Dave Isay was shocked to learn he was in the running for the 2015 TED Prize. And yet, his TED Prize wish — to grow StoryCorps’ digital archive of the collective wisdom of humanity — was granted, fueled by $1 million and the vigor of TED’s global community. Could your idea win the TED Prize? In a word: yes. Nominations for the 2017 TED Pri...

Roads need constant repair. Rain, snow and other moisture seeps into the asphalt and -- if it freezes -- expands, breaking it apart and creating potholes. In today’s talk, given at TEDxDelft, civil engineer Erik Schlangen reveals a fascinating solution: a road that is able to heal. He gives a demonstration of a new type of asphalt, which in...

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, two new playlists are available: Work Smarter and Objects of Desire. Work smarter Business advice can be horribly rote and hackneyed. But not the advice given in these 11 talks, which come from unexp...

For most of us, trying to picture the future is a futile exercise that leads at best to some bad ideas that should likely never be shared out loud. For people like TED Fellow Chris Woebken, it's why the present exists. Along with Elliott Montgomery, Woebken runs The Extrapolation Factory, a studio devoted to imagining future scenarios. One re...

MaKey MaKey -- the kit that encourages you to rig a banana piano or control a video game with pencil-etchings -- was one of the most successful projects on Kickstarter in 2012. The project raised 2, 272% of its goal in 30 days, bringing in a cool half million from excited makers. Today’s TED Talk comes from the co-creator of the MaKey MaKey, ...

Just a few of the intriguing headlines involving members of the TED community this week: The cascading effect of small lies. Tali Sharot is the senior author on a paper published in Nature Neuroscience that sheds light on the possible slippery-slope effect of telling small, self-serving lies. Using an fMRI scanning device to monitor the a...

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...

Museum exhibitions offer a complex conundrum. While museum-goers walk through, looking at art and objects of extreme historical importance, the context of a piece’s creation is often reduced to a small plaque on the wall. This is an issue that Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, thinks a lot about. I...

In the most recent issue of Scientific American, Pawan Sinha shares the eye-opening experience that shook his worldview. When riding through the streets of New Delhi one night in 2002, Sinha's cab slowed for a red light by a struggling family sitting on the side of the road. Both of the children, emaciated and barefoot, had eye cataracts....

Bosnian photojournalist Ziyah Gafić photographs the aftermath of conflict. (Watch his TED Talk, "Everyday objects, tragic histories.") In his most recent book, Quest for Identity, he catalogs the belongings of Bosnia’s genocide victims, everyday objects like keys, books, combs and glasses that were exhumed from mass graves. The objects are s...

People worldwide upload more than one billion images a day, preserving their memories to enjoy them in the future. But it turns out: all our photography may be obstructing our recall, says tech podcaster Manoush Zomorodi. When it comes to obsessional tech habits, photo-taking probably isn’t the worst for relationships. If you’re not gazing into...

It’s a humbling day to be an Earthling. Just sixteen hours before the highly-anticipated flyby of the asteroid 2012 DA14, the skies above the Chelyabinsk region of Russia were shattered by the explosion of an incoming meteor. Although fortunately nobody appears to have been killed by the blast, more than 1,000 people reported injuries, mostly...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. New clues about the most mysterious star in the universe. KIC 8462852 (often called “Tabby’s star,” after the astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who led the first study of the star) intermittently dims as much as 22% and then brightens again, for a reason n...

Ophthalmologist Anthony Vipin Das is working on a new toy for the blind, FITTLE, with Tania Jain, a designer from National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar. The toy will help blind children learn to read Braille while getting a sense of the shape of the world around them. We asked him to tell us all about it. Below, his essay on what this toy ...

Invisible to the eye and undetectable by most sensors, the small frequency of light called terahertz has eluded scientists for more than a century. That is finally changing -- and revealing amazing visuals in the process. In 2011, Albert Redo-Sanchez and his colleagues made an extraordinary discovery. Using terahertz technology, a recent additi...

Lee Cronin is a chemist at the University of Glasgow. At TEDGlobal last year he took the stage to describe his audacious idea to create inorganic life. This year, he is presenting a short talk on another ambitious idea: a 3D printer that, instead of printing objects, prints molecules. The question he starts with is, "Could we make a really c...

