Jennifer Healey remembers totaling her car as a teenager. She was cruising down the highway, when she noticed the brake lights on the car in front of her go on. She assumed the car was slowing down, but it came to a halting, abrupt stop. Healey, now a research scientist at Intel working on mobile internet devices, simply couldn’t stop in time an...

It’s 2012. And many of us no doubt imagined that flying cars would be all the rage by now. While that hasn’t happened yet, some major driving innovations are on their way down the pipeline. In a new TEDTalk, Chris Gerdes of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (awesomely abbreviated as CARS) explains that he and his team are busy ...

On March 1 -- just two days after Elon Musk appeared on the TED2013 stage -- a SpaceX CRS-2 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission for the International Space Station. Two days later, after the righting of a glitch, its Dragon capsule delivered a half-ton of supplies for the astronauts on board. And four days after that, ...

We’ve been told that AI-driven cars would soon be all over our roads, but where are they? Writer Janelle Shane explains how our world with all its unpredictable challenges -- things like pedestrians, sinkholes and kangaroos -- are testing the capabilities of the most advanced artificial intelligence. Car manufacturers know: There’s a huge amoun...

Big cities across the globe will soon be getting much, much bigger. As architect Kent Larson shares in this future-focused talk from TEDxBoston, 90 percent of the world’s population growth is expected to happen in cities. But while newly established cities tend to sprawl to accommodate growth, Larson envisions that the metropolises of the futu...

Think about car racing and certain images -- and sounds -- probably come to mind. The high-pitched nasal howl as Formula 1 cars zoom by. The absurdly over-logoed visual extravaganza of NASCAR. Now there's a brand-new racing series that has, well, none of that. Formula E, the world's first fully electric racing series, has cars that swish rather ...

Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the Internet: California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law yesterday making it legal for driverless cars to travel on public roadways. [Forbes] Watch Sebastian Thrun’s TEDTalk “Google’s driverless car” for a description of how such a thing works and Chris Gerdes’ talk “The future race car -- 150m...

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EfcOvoQiX8[/embed] Above, Chris Fralic and friends take a tire-squealing ride in the Google self-driving car in spring 2011. Warning, profanity and lots of it. More video below. At TED2011, Sebastian Thrun from Google told us why he wanted to make a self-driving car: "Most automotive deaths are due t...

"The ultimate sitting machine." Please be kind -- this is only my first attempt at a tagline for the BMW autonomous vehicle which I just went for a test drive, er, test ride in. Yes, I can proudly say that I've gone for a ride in the future -- and it's smooth enough to eat ramen in. Wait, let me back up (just like a car, get it?). A...

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...

"12 years ago I cofounded Zipcar," says Robin Chase. "Zipcar buys cars and parks them through dense metropolitan areas for people to use by the hour or day instead of owning their own cars." Each Zipcar replaced 17 personal cars and caused drivers to drive 80% less. But Chase isn't here to wax nostalgic. She's here to tell us it's time to...

Secrecy is often used as a legal shield to cover up illegal actions by businesses. Anti-corruption activist and TED Prize winner Charmian Gooch explains why we should care -- and what we should do. Privacy and secrecy are hot topics right now. The promise of open data, the perils of mass surveillance, and a world where our social lives are po...

By Kate Torgovnick May and Thu-Huong Ha In the past 30 years, 300 million people in China have left rural areas and moved to cities. Which means that a lot of thinking about the future of cities is happening here. At the TEDCity 2.0 Salon -- an event held in Chengdu, China, on November 12, in partnership with the Michelin Corporate Founda...

It’s an experience that can inspire road rage in even the calmest person: an urban traffic jam where cars crawl along at a pace of inches per hour.  As Jonas Eliasson, a professor of transportation at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), explains in today’s talk, traffic congestion occurs in almost every major city across the globe, d...

Do city people really like to share more? Emily Badger of The Atlantic Cities suggests a new and fascinating phenomenon in urban areas -- that city dwellers are moving toward a culture of shared ownership of everything from cars to power tools. Badger shares this thought in an essay from the new TED Book City 2.0: The Habitat of the Futur...

