1905 was a big year for Albert Einstein. He was 26 years old and working in the Swiss Patent Office when, in the span of seven months, he published four papers that would eventually be hugely influential. In these papers, he proposed that light could be a particle, proved that atoms existed, laid out his theory of special relativity and offer...

Human creativity is a natural, infinitely renewable resource -- and it’s coming up with smart, cheap solutions to people’s biggest problems. Strategist Navi Radjou explains. If an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty, then the developing world must be filled with optimists. There, people have learned to get more value from limited ...

Agriculturalist and social entrepreneur Su Kahumbu created iCow, a mobile app that supports farmers caring for livestock. Soon it will become an information-delivery platform that could help generate a whole new crop of young farmers. What does iCow do? The iCow application essentially reminds small-scale dairy farmers in Kenya of important...

Bioengineering professor Manu Prakash brought the world a 50-cent microscope. Now he's created more cheap public health tools, including a paper centrifuge and a mosquito identifier. And he’s just getting started. While many of us may look at a sheet of paper and see something to write on, Stanford University bioengineering professor Manu Praka...

Six TED speakers have been recognized in the 2013 class of MacArthur Fellows. Each recipient will heretofore be unofficially known as a "genius" and will very officially receive a no-strings-attached prize of $625,000 to support his or her creative instincts for the benefit of society. We salute all 24 of this year's winners, of course. B...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A MacArthur for Rhiannon Giddens and Kate Orff. On October 11, the MacArthur Foundation released their list of 2017 Fellows. Among them are musician Rhiannon Giddens and landscape architect Kate Orff. Giddens, known for her rich reinterpretations of Ameri...

The MacArthur Foundation revealed its list of 2015 Fellows this morning. Twenty-four people received the “genius grant,” a $625,000 no-strings-attached stipend -- and two of them are TED Fellows: Patrick Awuah and LaToya Ruby Frazier. Patrick Awuah founded Ashesi University, a college in his home country of Ghana dedicated to educating Af...

Every week at TED’s New York office, the media team gathers for a staff meeting. During the proceedings, one staffer is tasked with sharing five recent things on the internet that thoroughly intrigued, shocked or amused them. Because the selections are always so thrilling, we’ve decided to bring this feature to the readers of the TED Blog. C...

We’ve been on break but the TED community definitely hasn’t -- here are some highlights from the past few weeks. Black Panther’s Shuri stars in her own comic. Writer Nnedi Okorafor will team up with visual artist Leonardo Romero to bring Marvel’s newest Black Panther comic series to life. Shuri will follow Wakandan princess and tech geniu...

Today we’re debuting a new original video series on Facebook Watch called Small Thing Big Idea: Designs That Changed the World. Each 3- to 4-minute weekly episode takes a brief but delightful look at the lasting genius of one everyday object – a pencil, for example, or a hoodie – and explains how it is so perfectly designed that it’s actually...

At the end of Session 1: Liftoff! at TED2014, DJ and producer Mark Ronson drops the TED Talk intro into a million tiny little pieces. Hair slicked to one side, Ronson mutters self-disparagingly about following Nicholas Negroponte, Chris Hadfield and Ziauddin Yousafzai: "Now I know what it feels like to follow Led Zeppelin, the Stones and the Bea...

We want to remember Felix Dennis, who passed away this week at the age of 67, as he’d probably wish—with this trenchant, funny aside from his 2004 TED Talk. "You guys, you know, you're going to totally transform everything. Cloning will transform everything. Voice navigation will transform everything ... But human nature doesn't change, ...

An indefinable quality lies at the heart of any successful idea or project ... a spark of intuition, genius or insight that acts as the driver of all later action. Our speakers in this session all possess such a spark, from the educator who's made it his mission to help high-achieving minority students to a young inventor who figured out a novel...

Humans, ever-meaning-making creatures, will never cease to wonder: Why are things the way they are? Why do I think the way I do? And what does it all mean? Welcome to Session 7 of TED2014, in which speakers will ask big questions about how we -- and the world -- work. Here are the speakers who appeared in this session. Click below to read...

TED Prize winners turn ideas into world-changing projects, with $1 million in seed money and the TED community’s support. Beyond having a solid track record of making high-impact change in their communities and beyond, all prize winners must be capable of one thing: dreaming big. Does this sound like you or someone you know? This morni...

