Should we be putting humans on Mars? A panel of space experts brings up the big questions we need to ask before we blast off. Mars! It’s a planet we humans have been eyeing with intent since we first looked upward. Someday, the Red Planet might become a place to house Earth's expanding population ... it could be a lucrative place to mine natura...

TED Fellow Lauren Sallan is a paleobiologist who analyzes "big data" -- the fossil record -- to study large-scale evolution. As she says: "I want to know why some fishes win and others lose." Here's the story of her talk, in amazing work from illustrator and animator Dennis Moore.    

Erik Brynjolfsson says growth is not dead. To make his case in session 1 of TED2013, he points out two moments in the past -- one that took place 120 years ago and the other that took place about 15 years ago. One hundred and twenty years ago, the Second Industrial Revolution began. But while the tools had been invented for mass productio...

We need to have more honest, open-ended conversations about race and bias -- in our own lives and in the TV shows and movies we see, says diversity consultant Vernā Myers. It’s not every day that the TED world collides with a reality TV show, but recently on The Bachelorette, one of the most compelling conversations about race was initiated by ...

The great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude, says public-interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson. It was the ideology of white supremacy used to justify it -- and it’s an ugly part of our history we need to acknowledge. Today in America we are not free. We are burdened by a history of racial inequality and injustice. It compromises ...

With TEDGlobal 2013 just 17 days in the distance, we in the TED office are getting very excited to “Think Again.” Here, a look at the conference speakers who made the news this week. Education innovator Anant Agarwal is interviewed in The New Yorker article “Laptop U.” The founder of edX, Harvard and MIT’s online learning venture, Agarwal wi...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A map to guide conservation. After almost eight years of airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, Greg Asner has finally mapped all 300,000 square miles of the Peruvian Amazon. Highlighting forest types that are reasonably safe and those which are ...

As always, many members of the TED community have been popping in the news this week. Below, some highlights. Liu Bolin uses paint to make himself disappear into backgrounds. In this video from The Creators Project, Bolin shows the next evolution—group versions of his signature work. Watch him turn his friends into money in the video above, ...

Mellody Hobson’s talk asks us to be open about race -- not to avoid talking about it. The news this past few weeks has been full of people who have great big opinions about race. And some of them are -- not to put a fine point on it -- jerks. Two widely covered examples from the US just in the past two weeks: A basketball team owner, Donal...

Germany's 7-1 victory over host country Brazil in the World Cup semi-finals this week followed the injury of Brazilian soccer star Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, whose collision with Colombian player Juan Camilo Zúñiga during the quarter-final game led to a hail of racist epithets aimed at Zúñiga. Ready to go beyond the headlines? 5 primary sour...

Although race and racism are at the top of Americans’ public discussions, it turns out that most white parents in the US don’t talk about those issues with their kids. Research on how white parents discuss race with their children is sparse. However, past research has shown that conversations about race, much less racism, are rare, even when ...

Think about car racing and certain images -- and sounds -- probably come to mind. The high-pitched nasal howl as Formula 1 cars zoom by. The absurdly over-logoed visual extravaganza of NASCAR. Now there's a brand-new racing series that has, well, none of that. Formula E, the world's first fully electric racing series, has cars that swish rather ...

On Sunday, May 26, two rockets soared over Beirut, Lebanon, hitting a Shi’ite Muslim area in the southern part of the city. The rockets raised fears that Beirut could become embroiled in the civil war raging in nearby Syria. And yet, these bombs did not stop women throughout the city from lacing up their running sneakers and taking to the st...

When Shaka Senghor (Watch: Shaka Senghor: Why your worst deeds don’t define you) was nineteen, he shot and killed a man — and was sentenced to spend the second nineteen years of his life in jail. At first, Senghor sat in his cold cell and rationalized his worst deeds. “In the hood where I come from,” he says, “it’s better to be the shooter than ...

The entire state of California is now suffering from severe drought. Read a veteran firefighter's experience of what this means on the ground -- and other stories you need to know about today. California burning The sunshine state is suffering -- yesterday it was reported that the entire state is in a state of severe drought. Time looks at the...

It’s 2012. And many of us no doubt imagined that flying cars would be all the rage by now. While that hasn’t happened yet, some major driving innovations are on their way down the pipeline. In a new TEDTalk, Chris Gerdes of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (awesomely abbreviated as CARS) explains that he and his team are busy ...

Michelle Cusseaux. Aura Rosser. Tanisha Anderson. Mya Hall. Natasha McKenna. These are the names of but a few African-American women who were victims of police brutality in the past two years. Why are most people unfamiliar with these names? Activist and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw urges us to ask this question. Through her theory of inter...

Fifty years ago, April 12, 1961, was one of the most extraordinary moments in human history: a spacecraft carried a passenger, Yuri Gagarin, into space, and back again safely. It's probably impossible to overstate the magnitude of that achievement, or the repercussions it would have. To give some context, here are three TEDTalks on the sp...

You can start referring to TED Fellow Kyrsten Sinema as Congresswoman. In a race that took nearly a week to call, Sinema has been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Arizona’s 9th congressional district, which wraps around Phoenix. Though the race remained close through midday Monday, Sinema -- a Democrat -- was declared the victor ...

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...

In 2006, Harold Ford called his friend Mellody Hobson, to tell her that he was running for US Senate in Tennessee and that he needed some national press. Hobson, an investor, in turn called a friend at a major media organization and organized a lunch. But when Hobson and Ford arrived at the lunch, they were taken to a back room. Then they we...

Yes, a marathon is about running 26.2 miles. But as May El-Khalil describes in today’s talk, a marathon can also be about so much more -- a chance for people to come together and celebrate the human spirit. El-Khalil is the founder of the Beirut Marathon and, in this talk, she describes how a personal tragedy led her to organize the first...

Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the Internet: California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law yesterday making it legal for driverless cars to travel on public roadways. [Forbes] Watch Sebastian Thrun’s TEDTalk “Google’s driverless car” for a description of how such a thing works and Chris Gerdes’ talk “The future race car -- 150m...

Musician, ethnomusicologist, author, and social media maven -- Kyra Gaunt (see her TEDxChisinau talk here) won’t limit herself to one way of thinking. Using a variety of media, she works nonstop to help humanity see our own remarkable unity in diversity. Your work encompasses scholarship, musical performance, educational theory, race, gender,...

We can’t have an honest reckoning about race until we start to recognize all the ways in which privilege and prejudice creep into our lives, says author and digital strategist Luvvie Ajayi. There comes a time in every upwardly mobile Black person’s life when they encounter someone who tells them how “well-spoken” and “articulate” they are. It i...

One might ask Nate Silver, the data whiz behind FiveThirtyEight.com, which shot to prominence after providing eerily accurate forecasts of the 2008 election, what makes for good predictions. His answer will come as a surprise. In his new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t, Silver explains the “prediction ...

Behold, your recap of TED-related news: Habitat turns 50! First conceptualized in 1961 as part of architect Moshe Safdie’s thesis at McGill University, Habitat 67 has gone on to inspire several generations of architects. Combining high-rise living with community connection, Habitat’s concrete cluster of homes challenged the contemporary n...

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...

"When police officers, acting in their duty as government officials and the enforcers of our laws, when they kill someone, that’s the death penalty." There has been a lot of heated rhetoric around the decisions of two separate American grand juries not to indict white police officers responsible for the deaths of unarmed black men. But in descr...

(TED is on its annual two-week vacation. During the break, we’re posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. We’ll be back with new talks Monday!) The wonderful thing about the universe is not just how big it is, but how every time we look into it we find something new and extraordinary. Here are four talks about the vastness of space, a...