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 ...

Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights. Jeff Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon (watch his TED Talk), made waves on Monday when it was announced that he will buy The Washington Post for $250 million. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its ow...

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 ...

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...

A flat piece of plastic that can shape itself into a shoe? An orthodontic device that moves into position to straighten teeth? Computational architect Skylar Tibbits is shaking up the material world. Ever tried to assemble an Ikea table? Turning a two-dimensional pile of wood and plastic into a useful 3D object can be a challenge. Now imagine o...

Turns out, it's less about "teaching" creativity to children -- and more about creating a fertile environment in which their creativity will take root, grow and flourish. Researcher Mitch Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT, explains how we can do this. There’s a common misconception that the best way to encourage childr...

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...

Micro-mechanician Bill Robertson builds sophisticated, fully working replicas of rare tools, gadgets and houses from the 17th and 18th centuries. His exquisite creations put history’s hidden details in the palms of our hands. Many of us have fond memories of playing with dollhouses, most of which were machine-made of plastic. But the first doll...

On March 1 -- just two days after Elon Musk appeared on the TED2013 stage -- a SpaceX CRS-2 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission for the International Space Station. Two days later, after the righting of a glitch, its Dragon capsule delivered a half-ton of supplies for the astronauts on board. And four days after that, ...

Take a trip back to the future with this week's TED Radio Hour, as six TED speakers share their prophecies for what lies ahead. From curing cancer to self-driving cars, these TEDsters offer exciting visions for the future, but not without cautionary warnings. The episode starts with a walk down memory lane with Nicholas Negroponte, who made s...

Who would have thought when you left those high school math problems behind that you would one day be encountering algorithms on a daily basis? Zeynep Tufekci might have guessed; now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information, Tufekci’s first job as a teenager was as a computer programmer. So it’s no sur...

Please enjoy your weekly roundup of news briefs from members of the TED community: A 21st-century break-in. Security futurist Marc Goodman knows that technology can make both life and crime easier. In a post on Boing Boing excerpted from his book Future Crimes, he tells the story of an auto trading company that installed tiny remote-controlled ...

Stacey Abrams's 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia was watched across the world. The first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor, she lost after a hard-fought race. Now she's the surprise speaker onstage at TEDWomen 2018, where, in an electrifying talk, she shares the lessons she learned from her campaign, advice on ho...

Beyond policy reform, what can ordinary people do to combat systemic racism? Diversity advocate Vernā Myers thinks it starts with confronting our own acknowledged and subconscious prejudices. In your work, you encourage people to talk to young black men, to get out of one's comfort zone. Who are you speaking to in particular? Who is your audien...

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,...

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, ...

Fun stuff, stuff to make you cry, serious stuff, weird stuff. Here, a recap of all the coolest stuff on the interwebs this week. More than 60 percent of 1400 Boy Scout leaders voted to lift its longtime ban on openly gay scouts. [The New York Times] . A fantastic piece by Carl Zimmer on how studying rare diseases can help mainstream medic...

RejectTED Talks. Onion Talks. DED Talks. Here in the TED office, you often hear chuckles as someone watches one of the quickly growing crop of TED spoofs floating in the ether. And surprisingly, there are some pretty good lessons for speakers embedded in these spoofs. See what I mean below. The spoof: Stephen Colbert’s RejecTED Talks Cr...

Countdown is a global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. Watch the talks, interviews and performances from the Countdown Global Launch at ted.com/countdown. Transforming big systems is a huge task. Energy, transportation, industry and infrastructure all pose their own challenges. And yet that transformation is alrea...

Around the world, right now, several countries are developing autonomous weapons that use artificial intelligence to locate, track and destroy their targets. AI professor Toby Walsh explains why that’s a problem. Artificial intelligence is in the news a lot, and it’s safe to say that it’s not always benign. That’s why the United Nations is host...

For week 4 of TED2020, leaders in international development, history, architecture and public policy explored how we might rebuild during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing protests against racial injustice in the United States. Below, a recap of their insights. Achim Steiner, head of the United National Development Programme Big id...

So much of our lives are gut reactions; they drive our newsfeeds, and they make our minds smaller. At TED2017, we decided to step back from the frenzy of the news media cycle to take an in-depth and nuanced look at three topics of particular interest -- the forward march of machine learning with Sebastian Thrun, the future of storytelling wi...

TED science curator David Biello exposes the odd couple behind the de-extinction movement: scientists and hunters. What does this say about our ambivalent attitude toward animals? Our world is the setting of a great murder mystery: Where did all the big animals go? Although Earth is the scene of the crime for many deaths -- it is estimated that...

Formula E racing, the darknet, a potential fountain of youth, and beheadings. At TEDGlobal>London — a two-session event curated and hosted by Bruno Giussani on June 16, 2015, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain -- the talks ranged from a wildly hopeful future to stern warnings about the present. Enjoy these recaps of the talks in th...

Compiled from past TED book lists, here's a curated selection of fiction and non-fiction titles to check out now. Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Change by Stacey Abrams (TED talk: 3 questions to ask yourself about everything you do) I work in government affairs, and the last thing I enjoy reading for pleasure are books ...

By Liz Jacobs and Ben Lillie Taking stock of our moment in history helps us better understand ourselves, our societies and the present moment itself  -- which often gets lost in the temptation to look backwards or forwards. And at TED2014: The Next Chapter we're doing plenty of both. But we're also designating this All-Stars session to th...

Concerns are growing around privacy and government surveillance in today’s hyper-connected world. Technology is smarter and faster than ever -- and so are government strategies for listening in. As a lawyer for the ACLU, Jennifer Granick (TED Talk: How the US government spies on people who protest -- including you) works to demystify the mur...

For the Session 3 of the conference, TED Head of Curation Helen Walters says, “We’re throwing off all pretense of cool.” Seven speakers are queued up to discuss the latest advances in their fields of technology. And while the gadgets do all different things, they share one crucial function: the power to make jaws drop. How wireless si...

Anyone in the room here today, at the glossy Times Center in Times Square, has been affected by the imagination and tenacity of Janette Sadik-Khan. It was her vision that created the much-loved pedestrian zones on Broadway and the cool new CitiBikes. In 2008, when Sadik-Khan took the job as New York's traffic commissioner, she saw how hard i...

Three stellar main stage sessions of talks -- including the launch of the Audacious Project -- plus workshops, exhibits and TED Unplugged, a session of talks given by audience members, made for a jam-packed day 2 at TED2018. Here are some of the themes we heard echoing through the opening day, as well as some highlights from around the co...