In 1989, children younger than 16 could be sentenced to die in the United States. Lawyer Bryan Stevenson (TED Talk: We need to talk about an injustice) represented some of these juveniles in Alabama, the state with the most children sentenced to death per capita. Read his chilling account of meeting Charlie, a 14-year-old tried as an adult for c...

"The universe is teeming with planets," and Jeremy Kasdin, an astronomer at Princeton University, wants to see them. Not in the way they've been detected so far, but directly. He wants to build a space telescope that will image a planet around another star and tell if it harbors life. There is probably one per star in the galaxy, and maybe 1...

"In System D, this is a store," says Robert Neuwirth as he shows a photo of a woman sitting on a plank beside a canal in Makoko in Lagos, a booming shantytown built on stilts over the water. It's a place where "there are no streets where there are stores to shop, and so the shop comes to you." Another example of business synergy, global busi...

Daniel Suarez's novel Kill Decision features a scientist, Laura McKinney, whose work studying ants is purloined by bad guys wanting to use her research to create an automated drone army. It's pretty terrifying; here's an excerpt. McKinney gestured to the covered object in the center of the table. "What's in the sack?" "Something you should...

George Siemens taught the first "massive open online course" back in 2008. He shares his take on why the class form is still valid -- and what might happen next in higher ed. In the past few years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a lens used by educators, entrepreneurs, education reformers and venture capitalists to view the h...

What happens when a city is managed almost completely by private corporations? Visit Gurgaon, India, a boomtown of millions without a citywide system for water, electricity or even public sewers. The city of Gurgaon, roughly a half-hour’s drive south of New Delhi, has survived without a functioning municipal government for roughly four decades....

Collective wisdom might best be found when small groups of people are given a chance to discuss and deliberate, say social scientists Mariano Sigman, Joaquin Navajas, Gerry Garbulsky and Dan Ariely. Could this suggest a better way to vote? For many years, problems with democracy have been pushed under the carpet in the general belief that “demo...

A photographer's lovely visual thank you to some often overlooked medical professionals. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t make a difference, and it’s great to be reminded that I do.” That quote is from one of the hundreds of heartfelt notes that photographer Carolyn Jones (TED Talk: A tribute to nurses) received after she published a book of p...

Adam Foss asks for a show of hands: who in their late teens or early 20s shoplifted, tried an illegal drug, got in a fight or drank alcohol before they were of age? A lot of hands pop up around the theater. “How many of you think you're a danger to society and think you should be defined by those actions of youthful indiscretion?” he asks...

It may be the age of big data, but it’s still very hard to know how many children were born in Bolivia or Botswana last year, or to know something as simple as which clinics in the developing world have medicine and which don’t. Until recently, there was only one way to find answers to questions like these -- to send a group of workers out i...

You may be overflowing with talent and ideas, but you won’t start making an impact unless you step up and stand out, says political commentator Symone D. Sanders. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here. ...

In the United States, nearly 70 percent of the people held in local jails are there for one reason: they don’t have enough money to pay bail. Here’s a look at how this came to be and what it would take to change it. Here’s a riddle for you. In the past 15 years, the number of people jailed in the US has grown sharply (continuing a steady upward...

Larry Lessig is about to complete a 185-mile walk across the state of New Hampshire. He began this journey on January 11 and has walked despite rain, sleet, snow, ice and freezing cold, as the temperature in this state ranges anywhere from the lower thirties to the negative teens in the month of January. Lessig undertook this walk to hamm...

Born in Shanghai in 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Eric X. Li grew up hearing a story: All human societies develop in linear progression, beginning with primitive society, moving through capitalism to socialism and, finally, Communism. Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of creed or culture, will reach that final st...

In South Korea and Finland, it's not about finding the "right" school. Fifty years ago, both South Korea and Finland had terrible education systems. Finland was at risk of becoming the economic stepchild of Europe. South Korea was ravaged by civil war. Yet over the past half century, both South Korea and Finland have turned their schools arou...

