Smart stuff from the comments: TED community member Phillip Farris shared this in response to the TED Talk by nuclear physicist Taylor Wilson: My radical plan for small nuclear fission reactors: "Despite the rampant assumptions regarding nuclear power and its perceived dangers, Wilson’s fission idea addresses many of the problems found in react...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Taylor Wilson is a 17-year old nuclear physicist. No, really. He charms the audience from the get-go, making the case that "you know, as a scientist, the glass is always 100% full, with water and air." But he's really here to make two cases: that nuclear fusion will be the energy of the future, and that kids c...

Which is the bigger threat to wildlife: Radioactivity or humans? Wildlife ecologist Jim Beasley has gone into the contaminated zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima to learn the answer, and his findings are both sobering and heartening. When humans are evacuated after a nuclear disaster, what happens to the environment -- soil, plants and trees,...

TED2013 kicks off in just 11 days. And, in the very first session, Robert J. Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson will ascend the stage for a debate on the future of work. While Gordon will focus on how our current ecosystem of innovation is too focused on personal gadgetry, and thus isn’t setting us up to solve the big problems of the future, Brynjolfs...

Taylor Wilson graduated from high school in May. And Popular Science has already dubbed him "The Boy who Played with Fusion" and Forbes has suggested that he may just be "The Bill Gates of Energy." Wilson first received attention at the age of 14, after building a nuclear fusion reactor he'd dreamed up in his parents’ garage. He spoke at ...

Data is a valuable, powerful commodity -- but unlike oil, it is unlimited in quantity and in its capacity for harm, says technology thinker James Bridle. The phrase “data is the new oil” was apparently coined in 2006 by Clive Humby, the British mathematician and architect of the Tesco Clubcard, a supermarket reward program. Since then, it has b...

Taylor Wilson has been called “The Boy Who Played With Fusion” by Popular Science magazine. At age 9, Wilson stunned tour guides at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with his complex understanding of rocket science. At 12, he set out to make a “star in a jar.” By 14, Wilson had become the youngest person to achieve nuc...

Five years ago, a tsunami and nuclear disaster led to the mass evacuation of the Fukushima region of Japan. Photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart covered the aftermath; last September he returned for a month to see how the situation has progressed. Here, he shares some of his portraits and reflections about the trip. [gallery link="none" c...

In January 2020, a new advice column from New York City psychologist Guy Winch, who has given two beautifully thoughtful and helpful TED Talks and written one TED book, will appear on TED.com. Called “Dear Guy,” the column will consist of Guy’s answers to questions from readers. As we’re preparing to publish it, we’ve realized this: We need ...

Chemist Rebecca Abergel and her colleagues have found a way to remove radioactive contaminants from the body. Now they are trying to put their solution in a pill. After the US dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two, more than 100,000 people died -- many from exposure to radiation. At high doses,...

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built specially for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, two new playlists are available: Animals that amaze and The end of oil? Animals that amaze At TED there's a certain species of speaker who is absolutely devoted to all kinds of weird beasts...

What are the tools we're using to build the future? Session 3 speakers go deep on what's next in finance, energy, business and the structures we live in. The next generation of trust on the Internet. For many online transactions, we rely on middlemen like banks and government to establish trust -- but these systems face growing issues lik...

How an elite squad of Tokyo firefighters found the courage to confront the Fukushima nuclear disaster. On March 18, 2011, Tokyo fire division chief Yasuo Sato (TEDxSeeds Talk: How we put out the fire in Japan’s nuclear reactor) dispatched 119 firefighters to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster zone, six days after a series of explosions tore through...

When Hillary Clinton became the first female nominee of a major political party in the United States this summer, she reflected that this achievement "belongs to generations of women and men who struggled, sacrificed and made this moment possible." Women have been leaders throughout history, making positive changes in their communities. But in s...

"The whole planet needs a lot of energy," begins Michel Laberge, in an understatement. So far, he says, we've been running on fossil fuels, and it's been difficult to find something as cost-effective to replace them. Laberge is a fan of nuclear power, which he thinks is the best solution to that problem in the long run.There are two ways to prod...

