Great gifts aren’t always tangible. Just think back to the last time someone made your holiday season by gifting you an experience, or by writing you a card that got you just a little choked up. And so we ask: why not give the gift of an idea? This week, we’ve asked some of our favorite speakers of 2013 to gift three people in their lives wi...

Limitations, schimitations. At TED2013, Phil Hansen shared the story of how he thought his art career was over when he developed a severe hand tremor. Instead, by learning to “embrace the shake,” Hansen became a creative powerhouse, constantly coming up with new ways to transcend his limitation. And so we wondered: what if we asked Phil Hanse...

The pressure to find great gifts is on. And rather than wait in a long line to purchase yet another sweater, we ask: why not give the gift of an idea? This week, we contacted incredible speakers from 2013 and asked them to gift three people in their life with a TED Talk that will amuse, amaze or inspire them. Below, see which talks Lisa Bu -- T...

Kid President warms hearts anytime he speaks. So what happens when he gives a "KID Talk"? A great opening line, tiny top hats for dogs and, of course, a dance. This talk gets a standing ovation from us—and we have a feeling it will send you off to the weekend in the right spirit. Watch Kid President's breakthrough moment on TED.com » An...

Bran Ferren's life pivoted on a trip to Rome at age 9. He's the son of two passionate abstract expressionist artists, who taught him that art wasn't just decorative but about communicating ideas, and the grandson of a cabinet-making factory owner, who often took him on field trips to buy electronics to take a apart and reassemble. So Ferren di...

Twitter was ablaze yesterday with some interesting news: Kermit the Frog had just become the first frog (albeit puppet) to give a TEDx Talk. On Thursday afternoon, the green superstar hopped on over to Jackson, Mississippi, to give a standing-ovation-grabbing talk at TEDxJackson. Kermit was a natural fit for the event, as The Muppets creator...

Television schedules are packed with reality shows about the wild world of modeling. Tyra Banks’ America’s Next Top Model is casting for its 20th edition right now, and The Face, starring Naomi Campbell, Coco Rocha and Karolina Kurkova, will premiere in February. What are we supposed to learn from this addictive genre? Modeling isn’t just about ...

Jane Chen knew that, for her low-cost baby incubator to save lives, moms would need to love it. But she had no idea that one of the world’s most famous moms—Beyoncé—would become one of her biggest supporters. Last week, Beyoncé announced a $125,000 donation to Embrace Innovations, Chen’s organization that makes the low-cost infant warmer,...

. Track and fielder Steve Mesler never imagined himself at the Winter Olympics, standing atop a freezing mountain preparing to compete. But after repeated injuries in his original sport, he realized that his Olympic dream wasn’t going to happen on the track he'd planned. Mesler opted to channel his drive and ambition into becoming a bobsledde...

Many of us in the TED office have been in Orange Is the New Black withdrawal. We inhaled the first two seasons of the Netflix series, and have been waiting ever since for the new season to come out. If, like us, the mere mention of the show sends Regina Spektor's "You've Got Time" blasting through your head, then you will want to watch this ...

The Knight Foundation announced today a grant to TED -- $985K to help TED leverage technology to turn TED.com into an action platform, one that allows members of the TED community to work on amplifying and measuring the impact of ideas as they ripple through society, producing technology tools and best practices for connected action. The gra...

Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights: Hours after announcing that the 2013 Prize in Physics had been awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles,” ...

If you ever find yourself in Brazil, advises Misha Glenny, try to look past the samba, soccer and sea. The journalist, who is currently researching a book on the underground drug trade in Rio de Janeiro, sees a Brazil of challenges, contradictions and opportunities that are far more complex than the celebrations on Ipanema let on. During ...

On the surface, the talk is "TED-like": the round red carpet, the well-rehearsed speaker, the shadowy audience, the headset mic. But quickly, discordant elements begin to register: the strange parenthetical markings on the floor, the inappropriate audience responses, the fact that the speaker himself is a 10-year-old boy. Welcome to "T...

Most people rarely feel compelled to stare at grains of sand. But when those same grains are magnified hundreds of times and rendered in three dimensions, they appear like individual pieces of colored glass crafted by a skilled artist -- no two pieces the same. In today’s TEDTalk, photographer turned microbiologist turned inventor Gary Gr...

