Allan Savory isn’t afraid to own up to the “greatest blunder” of his life. In his incredible talk from TED2013, Savory shares his life’s work managing grasslands in Africa, weaving a gripping tale out of what seems like an unlikely topic.  In the 1950s, Savory helped create large national parks in Africa. But as people left this land to make way...

With just over a month to go before the 2012 presidential election in the US, eyes around the world are on the contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The election may well come down to a few key issues. So what matters most to Americans? The TED Blog read this Gallup poll from late July on issues that citizens want the next president ...

On January 17, 2009, at 3:24pm, Flight 1549 took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport as normal. Five minutes later, it had crash-landed in the Hudson River. While the heroic landing of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger has become the stuff of aviation legend, during the white-knuckle landing his passengers had no idea whether they would s...

Edinburgh, Scotland will host TEDSummit this summer, from July 21-25. The city was selected because of its special blend of history, culture and beauty, and for its significance to the TED community (TEDGlobal 2011, 2012 and 2013 were all held there). We asked longtime TEDster Ellen Maloney to share some of her favorite activities that showcas...

This week, the world's advertising and communication agencies have sent their top executives and creativites to Cannes, on the French Riviera, for the annual Festival of Creativity and the Cannes Lions awards. In the scope of a partnership with Starcom MediaVest Group, TED was in Cannes and presented two sessions. On Tuesday, on the main stag...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson Brené Brown is an expert on vulnerability who starts off her talk by describing the extraordinary impact of giving a talk in 2010 at TEDxHouston: The Power of Vulnerability. For starters, she says, the day after giving the talk, she woke up in a state of depression that she'd shared details of her own breakdo...

What can American parents learn from how other cultures look at parenting? A look at child-rearing ideas in Japan, Norway, Spain -- and beyond. The crisis of American parenting, as anyone who has looked at the parenting section of a bookstore can attest, is that nobody knows what the hell they're doing. Yet despite this lack of confidence and a...

Band manager Vijay Nair is revolutionizing the independent music scene in India. In an industry heavily dominated by Bollywood, Vijay has resorted to creative techniques like printing instructions of how to pirate one of his band's CDs on the back of the disc. Though his quirky company has had a lot of success, all start-ups make the same m...

"I am a magnificent failure," Ashton Kutcher announced on the TEDYouth stage in New Orleans earlier today. "I screw up so much it hurts." The star of television show Two and a Half Men said this not to be self-deprecating or to beat up on himself, but to drive home the point that failure is a part of life -- and one that can prompt profou...

Taking a moment to pause and really look at the other person can help us all avoid embarrassment and hurt feelings, says youth empowerment activist Quita Christison. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. ...

No, “humble narcissism” is not an oxymoron; it’s a combination of qualities that the best leaders and companies have. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant explains why. Who would you rather work for: a narcissistic leader or a humble leader? The answer is more complicated than you think. In a Fortune 100 company, researchers studied whe...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Neuroscientist Tali Sharot comes on stage to discuss the "optimism bias." It's a topic that she's been studying in her lab and she claims that 80% of us experience it. "It" being the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good things happening to us. As she puts it: "we're more optimistic than realistic, and...

Most people go into top positions with good intentions, but those often crumble due to the demands -- and perks -- of the job. If you want to succeed, devote some time and energy to self-leadership, says consultant Lars Sudmann. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from s...

Shimon Schocken is a professor and founding dean of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at IDC Herzliya in Tel Aviv. He starts out with some of his life story, introducing us to his grandfather, Salman Schocken, who dropped out of school aged 14 to help feed the family. He went on to found "a glittering empire of department stores," eve...

How amazing would it be to see a wooly mammoth, raised from the dead, walking the permafrost of the North again? Or to look up at the sky and see a flock of passenger pigeons fly by? Or to witness a gastric-brooding frog hiccup tadpoles out the mouth from an embryo located in its stomach? These incredible animals, as well as others beyond ou...

