What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading. Read Hans Rosling's lively chat about this talk in...

Is the world getting worse every day in every way, as some news media would have you believe? No. In fact, the most reliable data shows that in meaningful ways -- such as child mortality rate, literacy rate, human lifespan -- the world is actually, slowly and measurably, getting better. Hans Rosling dedicated the latter part of his distin...

Hans Rosling has given nine TED Talks, each sharing a carefully measured dataset to change misconceptions about global issues. Now, the Gates Foundation shares a new demonstration from Rosling. Here, using powerful moving charts, Rosling shatters the fallacy of the “developed” world versus the “developing” world. By looking at the facts, we a...

Today, Monday March 21, from 11:30am-1:30pm Eastern time, the wise and wonderful Professor Hans Rosling will be answering questions in TED Conversations. Ask him about his latest TEDTalk, on the "magic washing machine," or ask about the latest data tools from Gapminder.org or his recent BBC short film "The Joy of Stats" ... Watch the new TED...

"The strive for a washing machine is stronger than the strive for democracy," says TEDTalks star Hans Rosling at the beginning of this casual video, shot at TEDxSummit last week. On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, Rosling sat down with a group of fans to chat about presenting data with clarity and passion -- using Legos, rocks and humor that revea...

I was there when Hans Rosling first shook the room at TED, and transformed tiresome medical statistics into an action-packed, live performance about real people’s lives on the line. He’s since been namechecked by Bill Gates. And he outlasted Fidel Castro – twice. Not merely mortally. In an interview on the TED Blog, Hans recounts an all-n...

Members of the TED community saturated the news in the past two weeks. Below, just a few of these headline-makers: Eight years ago, Hans Rosling shared “The best stats you’ve ever seen” at TED2006, flipping our thinking on global health. BigThink.com is marking the anniversary of that talk. Take their very fun quiz that tests your understan...

Anna Rosling-Rönnlund collects photographs of everyday objects from the richest to the poorest households. Even a toothbrush, she says, can reveal a world of inequalities. Imagine if the world lived along a single street, with the richest households on one end, the poorest on the other -- and every door flung open to the public. That’s the visi...

Over the past week, 21 amazing names in the worlds of technology, entertainment and design have curated lists of their favorite TED Talks, to celebrate TED’s billionth video view. The talks they’ve selected have run the gamut from Ben Affleck, who loved Bryan Stevenson’s “We need to talk about an injustice” among others, to Alexis Ohanian of Red...

Have you ever wanted to watch Hans Rosling premiere a brand-new talk live onstage? In just 4 hours, at 7:30 AST / 4:30pm GST / 12:30pm EDT, tune in to tedxsummit.ted.com or watch on AlJazeera.com to watch a free two-hour livestream from TEDxSummit Opening Night, a full session of TED with speakers, performers and TED magic. Hans ...

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...

Yesterday, Twitter user @ademoor wrote: Thinking of organizing a #TEDtalk video night w/ some friends. What's your absolute favorite must-see talk? Great question! We RT'ed on @TEDNews. And the replies are worth sharing: @WackyFiasco: I really appreciated Dan Gilbert's talk on happiness ... @ozteethtweet: hans rosling, can't get ...

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...

Browse the Time 100 list -- and let it point you to great TEDTalks! Hillary Clinton: "Tough. Indefatigable. Patient. Smart. Knowledgeable. Superior political instincts. Funny. Loyal team player. Finds opportunities in crises and challenges. Skilled global advocate for American interests and American values. That is my job description for ...

TEDxChange, themed “Positive Disruption,” kicks off shortly -- at 9am (PDT) at the Gates Foundation campus in Seattle, Washington -- and anyone, anywhere is invited to watch along through the livestream at TED.com or via TEDxChange.org. Yesterday, we gave you three reasons to tune in and shared with you the amazing speakers who’ll take the stage...

Many unusual things have happened on the TED stage over the years. Our incredible speakers have done everything from perform magic tricks to attempt to set themselves on fire, all in the name of spreading their ideas. Although far from a complete list, here are some of the weirdest TED moments that we still haven’t stopped puzzling over. To many...

