Today, July 11, is World Population Day. Established by the Governing Council of the United Nation Development Program in 1989, to commemorate the day global population reached five billion two years earlier, World Population Day strives to raise awareness about the issues created by the growing number of people in the world. Twenty-four yea...

Writers Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson unpack the Canadian Solution, explaining how the country's attitude towards refugees and immigrants has set it apart and why other nations should take note if they want to thrive. The first thing the visitor heard as he approached the cabs outside the airport was a lively discussion in Arabic, which bro...

  Super Cells is the new TED Book by Nina Tandon and Mitchell Joachim, who take us on an eye-popping tour of the tantalizing array of inventions already being created with nature’s elemental building block, the cell. They argue that we’re entering a new technological revolution, one in which we can create smarter technologies by making ce...

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 debate with their fellow TEDizens from around the globe. This week, dozens of new conversations were started. Many of them were about issues brought up in our first television special, TED Talks Education, ...

Getting treatment for a mental illness when you live in the developing world is hardly as easy as making an appointment with a therapist or psychiatrist. Mental illness is often not treated with the same sense of urgency as physical illness, and resources to provide care are simply not available in many areas. In this moving talk at TEDGl...

At TEDGlobal 2013 environmental systems researcher Lian Pin Koh presents a new and unexpectedly benign use for drones: nature conservation. Nepal has natural landscapes that are beautiful -- and in danger. But wildlife conservation is costly, and time- and labor-consuming. Behold: Conservation drones, a new tool being used in Nepal to com...

Dave Troy (TED Talk: Social maps that reveal a city's intersections — and separations) makes "people maps," graphics that visualize cities and communities by people's interests rather than their geography. Here he looks at the divides in St. Louis, Missouri, and asks if we might use this kind of analysis to predict the next Ferguson. Looking at...

Washington -- and America -- seem mired in division and dysfunction, but bipartisanship and compromise could exist again in the near future. Journalist Michael Tomasky points out three tiny rays of hope. I’ve been covering politics for 25 years, and lately, wherever I go in the US, the first question that people ask is “Why can’t politicians in...

Engaging in dialogue and conversation is a great way to learn. Which is why, this semester, TED Fellow Jessica Green is teaching a Biodiversity class this semester at the University of Oregon, and her students are starting great TED Conversations around topics that come up in class. And you are welcome to join! How does affluence influence bi...

Homophobia and mass shootings are afflictions that won't be solved overnight -- but the problematic and outdated restrictions against gay blood donors could be. Nothing rubs salt in the wounds of tragedy like bigotry or bureaucracy -- or both. But that is just what happened last week after the shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando. Wit...

Social geographer Danny Dorling explodes the traditional maps of the world and creates lively, ever-changing depictions of why and how we live. Channeling our twin urges to explore and understand, we geographers strive to uncover the hidden connections of human existence. These seven maps -- produced with cartographer Benjamin Hennig -- offer n...

“These are very difficult times to be a refugee,” says the UN Refugee Agency’s Melissa Fleming. She gives some stats that are hard to swallow: Not since WWII have there been so many people on the run; by the end of today 32,000 people will have been forcibly displaced from their homes; currently there are 1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon...

Richard Turere, 13, grew up hating lions. In Nairobi National Park, where he lives, lions roam freely and often targeted his family’s livestock at night. And yet Turere also hated the only solution his community had come up with to stop lion attacks on cows -- killing the majestic creatures. “I had to find a way of solving this problem,” says...

I’ll never forget the first images of Sebastião Salgado’s that I ever saw. At the time, I was just getting into photography, and his images of the mines of Serra Pelada struck me as otherworldly, possessing a power that I had never seen in a photo before (or, if I’m honest, since). In the twenty years that I’ve been photographing, his work has...

Conservation biologist Juliana Machado Ferreira uses genetic data to fight illegal wildlife trafficking in Brazil—a $2 billion-a-year business that affects 38 million animals. In 2012, Ferreira founded FREELAND Brasil to raise awareness of the devastating effects of keeping wild-caught songbirds, parrots and macaws—as well as to release reha...

Susan Solomon is an advocate for more research into a promising treatment for many conditions: human stem cells. "They are our bodies' own repair kits, because they are pluripotent -- they can morph into any cells in our bodies." We can use them to model and study disease, but she hopes for much more. She hopes, and believes, that our childr...

