Archaeology is a puzzle. For Sarah Parcak, trying to find ancient treasures is made exponentially easier by satellite imagery. Archaeologists have many tools at their disposal: shovels, trowels, satellites. If you are scratching your head at that final entry, check out how TED Prize winner Sarah Parcak uses satellite imagery to locate long-lost...

In January 2011, Fred Villagomez, the head mechanical technician at a Mountain View-based satellite imaging startup, drove east, looping down and around the San Francisco Bay toward Fremont. His destination: an auto plant called NUMMI, a failed joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, whose assets were about to be auctioned off. Vill...

Ranging in age from 17 to 25, they are challenging their country’s gender norms by learning engineering and coding, and setting their sights on infinity and beyond. In Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a dedicated group at the Kyrgyz Space Program is intently focused on building their nation’s first-ever satellite and prepping it for a 2019...

Today—March 21, 2013—the much-anticipated cosmological results from the Planck satellite have been released. In a recent blog post on her own website, TED Fellow and cosmologist Renée Hlozek describes why this is a big day for astrophysics and cosmology. We asked her to explain what the excitement is all about. "Planck is the 'next generation...

She’s best described as the modern-day Indiana Jones. Using infrared imagery from satellites, she identifies ancient sites lost in time. In Egypt, she helped locate 17 potential pyramids, plus 1,000 potential forgotten tombs and 3,100 possible lost settlements. That’s in addition to her discoveries throughout the Roman Empire. Sarah Parca...

Back in 2014, Will Marshall took the TED stage to introduce us to his company, Planet, and their proposed fleet of tiny satellites. The goal: to image the planet every day, showing us how Earth changes in near-real time. In 2018, that vision has come good: Every day, a fleet of about 200 small satellites pictures every inch of the planet, ta...

The Vikings described a place called Vinland — a “land of wine,” bursting with berries. But where, exactly, was it? Space archeologist Sarah Parcak shares a step-by-step look at how her team used Norse texts and satellite imagery to search in eastern Canada. Vinland. It means, quite literally, “wine land.” In their sagas, the Vikings described ...

  This spectacular satellite timelapse sequence shows the growth of Dubai over the past 10 years (while introducing the speakers at last weekend's TEDxDubai event). Producers METAphrenie took 3 months to produce the clip using imagery from Space Imaging Middle East and DigitalGlobe. As they note: The titles, together with the event, re...

Sarah Parcak is a space archaeologist, and has located multiple lost ancient sites. Still, she says, it’s easy to pick her greatest discovery: her husband, Greg Mumford, who she met on her very first dig in Egypt. He was her first lesson in “finding unexpected wonderful things,” she says, and a second lesson followed quickly. On that same tr...

The power of the crowd has helped digitize the world’s books; it maintains the online encyclopedia many of us check by default. The crowd has fueled our understanding of the connections between neurons in the brain and contributed voice samples that will become a simple phone test for Parkinson’s. Incredible things happen when people aro...

Strange as it may seem, archaeologists often look to the sky to discover sites buried deep beneath the earth. Space archaeology, as it’s called, refers to the use of high-resolution satellite imaging and lasers to map and model everything from hidden Mayan ruins in Central America to specific features on the ancient Silk Road trade route in ...

"We're on spaceship Earth," begins Will Marshall during Session 9 of TED2014. "It's fragile and finite -- and we need to take care of it." He shows a satellite image of Earth. Yes, it's beautiful, says Marshall, but it's outdated. The information is old, and he says, "We can't fix what we can't see." Satellite imaging, says Marshall, is b...

Why learn about methane? Because it could be our chance to make a real dent in global warming, says environmentalist Fred Krupp. Methane, which is created when four hydrogen atoms bond to one atom of carbon, is a molecule that’s lighter than air. It's amazingly useful -- it’s the primary component of natural gas, which generates roughly 22 perc...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Space archeology pioneer and Egyptologist Sarah Parcak zooms out from the moment 90 years ago when Howard Carter peered by candlelight into King Tut's tomb to a new age of archaeological discovery: seeking ancient civilization by 21st-century candlelight. Sarah uses satellite imagery to find evidence of ancien...

What’s the best way to find something lost on the ground, like a historical site from a civilization lost to time? For archaeologist Sarah Parcak, the answer’s obvious -- from way up above, using satellites, of course. As a space archaeologist, she’s mapped the lost city of Tanis (of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark fame) and identified th...