In today's TEDTalk, director Kirby Ferguson outlines a bold vision of creativity -- that it's not about dreaming up a new song, a new piece of art or a new form of technology in a vacuum, but instead about remixing what has come before. In his fast-paced talk, Kirby reveals that many of our most iconic thinkers -- from Henry Ford to Bob Dyla...

TED is dedicated to ideas worth spreading. And that leaves many wondering exactly which ideas have been spread the most widely in the six years that TEDTalks videos have been available online. Here, a list of the 20 most-watched talks on all the platforms we track: TED.com, YouTube, iTunes, embed and download, Hulu and more, as of November 2...

TED2014 begins in five short days, and we have added even more new speakers to look forward to. Below, a bit about each one: Cellist and beatboxer Kevin Olusola from Pentatonix (swoon!) will open Session 1: The Next Chapter. And as a bonus in Session 1, we'll be honoring TED's co-founder, Richard Saul Wurman. In Session 6: Wired, planet de...

We can all play a role in helping defuse even the most bitter conflicts. Veteran negotiator William Ury shares his hard-won insights. My passion in life is helping people and societies to move from no to yes. As a negotiator, mediator and cofounder of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard University, I’ve spent more than four decades traveling ...

Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week: In case you haven't seen it yet, To This Day is a beautiful collaborative project that combines spoken word poetry and a flurry of eclectic animations to raise awareness about bullying. Watch seven TED Talks on the wonder of 3D printing. The f...

Radio host Julie Burstein has found the perfect analogy for creativity—raku pottery. A Japanese art form in which molded clay is heated for 15 minutes and then dropped in sawdust which bursts into flames, what makes this pottery so beautiful is its imperfections and cracks. Burstein interviewed hundred of artists, writers, musicians and fil...

Miguel Nicolelis begins today’s talk by showing you what a brainstorm looks and sounds like. “This is 100 brain cells firing,” says Nicolelis. “Everything that defines what human nature is comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for the future...

Maria Popova of brainpickings.org shares some of her favorite books relating to dreams and dreaming. "The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams" Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary in 1940. Here are six books that explore how dreams, in both senses of the word -- the nocturnal wanderings of the unconscious mind and the motivated marches of the cons...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Don Tapscott has written 14 books about the digital, super-connected, hyper-collaborative world, and he has the distinct responsibility of officially kicking off Critical Crossroads, the first session of this year's TEDGlobal conference. He gets a laugh early on: "Openness is a word denoting opportunity, possi...

We at TED have a new addition to the office: a space-age ant farm! The Ant Column Cylinder Ant Farm arrived at our office last week. It’s a six-inch tube filled with a nutrient-rich blue goo. We added ants ordered from Ants Alive into the equation and within a few hours, the ants had built a complicated series of tunnels in the goo and looked...

Jinsop Lee is here at TED to ask a very important question: Why is sex so damn good? The audience laughs, but the playful designer is making a serious point. Great sex, and great design, is about the five senses and how and when we use them. Lee tells us the story of a university challenge to create a clock. Lee's design involved a sunflo...

What's happening in this picture above? Ask Mohammed Abu Zeinab, a TEDx speaker and member of the onsite documentary crew WTYSL: As I walked in, I saw a crowd had gathered, with Lara, our own TEDx Director, even standing on a coffee table to see the center of everyone's attention, the real show. I knew what it was. It was Hans. I swerv...

Horses, parrots and mosquitos: oh my! TED2013 will commence in just nine days, and the TED Blog is gearing up for our live, minute-by-minute, coverage. One thing we can’t wait to see: which speaker will bring an animal onstage with them? (Our money is on ornithologist Kees Moeliker.) Sometimes, speakers arrive with a live animal, other times ...

This year, TED is using Facebook and Instagram to give our online audience behind-the-scenes access to the ideas we're discussing at TED2018: The Age of Amazement. New for 2018, our online community will be able to join the conference via the Facebook Watch show TED: Backstage Pass. Throughout the week, we'll offer exclusive interviews, live ...

Maybe two years ago, my sister and I came up with what we thought was a genius term for a photo that someone snapped of themselves on their cameraphone: an "extended arm shot." Someone else, however, came up with a term that rolled far more easily off the tongue: the "selfie." The rest is history. Who hasn’t, at some point in time, either mad...