Sarah Jones is an actor and monologuist who comes on stage to explain her own diverse background. "I grew up in a family that was multi-everything, black and white, Caribbean, Irish American, German American, there was Dominican music playing from the stereo, Christians and Jews (that's a long story)." But then, before we quite know what's hap...

A surprise superquick talk from wordnik Erin McKean, who reads from her magic notebook the top 10 words of this TED. The full list follows; here are four highlights: tokamak, a doughnut-shaped fusion reactor whose name comes from a transliteration of the Russian токамак. rockism, which Mark Ronson describes as "like racism, but for roc...

Last year the awe-mazing writer Benjamin Rosenbaum said something great about first-world problems, and specifically the #firstworldproblems tag, used on Twitter attached to complaints about dumb little things that bug us: This whole #firstworldproblems meme, you know that one? It’s supposedly an exercise in humility and perspective, but in f...

We live most of our lives wired and wound up, rarely pausing to relax or unplug from the daily grind. Our speakers in this session discuss the consequences of our ever-hectic lives, and remind us of the qualities we sometimes forget to foster. They include an author discussing why modern parenthood is out of whack, a leadership expert encourag...

TED2014 is our 30th-anniversary conference, and the speaker lineup is -- in a word -- thrilling. Speakers will touch on topics ranging from technology, entertainment, design and education to climate change, architecture, music, physics, parenting, typography, fireflies and the Golden Gate Bridge. Randall Munroe of xkcd will talk about his passio...

Questions of justice and injustice are the most difficult of our world. There's no app that can fix these things; simple solutions just don't exist. And yet, we have to try. In these six talks, speakers share their thoughts on large-scale injustices and give their thoughts on how we can start to dismantle them. The echo of humiliation. “I...

TED2015 featured more than 90 speakers, and more than 20 hours of talks. We turned our perceptions inside-out, saw some new technology, traveled to space more than once, heard astounding life stories, learned about unusual materials, rethought artistic expression and contemplated the divides of society, with an eye toward ending injustice. ...

She’s best described as the modern-day Indiana Jones. Using infrared imagery from satellites, she identifies ancient sites lost in time. In Egypt, she helped locate 17 potential pyramids, plus 1,000 potential forgotten tombs and 3,100 possible lost settlements. That’s in addition to her discoveries throughout the Roman Empire. Sarah Parca...

A year ago, Sarah Parcak revealed her TED Prize wish: a citizen science platform for archaeology to let people around the world help find and protect ancient sites. Yesterday night, she returned to the TED stage to share what’s happened since. After a year of work with partners National Geographic and DigitalGlobe, GlobalXplorer launched in ...

Happy birthday, National Geographic. The intrepid magazine turns 125-years-old this month. Yesterday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation invited TED speakers Robert Ballard and Sarah Parcak on the air to discuss the notable anniversary. Ballard, who is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, talked about a recent expedition to the Black Sea, w...

Women’s perspectives matter -- but with movie casts and crews dominated by men, Hollywood has long suggested otherwise. One way to fix this: support female filmmakers. Here’s a curated list of picks from writer, actor and activist Naomi McDougall Jones. The good news: a greater number of women were nominated for Oscars this year than in previou...

Today, GlobalXplorer, the citizen science platform created by satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak with the 2016 TED Prize — which allows users live out their Indiana Jones fantasies and search for archaeological sites from home — announced the location of its second expedition. The location will be: India! GlobalXplorer's first expeditio...

The second day of TED2016 brought wisdom for within and discoveries from without. Below, highlights for you following at home. Procrastination works ... for some. Session 4 speakers Tim Urban and Adam Grant take two positions on procrastination: The former thinks it can be a huge, crippling problem; the latter realized his "pre-crastinati...

“This is Tanis from Indiana Jones, from Raiders of the Lost Ark?” asks Stephen Colbert, holding up a pair of photos, one that shows a barren patch of desert, and another that shows an intricate system of buildings and streets buried underneath it. “This is the city of Tanis that they find with the medallion burned into the guy’s hand, the thi...

What’s the best way to find something lost on the ground, like a historical site from a civilization lost to time? For archaeologist Sarah Parcak, the answer’s obvious -- from way up above, using satellites, of course. As a space archaeologist, she’s mapped the lost city of Tanis (of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark fame) and identified th...

Read Montague is interested in the human dopamine system -- or, as he puts it in this illuminating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, that which makes us "chase sex, food and salt" and therefore survive. Specifically, Montague and his team at the Roanoke Brain Study are interested in how dopamine and valuation systems work when two human beings inte...

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...

The phrase “truth or dare” is a false binary -- facing the truth often requires daring action, and vice versa. That’s why, at TED2015: Truth and Dare, the two go hand-in-hand. TED2015 happens March 16-20 in Vancouver and Whistler, and we dare to think this will be the most provocative, invigorating, mind-shifting TED yet. The 58 speakers on o...

After hearing an idea that struck them at their core, these people were no longer satisfied to sit on the sidelines -- so they jumped in. Hearing an inspiring idea is like experiencing a great book or movie; it stays with you. For most people who watch a TED Talk, this occurs subtly, with the concept going into our minds where it serves as a ki...

A design competition to reimagine death. 100 percent of the human population will die, and yet, why don’t we design for this inevitable outcome? OpenIDEO, design and innovation firm IDEO’s online innovation platform, has launched a new public design challenge to “reimagine the end of life experience.” BJ Miller is an advisor on the project a...

Ancient Peru was home to many cultures, most of them still quite mysterious to modern archaeologists. But as Sarah Parcak directs her citizen-science platform at the Peruvian landscape, the invisible past could make a comeback. A mummified macaw with orange and blue feathers. The body of an ancient priestess, whose arms and legs were covered in...

The TED Fellows program is excited to announce the new group of TED2020 Fellows and Senior Fellows! This year's class represents 13 countries across four continents, and they're making strides in an impressive range of fields — from astrobiology and ethnomusicology to maternal healthcare and beyond. This group is taking a hard look at the wo...

  With TED2016 quickly approaching, what better way to get ready than with a good book (or two, or three)? Before the conference starts on February 15, explore these reads by some of our speakers. Life in the future: Exegesis by Astro Teller. A science-fiction tale of a self-aware, artificially intelligent machine and its creator grappl...

Strange as it may seem, archaeologists often look to the sky to discover sites buried deep beneath the earth. Space archaeology, as it’s called, refers to the use of high-resolution satellite imaging and lasers to map and model everything from hidden Mayan ruins in Central America to specific features on the ancient Silk Road trade route in ...

Session 5 starts with a talk from a 93-year-old television icon. But it goes back so much further in time than that. As astronomer shares the mystery of a star's light that dimmed 1,500 years ago. A paleontologist walks us back more than 66 millions. And capping it off: the reveal of this year's TED prize wish, from a satellite archaeologist...

Books can entertain, sucking you like a tornado into incredible new worlds. Books can teach, giving you a richer understanding of time periods, people and ideas you’ve never been exposed to. But books can do so much more. In today’s talk, TED's own Lisa Bu introduces us to the concept of “comparative reading,” the practice of reading book...

The tables in bookstores can be overwhelming: Every book cover looks appealing, every blurb glows with praise. Sometimes, you just need a recommendation from a human, someone you trust. Below, 10 members of the TED community -- with very different points of view -- share the books they think you’ll enjoy this summer. Their selections are won...

Here are the books that profoundly influenced women from our speaker community, and they’re just as wonderfully diverse as TED itself. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë When I read this book for the first time as a deeply odd fifth-grader (or, as Jane says, "poor, plain, and little"), it felt like grasping onto a life raft that had been flung to...