Bosnian photojournalist Ziyah Gafić photographs the aftermath of conflict. (Watch his TED Talk, "Everyday objects, tragic histories.") In his most recent book, Quest for Identity, he catalogs the belongings of Bosnia’s genocide victims, everyday objects like keys, books, combs and glasses that were exhumed from mass graves. The objects are still...

Design icon John Maeda shares the everyday objects (well, non-objects) he can't live without. When most people think of design, they think of objects. Lights, chairs, cars … tangible things that we can ooh and aah over. That’s why it’s surprising to hear designer John Maeda (TED Talk: How art, technology and design inform creative leaders) de...

Terrorists make headlines by destroying ancient sites like Palmyra, in Syria. But there's an even more sinister endgame, as archaeologist and TED Prize winner Sarah Parcak explains. You’ve probably heard of blood diamonds and blood ivory. But what about blood antiquities? Over the past two decades, fundamentalist groups have discovered that ...

Sarah Parcak is a space archaeologist, and has located multiple lost ancient sites. Still, she says, it’s easy to pick her greatest discovery: her husband, Greg Mumford, who she met on her very first dig in Egypt. He was her first lesson in “finding unexpected wonderful things,” she says, and a second lesson followed quickly. On that same tr...

Artist Shih Chieh Huang (TED Talk: Sculptures that’d be at home in the deep sea) takes everyday objects -- plastic bottles, food containers, old computer parts, plastic garbage bags -- and transforms them into surreal sea creatures. These creatures tower over the viewer and move as if they're alive. Many have eyes that blink, tentacles that unfu...

Hint: it has something to do with why we believe the earth is flat until we're taught otherwise in school. Neuroscientist Mariano Sigman explains how the process of learning involves a certain amount of un-learning what we intuitively know. Common sense suggests that learning consists of acquiring new knowledge. Socrates, though, proposed tha...

James Patten creates physical interfaces for technology -- producing rich, captivating experiences for the user. Your studio explores new ways physical objects relate to digital information. Why is that mission important to you? The way the human body and human mind are set up, we’re incredibly good at using physical objects and interactin...

Design icon David Kelley shares 5 everyday objects he loves. IDEO and d.school founder David Kelley exudes warmth, empathy -- and the deep conviction that all people can uncover more creative potential and meaningful joy in their own lives. (TED Talk: How to build your creative confidence). To begin to unlock more of your own creative potenti...

By Clayton Cameron As a 5-year-old kid, I barely knew what the word rhythm meant. At least no one told me what banging on inanimate objects and creating my own little beats might be called. It was like rhythm chose me and I really had no say in the matter. My favorite elementary school pastime was tabletop drum battles with my friends. I’d pl...

The neutrino has been called "the ghost particle," due to its otherworldly ability to pass through solid objects, including you and me. Researchers in Antarctica are trying to catch them, hoping they might reveal the most energetic areas of the universe. Neutrinos: you can’t feel them, you can’t see them, but they’re everywhere. They’re constan...

This weekend, hundreds of video games enthusiasts lined up in the cold, waiting 12 hours-plus to be the first to get their hands on Nintendo’s new console, the Wii U. And when the game Call of Duty: Black Ops was released in 2010, gamers around the world played it for more than 600 million hours in just the first 45 days. That is the equivalen...

Catarina Mota has many friends. One of her friend's fathers, when her friend was a kid, built a vehicle out of a bicycle and washing machine, because the family couldn't afford a car. Culturally, we used to know how to make and fix everything. As the 20th century progressed, we lost that ability, but thanks to the maker community, we are slo...

From China’s underwater cities to Amsterdam’s neglected neighborhoods to Italy’s looted ruins, Jorge Mañes Rubio seeks out forsaken places and makes art that memorializes, reimagines and reengages them with the world. His project “Normal Pool Level” -- which emerged from his exploration of the cities, towns and villages submerged by China’s ...

littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir wants you to snap the internet to anything you want. How might the Internet of Things make the world a better place? To find out, we asked TED Fellow Ayah Bdeir, an engineer, artist and founder of the modular electronic circuit toy-slash-tool littleBits. (Watch her TED Talk, "Building blocks that blink, beep and ...