Did you go outside and smile for the camera last Friday, like Carolyn Porco (watch her talk) asked you to, while the Cassini probe snapped a photo of Jupiter with Earth in the background? In this hyper-detailed post from Diary of Numbers, the author calculates the odds that one of your photons is in the shot. And you may be thinking: Oh, ...

Evolution. The concept surrounds us -- it's a standard part of science class, it's routinely thrown out as explaining our actions in relationships, business and behavior -- and yet, so many people hold subtle misunderstandings of what Darwin’s theory actually means. In this animated TED-Ed lesson, educator Alex Gendler gives a primer on th...

As technology accelerates our lives, many of us feel an urgent need to slow down. One seductive solution: A secular sabbath. Pico Iyer makes the case, in this meditative excerpt from his new TED Book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere The idea of going nowhere is as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from eve...

When he was 26, Kailash Satyrathi left his job as an electrical engineer. It sounded like a crazy move, but he was determined to help children in India who were forced into labor. Satyrathi has spent three decades raiding factories where children are held as slaves, building a movement to make the employment of children under 14 illegal i...

Through this procedure they can "generate massive amounts of bone," says Stevens as she shows a slide zooming in on the structure of this harvested bone versus the original bone; it is barely distinguishable. This innovation led to quite a bit of press -- and some creative thinking. Stevens says her lab got a call from a group of American footba...

Nesta Morgan is a storyboard artist. And while in the audience at a TED Salon in London in May, she found herself so inspired by several speakers that she took to sketching them -- and their ideas --  as they spoke. Above, see Nesta’s sketch of today’s TEDTalk, “Pam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapes.” “I particularly enjoyed Pam's t...

Sean Caroll gives an unusual disclaimer for his new book, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads to the Edge of a New World, out yesterday: ”You should have no trouble reading and understanding it, no matter what your physics background may be.” Carroll has long been a TED favorite because of his knack...

The week of TED2011 kicked off with the TED Fellows pre-conference, where an extraordinary group of people shared some really fascinating work. The TED Blog spoke with a few Fellows after their presentations; look for more Q&As all week. Chris Woebken has created a device that gives you ant-vision, a billboard that translates for bats, an...

Zak Ebrahim's The Terrorist's Son has won an American Library Association award. The memoir — which became the first TED Book in print in September — was named a recipient of the Alex Award today. A coveted honor, the Alex Award is given to the 10 best adult books of the year that also appeal to young-adult readers. The Terrorist's Son te...

The TED Fellows are an extraordinary group of 368 people -- artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and more -- each at the beginning of a landmark career, and each with a story to tell, a truly unique voice. So when the folks at Medium.com asked us to create a publication for the TED Fellows, we jumped at the chance. Created by Twitter founder E...

I was there when Hans Rosling first shook the room at TED, and transformed tiresome medical statistics into an action-packed, live performance about real people’s lives on the line. He’s since been namechecked by Bill Gates. And he outlasted Fidel Castro – twice. Not merely mortally. In an interview on the TED Blog, Hans recounts an all-n...

It’s a challenge for anyone with a cause: How do you frame the issue so that people feel excited to get involved? For some causes, the answer is asking people to dump a bucket of ice on their head. For others, making that personal connection is even more tricky.  This is exactly how a small group of attendees felt when they were posed with...

Seth Godin: This is broken Why are so many things broken? In a hilarious talk from the 2006 Gel conference, Seth Godin gives a tour of things poorly designed, the 7 reasons why they are that way, and how to fix them. Watch now

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: Listen up. "We are losing our listening," says sound consultant Julian Treasure. In these eight talks on the value of listening, Treasure gives 5 ways to listen better, Er...

TED-Ed is a new initiative to build a deep, tagged archive of educational videos -- expanding the reach and power of great video (including TEDTalks) into the classroom by making them easier for teachers to find. Above, TEDsters use BlackBerry PlayBooks to watch and tag educational videos in the Café at TEDGlobal 2011; below, TED-Ed's Logan ...