Cartier believes in the power of bold ideas to empower local initiatives to have global impact. To celebrate Cartier's dedication to launching the ideas of female entrepreneurs into concrete change, TED has curated a special session of talks around the theme "Bold Alchemy" for the Cartier Women's Initiative Awards, featuring a selection of f...

Jess Thom wants you to know that it’s okay to laugh. “You’re going to hear the words 'biscuit' and 'hedgehog' a lot in the next few minutes,” she says at the beginning of her talk from TEDxAlbertopolis. That’s because Thom has Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological condition that causes involuntary movements and noises commonly referred to a...

Psychologist Kelly McGonigal used to demonize stress, warning patients that stress can increase the risk of a wide variety of ailments. Then, research changed her mind. Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal (TED Talk: How to make stress your friend) explored a startling research finding in her TED Talk: Stress may only have negative health conseq...

Instead of spending your days complaining, you might try changing your workplace from within, says leadership expert Simon Sinek. Simon Sinek now spends his days helping people create inspiring workplaces, but he found this calling only after experiencing profound professional despair. “I hated waking up in the morning,” he recalls. “I was no f...

The history of innovation isn’t a straight line, but a squiggly, winding path. In How We Got To Now, my new book and PBS documentary series, I highlight some of the creative mistakes that helped shape our world. Like most history, the narratives of innovation tend to be written by -- and about -- the victors. The traditional timeline of histori...

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. How do you deal with immense change? Be honest with yourself: Are you someone who embraces it and evolves with it? Or, do you find tend to retreat and stick ...

Raffaello D’Andrea (TED Talk: The astounding athletic power of quadcopters) stunned the audience with his super agile flying machines at TEDGlobal 2013. In a robot lab built on site, D’Andrea demoed tricks and feats to a hushed but delighted crowd, including a quadcopter that flew around the room with a glass of water perched on top, not spill...

With Microclinic International, Daniel Zoughbie is making health contagious, and believes that it’s critical to peace and stability in the Middle East. Microclinic International has a unique philosophy of “contagious health.” What does that mean? Common sense tells us that negative things like violence, smoking behaviors and unhealthy eating...

Every day, emergency room workers use triage to prioritize patient care -- but exhausted personnel in under-resourced hospitals can easily make deadly errors in diagnostic tests and symptom scoring. South African emergency room doctor Mohammed Dalwai witnessed such avoidable tragedy firsthand while working with Médicins sans Frontières in Pa...

Photographer Eman Mohammed captures the daily lives of incarcerated women and their children at one of the United States’ rare residential parenting programs. Eman Mohammed was just 19 when she began covering her native Gaza for a Bethlehem-based news agency. She spent more than a dozen years navigating violence and gunfire -- and sexism and ha...

A newly released diagram of all life on Earth, the Tree of Life, contains a whole new branch, full of microbes -- which appear to dominate Earth's biodiversity. How did we miss this? Since Darwin’s day, scientists have worked to map all of life on a single tree to show how all forms of life on Earth evolved and are related. The DNA sequencing r...

The bad news: We all face powerful mental blocks that stop us when we’re trying to achieve our goals. The good news: We can outwit them. Here’s how, according to cognitive psychologist Amanda Crowell. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community;...

Is it possible to define, measure and even increase how wise a person is? Psychiatrist Dilip Jeste is attempting to answer those questions. To assess our health, we weigh ourselves, measure our blood pressure, and check our cholesterol. But one scientist is trying to figure out the connection between our well-being and something much more diffi...

This morning, The Guardian published this essay written by TED's curator, Chris Anderson, in response to a column in the paper last week. In this essay, he dives into the misconception that TED Talks oversimplify complex subjects, and explains why we as a company are dedicated to the principle that knowledge should be shared. Seven years ag...

Amy Robinson maxed out her bank account to attend TEDGlobal 2010. While there, she heard Sebastian Seung of MIT give the talk “I am my connectome” and knew she had to talk to him. Two years later, Robinson—the organizer of TEDxHuntsville—saw on Twitter that Seung was launching something new: EyeWire, a game allowing citizen scientists aro...