By Liz Jacobs and Thu-Huong Ha   Our brains work in mysterious ways. They make us laugh, they make us cry, and sometimes, they make us 19-year old geniuses. The 11 speakers in this All-Stars session specialize in areas of the brain as diverse as personality, trauma and gender, but they all agree: Our minds matter. Below, read a deta...

Last week, the editors of Time magazine published a list of 30 people under 30 who are changing the world, with the help of a panel of millennials. On the list: six teenagers and twenty-somethings with TED connections. We at TED have had youth on the brain recently. TED2013 was themed “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.” and we’re sti...

In the new TED Book, Would You Stay?, photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart travels to Chernobyl and Fukushima to try to understand why people refuse to leave these areas despite the risks. Pulling together stunning photos, moving words, recorded interviews and multimedia maps, Rothbart weaves a complex narrative and poses an even tougher...

Autumn and Yuji are surfers who fell in love on the beach of Motoyoshi, a beautiful spot in Japan above Sendai where northern and southern currents meet. A month after Motoyoshi was hit by a tsunami in 2011, triggering a nuclear disaster at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the two made a startling decision -- they came back to help w...

TED Conversations is a unique space where any member of this community can get feedback on an idea, pose an interesting question, or start a fascinating debate with fellow TEDizens from around the globe. This week, dozens of new conversations were started — on topics ranging from the importance of letter-writing to the existence of infinity.  He...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Welcome to Autonomous Agile Aerial Robots i.e. flying robots that can move like anything. Vijay Kumar, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, makes robots related to unmanned airplanes. But those are big and heavy and aren't autonomous -- they need humans to pilot them. The robots he works with are tiny...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Ken Mogi, a Ph.D and researcher from the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo, bears a flag nearly twice his height, bright blue, covered with images of koi fish and Japanese letters. He begins by reminding us about a tragically transformative day in his country on March 11, 2011 that would change tens if...

How to explain the stunning political upheaval of 2016 -- Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in the US -- as well as the current and ongoing atmosphere of division, discontent and disquiet that fills many people’s lives? One simple answer: “We’ve lost our story,” says Jerusalem University historian Yuval Harari, i...

Holly Morris tells the stories of women through documentary, television, print and the web. One story she certainly didn't expect stemmed from a reporting trip to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. She just wanted to get out of the contaminated zone as quickly as possible ... and then she noti...

Featured image: Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, who first developed the theory explaining the process of nuclear fission. Theoretical physicist (and TED Fellow) Shohini Ghose has two great passions: physics, and advocating for gender equity in the sciences. “There are still relatively few women in physics – and the higher up the ladder in ac...

Many people ask, “How are speakers selected for TEDWomen? The answer is that speakers, like ideas, come from many different sources. TED has an open recommendation process on TED.com, and we review those as well as suggestions that come in from everywhere. Sometimes people self nominate but mostly, fans of TEDTalks submit names of women and ...

Deborah Rhodes' spectacular collaboration with a nuclear physicist led to a breakthrough in breast cancer detection. Kate Orff introduces us to the new hero of ecology: the oyster. Amber Case is a "cyborg anthropologist" -- she studies the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines. The Ahn Trio: With cello, piano and violin, si...

Before you can create a new world, you have to imagine new possibilities. The speakers in this session are the visionaries who propose that which couldn't be seen before, and suggest new paths that not only haven't been traveled yet -- but haven't been thought of. Here are the speakers in this session. Click their name to read a recap of thei...

They might not be old enough to rent a car solo or to order a glass of wine, but they certainly have what it takes to deliver a fascinating talk on a bold idea. In this playlist, we highlight incredible TED speakers under the age of 20.From Taylor Wilson, 17, and his nuclear fusion reactor to Richard Turere, 13, and his invention to ward off lio...

Created by the team behind An Inconvenient Truth and starring TED2010 speaker (and former CIA covert operative) Valerie Plame Wilson, Countdown to Zero began playing theaters of select cities this week. At TED, Plame spoke about the compelling need to bring the number of nuclear weapons in the world to zero and the film delves further into her a...