Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights. Jeff Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon (watch his TED Talk), made waves on Monday when it was announced that he will buy The Washington Post for $250 million. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its ow...

So many of us have been moved to mail a box of clothes, toiletries, food or toys after hearing about a natural disaster or tragic event. But humanitarian logistics expert Dale Herzog says: Ask yourself three questions before sending another box into the chaos. In the bleak winter days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, a t...

Team Rubicon’s latest mission is called Operation: Greased Lightning. What does that mean, you ask? In this powerful talk, given at TEDxSanDiego in 2011, Jake Wood shares his experience co-founding Team Rubicon, a disaster relief organization that uses veterans to do the difficult work of search and rescue, supply disbursement and debris cl...

Hurricane Sandy is currently hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, threatening a large swath of the United States’ East Coast, from North Carolina to Maine. With coastal areas evacuated, wind and rainfall picking up quickly and many transportation systems shut down in anticipation of flooding, millions of people are currently at home, just waiti...

The paradox of finding peace in a war zone, and a way to make aid more effective -- by decentralizing it and thus speeding it up. Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, this week’s talks, wh...

The TED community has been busy in the past week. Below, a few TEDsters with news to share. Mapping by the millions. Frustrated by the inability to test his theories given the current technology, Sebastian Seung embarked on what many of his colleagues considered career suicide: he built a game to map all the neural connections in the human ...

Oh, the places you’ll go with TEDx. This week, we’ve been exploring everything beyond the urban jungle. We followed an explorer to the dark caverns of underground caves, an astronaut to outer space, a time lapse photographer to fields and mountain ranges, and a group of TEDx’ers to the top of snowy Mount Everest. This is the kind of global pers...

Here come the acronyms: In March, the United Nations’ (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a working draft of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) from Working Group II (WGII), on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” in the world’s climate. The 2590-page report was studded with dense charts containing ... a lot of ...

If your home had been devastated by a disaster, would you stay? Why do people choose to remain in potentially life-threatening places? These are just a few of the complex questions that photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart and filmmaker Holly Morris explore in their respective work, documenting the lives of people living in Chernobyl and Fuk...

Michael Pritchard is very likely the only person to have stood on the TED stage and uttered the immortal phrase, "Let's get a bit of that poo in there." At TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford, he demonstrated his then-new product, the Lifesaver bottle, which can be used to turn filthy, rabbit-dropping-infested water into sparklingly clean liquid that's saf...

Human potential is a double-edged sword; it can be turned to great good or great evil. This session is about the discovery, liberation and channeling of human potential in ways that make the world around us a better place. But first, Alsarah & the Nubatones introduce us to East African retro-pop. As Alsarah says from stage mid-set: "T...

Most disasters come with heart-breaking visuals -- innocent victims, burned wreckage. Our looming water disaster is invisible. Will anyone notice before it's too late? Last week in Fresno, California, in the middle of areas hardest hit by the state's five-year drought, Donald Trump voiced the opinion that "there is no drought." Instead, he blam...

For some people, climate change can be an abstract concept, especially if they’re living somewhere that hasn’t experienced serious effects yet. Art is one effective way to provide people with a vision of what the future could look like if we do take action -- or if we don’t. That’s why TED Countdown -- a global rallying cry to cut greenho...

Pat Mitchell, curator of TEDWomen, shares this report with the TED Blog: In April, I had the privilege of moderating a discussion at the Skoll World Forum on the subject of “Leading Through Adversity.” My panel consisted of four powerful women: Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president (watch Mary Robinson's TED Talk); Halla Tómasadótti...

Volunteering at NGOs around the world convinced Peter Haas there had to be a better way to help villages develop. He co-founded the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) to empower locals to start their own businesses that bring clean water, electricity and sanitation to their communities -- and keep them there. Inte...

We live in contentious times. Yet behind the dismaying headlines and social-media-fueled quarrels, people around the world -- millions of them -- are working unrelentingly to solve problems big and small, dreaming up new ways to expand the possible and build a better world. At "We the Future," a day of talks at the TED World Theater prese...

How do we manage the transformations that are radically altering our lives -- all while making a positive impact on our well-being, productivity and the world? In a word: reboot. For a seventh year, BCG has partnered with TED to bring experts in leadership, psychology, technology, sustainability and more to the stage to share ideas on ret...

Growing up in the UK and coming of age in Pakistan, TEDIndia Fellow Asher Hasan observed a vast discrepancy: those with and without access to basic healthcare, and the devastating social consequences of this disparity. He tells TED Blog the story of how he witnessed a single health disaster ruin the hopes of his childhood friends, and how this...