“This is Tanis from Indiana Jones, from Raiders of the Lost Ark?” asks Stephen Colbert, holding up a pair of photos, one that shows a barren patch of desert, and another that shows an intricate system of buildings and streets buried underneath it. “This is the city of Tanis that they find with the medallion burned into the guy’s hand, the thi...

TED Fellow Sarah Parcak is a “space archaeologist” who uses infrared technology coupled with satellite imagery to discover previously hidden ancient structures and cities. In this exciting talk from TED2012, she shares how she helped unearth an unknown Ancient Egyptian city through satellite imaging. Now, Parcak is turning her attention t...

Ancient Peru was home to many cultures, most of them still quite mysterious to modern archaeologists. But as Sarah Parcak directs her citizen-science platform at the Peruvian landscape, the invisible past could make a comeback. A mummified macaw with orange and blue feathers. The body of an ancient priestess, whose arms and legs were covered in...

Terrorists make headlines by destroying ancient sites like Palmyra, in Syria. But there's an even more sinister endgame, as archaeologist and TED Prize winner Sarah Parcak explains. You’ve probably heard of blood diamonds and blood ivory. But what about blood antiquities? Over the past two decades, fundamentalist groups have discovered that ...

Space archaeologist Sarah Parcak highlights 4 thrilling recent finds -- and shows us how we can safeguard ancient sites with GlobalXplorer, her new online citizen science platform. Archaeologists worship at the temple of possibility. We travel thousands of miles and dig for years under hot suns, hoping to discover something that will help us un...

Kiran Bedi's campaign to bring mindfulness to prisons was expressed in one amazing photo: 1,000 prisoners meditating in one room. Sheikha Al Mayassa (live via satellite from TEDxDoha) on cultural development in the Middle East: It must be done organically, from within the region. Naomi Klein: "Our underlying assu...

Communication is fundamental to how we relate and interact. But we receive signals from everywhere -- other living creatures, the ecosystem, the earth itself, and the space beyond. In this session six speakers will explore how we send, and more importantly receive, those signals. Here are the speakers who appeared in this session. Click b...

Watch this TEDTalk >> Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project. An interaction designer and an educator, the spirited Italian bounds onto the stage to tell us a story. "A few weeks ago, a friend gave a toy car to his 8-year-old son," he says. "But instead of going to buy one, he went to a website, he downloaded a file ...

US authorities recovered an illegally looted mummy, and they wanted to return it. Big problem: They didn't know where it was from. Enter Sarah Parcak, an Egyptologist and expert in the relatively new field of space archaeology. Here, she explains how she and a team unravelled the mystery. Today there’s a new chapter in the history of collecting...

Via the Gates Foundation's Foundation Notes blog: On Monday, Sept. 20, TEDxChange will look at the eight Millennium Development Goals set by the UN back in 2000 -- and assess how close we are to reaching them by 2015. Melinda Gates made the video above to invite the world to watch online or at a local satellite event. From her post: I hav...

The massive layer of ice covering Greenland melted at a faster rate in July than at any other time in recorded history, with 97% of the entire ice sheet showing signs of significant thaw. The unprecedented rapid melting, which was captured in images taken from several satellites and released by NASA, alarmed scientists and deepened fears about...

Technology isn't just a nice-to-have. Across the world, it's helping to extend rights, open up lines of communication and create new opportunities. In this session, we explore how technology can transform a variety of lives. The speakers who’ll appear in this session: The founder of the Center for Digital Inclusion, Rodrigo Baggio helps ...

As we recklessly warm the planet by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, some industrial emissions also produce particles that reflect sunshine back into space, putting a check on global warming that we're only starting to understand. In her talk at TEDSummit 2019, "Emergency medicine for our climate fever," climate activist Kelly W...

You can watch all 12 sessions of TEDGlobal 2011 on webcast through our Associates webcast membership. The high-def video stream costs $500 for four days of amazement, and you can watch with (and split the cost among) up to 10 people. ($500 / 10 / 4 = $12.50 per day of mind-blowing live TED.) More details here >> The satellite webcas...

TEDGlobal 2014 is venturing "South!" In October, we'll gather in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for a five-day conference that will flip your thinking on innovation, problem-solving and, well, the world. Today, we're revealing the first 40 speakers who'll appear on the TEDGlobal stage. (Which, by the way, is being built on Copacabana Beach). They range...