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 ...

Five months ago, BMW i and TED laid down a challenge. What would the future of mobility look like? There were no constraints on time frame or existing technology. The Next Visionaries project was conceived as a free form exercise in innovation and ideation with the goal to surface some truly breakthrough concepts. Ideas poured in from ...

Let’s shake ourselves out of our four-wheeled stupor, look at the vehicles and devices being developed, and reimagine how we’ll move around our cities, says TED technology curator Alex Moura. Humanity has come a long way from traveling by horse, but when we consider the future of transportation in cities, too many of us are still stuck in the 1...

TED2015 promises to be our most provocative, thought-flipping conference yet. And we’ve added a few new speakers and performers to the lineup to join us March 16-20 in Vancouver. Below, a little introduction. Chris Urmson develops self-driving cars that thrive in both urban and off-roading environments. As the Director of Self-Driving Car...

Chris Anderson introduces Session 3 with a compelling idea: "Most of the new things happening right now that feel like magic — whether it’s self-driving cars or online translations suddenly getting much better — there’s machine learning behind it." In this session we look at the issues around machines that learn. The challenge of teaching...

[embed]https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring[/embed] In conversation with TED's Head Curator Chris Anderson, serial entrepreneur and future-builder Elon Musk discusses his new project digging tunnels under LA, Hyperloop, Tesla, SpaceX and his dreams for what the world could look like. Below, highlights fr...

TED’s presented our share of near-misses and might-never-happen tech demos — including, depending on how you count, at least 5 flying cars. Some big ideas are just too crazy for now, but maybe not too crazy for tomorrow. Under that heading, let’s be charitable and file the flying car. Though to the rational observer the flying car is a kind o...

Twice, Robin Chase has stood on the TED stage and offered powerful visions for a green, and shared, transportation future. At TED2007, the Zipcar founder suggested that car sharing could be the solution to global warming, while also helping drivers without cars. She also posited an even bigger idea: a mesh network of cars that transport cell...

. At TED2007, artist Theo Jansen shared his work creating a new form of life -- which can actually survive on its own -- from plastic tubes and bottles. In this 3D-animation film, David Lance imagines Jansen’s creature walking through a park, morphing into metal and becoming a spider-like form that can jump cars, fly and, eventually, talk.

City planner Jeff Speck has a big idea for how America can be more economically resilient, more environmentally sustainable, and a whole lot healthier: make our cities more walkable, and the people in them less dependent on cars. In today's talk, Speck takes a close look at suburban sprawl -- and the many unexpected effects it's had. "I beli...

Did you know that across the United States, cameras are automatically taking pictures of your car’s license plate as you drive by, recording your plate number and your locations over time? In a chilling talk given at TEDGlobal 2014, civil liberties lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump called attention to the ubiquity of mass surveillance techno...

Patterns delight the mind and eye. And yet, they sometimes lead to us getting stuck — not just in behaviors, but in systems. The speakers in Session 2, “Radical Repatterning,” can see what's beyond the status quo. Below, recaps of the talks in Session 2, in chronological order, from a speaker who will challenge how you think about math to...

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, a new playlist is available: What does the future look like? It's the question none of us is sure how to answer: What will the world look like in 20 years? And in a hundred years, will our lives be reco...

Nurur Rahman Khan was born and bred in Dhaka, Bangladesh; here's a taste of his home city, photographed by Mohammad Tauheed, a TED Senior Fellow, architect, designer and technology consultant. This wasn't your regular photoshoot. Tauheed was hampered in his task by the tense political situation. He told TED in an email, "We just faced around ...

Take a trip back to the future with this week's TED Radio Hour, as six TED speakers share their prophecies for what lies ahead. From curing cancer to self-driving cars, these TEDsters offer exciting visions for the future, but not without cautionary warnings. The episode starts with a walk down memory lane with Nicholas Negroponte, who made s...