Groundbreaking media experiment Basetrack sought to rejig how America’s wars are reported. TED Fellow Teru Kuwayama harnessed the communication tools of our time to present embedded reportage in a whole new way. Following the deployment of 1/8 – 1st Battalion, Eighth Marines – to southern Afghanistan, Basetrack’s embedded media team collabor...

Since Johannes Kepler used Mars to explain the organization of the cosmos back in the 17th century, people have been royally obsessed with the Red Planet. And with the announcement that there’s running water on the planet, it seems we’re not getting over the fascination any time soon. Here, two confessed super-fans, Andy Weir, author of the book...

In 2010 the U.S. Army Special Operations Command created a pilot program to put women on the battlefield in Afghanistan. In this edited excerpt from her book, Ashley's War, writer Gayle Tzemach Lemmon shares the background that led to this game-changing decision. From the start of the war, U.S. Special Operations Commander Eric Olson believed t...

Infectious disease researcher Romina Libster wants us to understand: Vaccines are really not a matter of personal choice. Romina Libster (TED Talk: The power of herd immunity) has witnessed first-hand the devastation a virus can wreak on an unvaccinated community. As one of Argentina’s leading infectious disease researchers, she’s on call at th...

Ed Glaeser is a economist at Harvard, and the author of Triumph of the City, and as his business casual look he wears a bow-tie with ice-cream cones. He is also one of the world's experts on the nature of cities, and he was invited to set the stage for the TED2012 wish. "At their heart," he says, "cities are the absence of physical spa...

Community member Ray Givler wrote this in response to Kevin Briggs' TED Talk, The bridge between suicide and life: "A lot of intelligent people watch TED talks. Bright minds face existential questions that the majority of the population don't even consider, and they face them with greater intensity. Addressing this issue is gifted education r...

In 2007, at TEDGlobal in Arusha, Tanzania, Euvin Naidoo gave an opening talk about investing in African countries -- laying out 10 markets and metrics to watch as African nations gained capacity. Today, in a follow-up post, investor Ryan Hoover looks at these 10 metrics that Naidoo laid out -- and charts how much has changed in the past f...

In session 3 of TEDWomen 2018, hosted by social justice documentarian Jess Search, a lineup of speakers and performers -- Eldra Jackson III, Shad Begum, Emily Quinn, Shohini Ghose, Climbing PoeTree, Maeve Higgins and Lindy Lou Isonhood -- explored toxic masculinity, quantum computing, immigration, the death penalty and much more. An e...

“The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows,” says Shereen El Feki in her talk from TEDGlobal 2013. “That is true for all of us, no matter where we live and love.” For five years, El Feki talked to people across Middle East about their bedroom behavior, and what she found over and over was a seemingly deep-rooted conservatism -- in ...

Human potential is a double-edged sword; it can be turned to great good or great evil. This session is about the discovery, liberation and channeling of human potential in ways that make the world around us a better place. But first, Alsarah & the Nubatones introduce us to East African retro-pop. As Alsarah says from stage mid-set: "T...

More and more women are being incarcerated in the US -- before they’ve been found guilty of crimes. Here’s how the bail system affects women and what can be done. Robin Steinberg’s big idea -- The Bail Project, a national revolving bail fund designed to make sure people can await trial from their own homes, not from jail -- was one of the first...

TED Prize winner Sylvia Earle inspired all of us to care deeply about the ocean and to think deeply about how we can protect it. But the ocean is vast and the challenges are numerous. Where do we begin to understand the complex beauty that is the ocean? One great place to start: The new mission-blue.org. It's a home for ocean news and initia...

Watch Benedetta Berti's TED Talk, "The surprising way groups like ISIS stay in power" >> It is virtually impossible to look at the news without being bombarded with graphic images of the ‘Islamic State’ (aka ISIS/ISIL/Dae’sh). Part of our fascination with the macabre activities of this group has to do with its sheer violence and brutali...

Lope Gutiérrez-Ruiz’s eye-popping magazines and celebrated festivals are creating “pathways to coexistence and tolerance.” Interactive Fellows Friday Feature: Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Lope  asks: What do organized communities achieve more efficiently than government? What could ...