TED2013, “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered,” begins in just 20 days and we at the TED Blog are gearing up to bring you live reporting on each of the 70 speakers who’ll be ascending the stage, not to mention assorted news from the scene in Long Beach, California. One thing we hope to see more of at this amazing event: props. There’s some...

One year ago today, we launched our platform for long-form conversations: TED Conversations. Since that time the TED Conversation community has held 6,435 Conversations, on topics such as: How can computer models help us build intuition? Where do you use math in your profession? Can we ever know how another person "senses" the world?...

The animal you see in this watercolor-washed illustration is not a camel. This is, technically, a dromedary. Anja Kantowsky, a communications consultant who lives in Germany, created this image at the TEDSalon Berlin in June as she watched a talk from nine-time TED speaker Hans Rosling and his son Ola Rosling that used the differences betwee...

On Monday, April 16, watch a session of TED streaming live to the world -- at TEDxSummit Opening Night. Curated by TEDGlobal's own Bruno Giussani, it's a two-hour session with TEDTalks favorites (Hans Rosling, Raghava KK) and vital voices from the Middle East. Watch this irreverent promo for TEDxSummit Opening Night >> Get the ful...

President Barack Obama ended his 2013 State of the Union address just minutes ago saying, “We are citizens. It’s a word that doesn’t just describe our nationality or legal status. It describes the way we’re made … Well into our third century as a nation, it remains the task of us all, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the ...

Welcome to the world, Prince(ss) XX! As per tradition, the birth announcement was posted on an easel in front of Buckingham Palace, listing the baby's weight and time of birth — XX lbs at XX:XX o'clock. As the world celebrates the momentous nativity of the third in line to the British throne, take some time to make sense of this baby's birth wit...

The speaker lineup for the TED2017 conference features more than 70 thinkers and doers from around the world -- including a dozen or so whose unfiltered TED Talks will be broadcast live to movie theater audiences across the U.S. and Canada. Presented with our partner BY Experience, our TED Cinema Experience event series offers three opportuni...

Next week, in Doha, Qatar, we're launching a four-day-long workshop called TEDxSummit -- where 700 TEDx organizers from around the world will meet to take classes and learn from one another how to make great local TEDx events. And to kick off the summit, we're throwing a session of TED -- and inviting the world to watch live! Mark your...

  Asphalt Orchestra storms the stage.   Hanna Rosin: For every two men who get a college degree, three women will do the same.   TEDWomen co-producer Pat Mitchell talks to entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner.   Halla Tomasdottir talks about bringing feminine values into finance.   Carto...

Session 4 of TED2017 kicked off with an interview with perhaps the greatest athlete of all time, Serena Williams, and closed with the potentially world-changing announcement of this year's TED Prize wish from Raj Panjabi. In between, the session saw a surprise talk directly from the Vatican by His Holiness Pope Francis -- the culmination of a ye...

Today, on the fifth birthday of TEDTalks video, we're releasing a new list of the 20 most-watched TEDTalks over the past five years -- as watched on all the platforms we track: TED.com, YouTube, iTunes, embed and download, Hulu and more ... What a great, mixed-up group this is! Talks about education and creativity, sex and fish, whizzy tech d...

At noon Eastern / 9am Pacific on Saturday, jump into our question-and-answer session with filmmaker Morgan Spurlock -- maker of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. You're invited to use TED Conversations to ask questions for Morgan to answer. (We just had fun doing one of these Q&As with Hans Rosling.) It's a chance to ask a longer, more considere...

Starting tonight, you can watch five hour-long blocks of TEDTalks on the Science Channel. Each hour in this five-part series shares some of the best science, tech, economic ideas and inventions from creative minds featured at TED. Within each hour, TED Curator Chris Anderson gives a brief intro, and then the talks play, uncut, in their entir...

In this reel, TED recaps an amazing year of talks from three conferences, a bunch of smaller TED events -- and a powerful year of TEDx. Dive in, and then follow up with talks that intrigue you ... You'll see, in order of appearance: The LXD, Chris Anderson and Julian Assange, Bill Gates, Chip Conley, Naomi Klein, John Underkoffler...