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...

How does TED complement a program of speakers sharing bold ideas, tough truths and jaw-dropping creative visions at TEDGlobal 2017 in Arusha? With interstitials: the beautiful, funny, inspiring, silly, short video breaks screened in between speakers. Pulling from a global pool of creativity, talent and thoughtfulness, this year's TEDGlobal in...

Nine days before the 2016 US presidential election, Roger McNamee went to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg -- whom he'd introduced, back in 2007 -- and told them they had a problem. He'd seen a Facebook group, associated notionally with the Bernie Sanders campaign, distributing misogynistic, viral memes in a way that looked like someone w...

Paul Collier studies the poorest people on earth -- the 1 in 9 humans living in dysfunctional countries with broken economies, places whose income gaps are so wide it's hard for westerners to wrap their minds around it. In 2007, his book The Bottom Billion broke down the problems facing this group of people, stuck in failed and failing state...

The race toward the Smart House of the future is barreling along, from Jibo the creepy home sidekick and Pepper the punny robot to near-military-grade vacuums. Yet between us and robotic domestic bliss, there remain some deceptively simple problems that take a large amount of computing. Friction is very hard to account for. To get a robot to...

The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius," or, in English, "Faster, higher, stronger." And as sports science reporter David Epstein points out from the TED2014 stage, "Athletes have fulfilled that motto — and they’ve done so rapidly." Epstein investigates why it is that, year upon year, runners, swimmers, gymnasts, basketball players...

Yesterday, while our staff finished last-minute preparations for TEDGlobal 2014, a kind of hush fell over the streets of Rio de Janeiro as Brazilians voted in their presidential election. In a race between more than 10 candidates, President Dilma Rousseff emerged as the front-runner, taking 41.5% of the vote, with runner-up Aécio Neves captu...

Session 1 of TEDGlobal 2014 felt a little like a campfire, as five speakers took the stage to share stories of their homeland. Below, a recap of what each had to say. Figures from history rarely have political durability, says writer Marie Arana. And yet, Simón Bolívar’s face still appears in street art throughout South America -- he’s he...

In April 2018, I flew to Vancouver, Canada, for my first TED Conference. As a TED Fellow, I had the opportunity to give both a talk and a cello performance. As I packed my artifacts and artwork, which included three of my custom Ku Klux Klan robes made from various fabrics, the one that most stood out to me then -- and still stands out to me now...

In Phil Plait’s talk from TEDxBoulder, “How to defend earth from asteroids,” he astonishes the audience, sharing how a single rock hurtling through space could damage our civilization as we know it. This weekend, TED Weekends on the Huffington Post features Plait’s spine-tingling talk. Below, some of our favorite essays from this edition,...

In 1985, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, you could see Back to the Future in the theater for less than three bucks, and a 30-year-old Steve Jobs was being forced out of Apple. Doug Menuez was a 28-year-old photographer who had become obsessed with Jobs' story. So he asked a somewhat ridiculous question and got an equally ridicu...

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. Today, 10.10.2020, is the climate's day of destiny: the Countdown Global Launch, a call to action on climate change and the first-ever free TED conference. L...

Today is World Rare Disease Day – an event launched in 2008 to galvanize public awareness and research momentum for rare diseases. In the United States, a disease is considered rare if it affects fewer than 200,000 people. Yet there are more than 7,000 known rare diseases. This ratio means that there's little funding for rare-disease research...

Please enjoy your weekly roundup of news briefs from members of the TED community: A 21st-century break-in. Security futurist Marc Goodman knows that technology can make both life and crime easier. In a post on Boing Boing excerpted from his book Future Crimes, he tells the story of an auto trading company that installed tiny remote-controlled ...

Update: As of January 25, 2016, the Coxless Crew made it to Australia, covering 8,446 miles over the span of 257 days at sea. Congratulations! Your 20s: are they an extended adolescence, or the critical setup for adult life? After watching Meg Jay’s TED Talk, “Why 30 is not the new 20,” 27-year-old Lizanne Van Vuuren decided it was time to ge...

“That is a part of you up there. That’s your water that helps to make the cloud, that becomes the rain, that feeds the plants, that feeds the animals.” These were the words Camlile Seaman’s grandfather said to her on a hot summer day when she was young. Inspired by her Shinnecock Indian heritage, and by her daughter’s fascination with st...

The stars of your favorite TED Talks have been busy over the past week. Below, a few newsy highlights. Postcards from Ferguson. A woman flushing pepper spray out of her eyes, a young black man against a fence with both hands in the air, a police car shrouded in tear gas. These are images from TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein’s “Postcards from Ferguson...

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 Opening Ceremony for the XXII Olympic Winter Games in Sochi takes place today, which means that -- over the next few weeks -- we'll all be watching a steady diet of hockey, skiing and figure skating. To get you in the Olympic spirit, watch these powerful TED and TEDx Talks from Olympians and Paralympians. We dare you not to cry. Janin...

Justice should be blind, right? Unfortunately, the predictive policing software used in much of the US has bias and misunderstanding programmed right into it, says data scientist Cathy O’Neil. The small city of Reading, Pennsylvania, has had a tough go of it in the postindustrial era. Nestled in the green hills 50 miles west of Philadelphia, Re...

TED2018, themed "The Age of Amazement," kicked off Tuesday with two eye-opening sessions of talks from this year's TED Fellows -- with tech and science demos, music, dance and comedy -- as well as the opening of exhibits and, of course, a memorable Session 1 full of bold ideas, tough truths and jaw-dropping creative visions. Here are some of ...

Who would have thought when you left those high school math problems behind that you would one day be encountering algorithms on a daily basis? Zeynep Tufekci might have guessed; now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information, Tufekci’s first job as a teenager was as a computer programmer. So it’s no sur...

Think back: Before Yo, before the cloud, before ubiquitous mobile connectivity, you first interacted with the Internet in your desktop browser. Sir Tim Berners-Lee and others who built the first database of linked information that later became the web haven't stopped thinking about those early days, and how we can defend the open culture the Int...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Steven Pinker  is a linguist and psychologist. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. The pair are also married, and they have taken to the TED stage, in front of a dinner table with several luminaries, to have a very public argument, or, in their rather more academic terms, a Socratic dial...

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 ...

We all have important things we want to accomplish, but there are so many distractions and stumbling blocks that may get in our way. Here, writer Bina Venkataraman shares a startlingly easy strategy to use to defeat future challenges. Playing poker is like planning for the future in one sense: You’re making decisions with limited information, a...

Teen reporters Sadie Cruz and Nia Ashley conducted lots of interviews with speakers at the TEDYouth conference on November 17. Their Q&As will run on the TED Blog over the next few weeks. Here, a interview conducted by Sadie.  Photographer Rick Smolan brought the flavor of homes across the United States to life, helped 25,000 photogra...

Last week, I saw Barbara Walters' list of "The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2014." It included interesting thinkers like Elon Musk (watch his TED Talk) and George R.R. Martin (the author of Game of Thrones), along with crowd-pleasers like Taylor Swift and Oprah. But reading this list of almost exclusively marquee names made me think about s...

Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls out Feminism Lite -- "a hollow, appeasing and bankrupt idea." A few years ago, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a childhood friend and new mother, asking her how she could raise her baby girl to be a feminist. Adichie’s new book, Dear Iljeawele, is her response, and it contain...

Behold, your recap of TED-related news: Print your own pharmaceutical factory. As part of an ongoing quest to make pharmaceuticals easier to manufacture, chemist Lee Cronin and his team at the University of Glasgow have designed a way to 3D-print a portable “factory” for the complicated and multi-step chemical reactions needed to create u...