beef. It will lo...

On Sunday, May 26, two rockets soared over Beirut, Lebanon, hitting a Shi’ite Muslim area in the southern part of the city. The rockets raised fears that Beirut could become embroiled in the civil war raging in nearby Syria. And yet, these bombs did not stop women throughout the city from lacing up their running sneakers and taking to the st...

Three American scientists have just been awarded the Nobel Prize for their space-time breakthrough, and LIGO team astrophysicist Gabriela González tells us about all the researchers, work and technology that contributed to it. A little over 100 years ago, in 1915, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which, despite its name, is ...

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 ...

The suspension bridge, says Acumen founder and session host Jacqueline Novogratz, provides the perfect metaphor for the leadership we need to see in this "fractured, divided, too often cynical world." Why? Because its structure balances a strong, deep, unwavering foundation with its ability to stretch across vast distances to connect and bri...

Kate Stone loves paper, and she loves technology, so she resolved to combine the two, which she shows us in a magical demonstration on the TED stage. But first, three key moments that got her to where she is today: 1. An obsession with technology: As a child, she hid switches behind the wall in her bedroom, ran wires underneath the carpet...

Carl Kasell of NPR hosts the show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me. And in the video above, he uses his classic radio voice to narrate LOLCats, reading lines like “I can has cheezburger?” and “I tried to hang up your laundry -- that’s when I realized I didn’t have thumbs.” The audio in this video comes from last week’s episode of TED Radio Hour,...

Hundreds of talks from independently organized TEDx events around the world are published on the TEDxTalks website daily. Each Tuesday and Thursday, we'll choose four of our favorites, highlighting just a few of the enlightening talks from TEDx community, and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Browse all TEDxTalks here » B...

The weekend before a TED conference, each speaker rehearses their talk in the TED theater. It’s a chance for the speakers to get to know the space, for our curators to give last-minute suggestions on talk content, and for our speaker coaches to give advice to help each speaker feel their absolute best the day of their talk. During this time,...

How a 100-meter concrete flume in a lab in the UK might help protect us against the next big tsunami. Nobody likes tsunamis, but earthquake engineer Tiziana Rossetto at University College London (TEDx Talk: Engineering against tsunami) is hard at work building one of her own. Don’t worry -- it’s not going to destroy your coastline. It’s a scale...