By Yasheng Huang Earlier this year, economist Yasheng Huang (watch his 2011 TED Talk) sparred with Eric X. Li in the pages of Foreign Affairs on a similar topic to today's TED Talk. The TED Blog asked Huang to expand on his argument in his ongoing conversation with Li. Imagine confusing the following two statements from a cancer doctor: 1)...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson The old adage goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, speakers during Day 2 of TEDGlobal 2012—the annual conference where thinkers in a variety of fields present their ideas—made it clear that there’s a lot out there in need of fixing. Giving a range of examples -- from the data that telephone companie...

Watch Andreas Schleicher's TED Talk >> "Learning is not a place, it's an activity," says Andreas Schleicher. He heads up the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, also known as PISA, and he's here to make the case that international comparisons of education systems can help to raise the global bar for students and l...

Adam Braun went to school in the US and now runs a nonprofit that builds schools in Ghana, Laos, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In contrast, Sugata Mitra—the winner of the 2013 TED Prize—went to school in India and now is a professor in the UK, where his research on self-directed learning routinely brings him into elementary schools. Both of these...

In his TED2013 talk, Robert Gordon points out that in 1900, human beings could only travel as fast as a horse could pull them in a buggy, but by 1960, we could travel at 80% of the speed of sound, thanks to the Boeing 707. Since 1960, though, the needle on how fast we can travel hasn’t moved at all. But this could change. Just now, fellow...

Last night at the TED offices, we held a special event: a miniature TED all about voting. Three amazing speakers took the stage to present ideas and stories related to our electoral process. First up, was TED’s own Lisa Bu, our Content Distribution Manager, who spoke about her experience traveling from China in 1995 to attend the Universit...

Living through a sexual assault is nightmare enough -- what makes things worse is a broken legal system that routinely ignores, loses and even destroys crucial evidence, an institutional injustice that one legal-system survivor set out to fix. In the US, if you’re sexually assaulted, your treatment by the justice system can depend on the state ...

This tiny republic has the most startups per person and the fastest broadband speeds, and it offers something no other country does: e-residency. Estonia is aiming to create the ideal information society. Technology thinker and entrepreneur Andrew Keen goes there to find out how it works. The future sometimes appears in the unlikeliest of place...

Every day, emergency room workers use triage to prioritize patient care -- but exhausted personnel in under-resourced hospitals can easily make deadly errors in diagnostic tests and symptom scoring. South African emergency room doctor Mohammed Dalwai witnessed such avoidable tragedy firsthand while working with Médicins sans Frontières in Pa...

The challenges we face in the 21st century are global in nature. Yet it often seems like we are woefully ill-equipped to address issues such as poverty, violence, security or public health with our large-scale political institutions. In this bold talk, Benjamin Barber suggests that we should transition away from nation states towards a sy...

Hacking has always been an important component of healthy democracies. Despite the bad connotation the word often has these days -- indicating rogue criminals breaking into computer systems, stealing identities, spying or worse -- hacking is really just any amateur innovation on an existing system. And that “system” doesn’t have to be a tech...

When it comes to US politics, many are frustrated that gridlock and grandstanding so often substitute for the hard job of getting things done. Just 14% of Americans say they approve of the work that Congress is doing, according to a recent Gallup poll. (Which, as a recent TED speaker notes, is lower than the approval rating for cockroaches, thou...

Hassine Labaied is here to talk wind. Specifically, wind power. "Wind is clean, free, perpetually renewable and widely distributed across the globe," he says. "Yet the current main wind technology, the turbine, is still based on a windmill system." And existing turbines are terribly inefficient: 70% of wind power is simply lost, while the de...

Bryan Stevenson, who gave the powerhouse talk “We need to talk about an injustice” at TED2012, appeared on Moyers & Company this past weekend. In the episode, titled “And Justice For Some,” Moyers takes a hard look at systematic biases in the American legal system. The occasion for this episode -- the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Cou...

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...