An epidemic hidden in plain view Margaret Heffernan begins her TEDGlobal talk by telling us a story: In Oxford in the 1950s, there was physician named Alice Stewart who was fascinated with the new science of epidemiology. She realized, as a scientist does, that the way to prove herself was to find a hard problem and solve it. The problem ...

By Courtney E. Martin and John Cary Curating the program for TEDCity2.0 -- a one-day conference about the future of cities that takes place, gulp, today -- was a true honor for us. The two of us come at cities from very different angles. John is trained as an architect, but has spent his career building the public interest design moveme...

TED's on its annual two-week vacation; during the break, we

Two years ago, waves of revolution swept through the Middle East. On February 17, 2011 -- two months after civil resistance began in Tunisia and less than a month after the people of Egypt rose up in Tahrir Square -- revolt began in Libya to oust dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Activist Zahra' Langhi was part of the "day of rage" that eventuall...

As a physician and epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin didn't think he had much to contribute to the conversation about gun violence in America. But then he began to realize something -- that outbreaks of violence follow the same patterns as outbreaks of tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS, all of which he'd worked on reversing during a decade in Somali...

Eddie Obeng runs Pentacle, an online business school where he teaches "new world management." He also has more energy than seems quite feasible in one human being. Soon after his arrival onstage, it's clear why he won the unofficial award in rehearsals for "most words per minute." Hold tight. This is quite a trip. Obeng starts off by givi...

The speakers in this session are artists, designer-scientists and visionaries who are remaking the world around them. Their weapons are scope, shutter, paint, brush, font, code, blood and bone. And they are not afraid to use them. Who are they and what do they want? It’s time to find out. Self-styled “wild woman” Thandiswa Mazwai came off...

Ed Yong begins by showing us beautiful images of animals gathering in large groups. And the reasons for them are fascinating and many. But Yong, an award-winning science writer, points out that most explanations "make an assumption about animal behavior -- that they are in charge of their actions." But many animals gather in groups, in fa...

Daniel Ogilvie was shocked when his 4-year-old daughter ran out of her bedroom screaming, "I don't want to be a thing that dies." But every child goes through this moment of recognizing their mortality. A Rutgers University professor who has studied philosophy for the past 25 years, Ogilvie has become fascinated with our beliefs about death ...

Some people who launch companies end up being wildly successful, but there’s an unpleasant truth: Many fail. Before you risk it all, here’s a quick guide to gauge whether you should go for it, from serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice f...

. What makes a great designer? According to IDEO founder David Kelley, who gave the TED Talks “Human-centered design” and “How to build your creative confidence,” being an incredible designer isn’t necessarily about having a great aesthetic sensibility or coming up with out-of-the-box ideas. No,  Kelley says that the key characteristic is e...

The conversation around the upcoming US presidential election is full of frenzy, headache and noise. But elections are about more than divisiveness and disagreement -- they're civic events worthy of celebration, and, while it may seem unbelievable at the moment, they hold the promise of transforming governments for the better. At TEDNYC: ...

In 2005, Bjorn Lomborg bounced onto the TED stage in Monterey to challenge the audience to think about "the biggest problems in the world." Author of the book The Skeptical Environmentalist and the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, Lomborg promptly advised the somewhat startled audience to forget about global warming. If we really wan...

By Robin Nagle When I teach classes about the anthropology of waste and discards, I always designate one 48-hour period in which my students and I keep all the trash we would otherwise throw out. (I kindly exclude recyclables and anything that normally gets flushed.) The effort teaches a few important lessons. It demonstrates that trash g...

Hurricane Sandy is currently hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, threatening a large swath of the United States’ East Coast, from North Carolina to Maine. With coastal areas evacuated, wind and rainfall picking up quickly and many transportation systems shut down in anticipation of flooding, millions of people are currently at home, just waiti...

The adage goes: You learn something new every day. This is especially true if you watch TED-Ed lessons, which bring to life educational topics as varied as “insults by Shakespeare” and “pizza physics” with animation. As a holiday gift, the TED-Ed team picked their favorite talks of the year. Here, a second look at the lesson: Rethinking Think...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Neuroscientist Tali Sharot comes on stage to discuss the "optimism bias." It's a topic that she's been studying in her lab and she claims that 80% of us experience it. "It" being the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good things happening to us. As she puts it: "we're more optimistic than realistic, and...

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. New month. New day. New leaf. So you’ve woken up and decided you’re finally going to take on the big, big problem that’s been weighing on you -- perhaps it’s shorin...

What made Wayne McGregor want to become a choreographer? Onstage at TEDGlobal 2012, he revealed his two childhood inspirations—John Travolta’s moves in Saturday Night Fever and a forward-thinking dance teacher who encouraged him to invent his own dances. “I’m obsessed with technology of the body,” says McGregor, founder of the company Rando...

If we want children to thrive in our complicated world, we need to teach them how to think, says educator Brian Oshiro. And we can do it with 4 simple questions. 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; browse through all the posts here. ...

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 ...

At concerts, lighters once swayed in the air during poignant moments, the audience belting out lyrics together in a moment of catharsis. Today, the group sing-alongs still happen, but the air shines with a different glow: the light of cell phones. Last week, while seeing a favorite band, I couldn’t help but notice the sea of undulating phones...

Preparation is the key trick used by magicians -- and it can help you conjure big wow moments, too, says David Kwong. In 2014, Hollywood director Edgar Wright, known for offbeat films like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and next month's Baby Driver, invited me to his home so he could learn “how a magician thinks.” I in...

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. One evening, I called my sons to come to eat -- and got no response. True confession: In anger, I marched into their room and kicked off the power button on thei...

For many, the words “professional development” conjure up memories of sitting in a human resources office, watching a series of awkward training videos and then taking a mandatory quiz. The TED Distribution Team realized: it doesn’t need to be this way. Earlier this year, they started to think about how companies could use TED Talks to get p...

In this session of TED2015, five speakers explored the bounds of perception — from how babies form expectations to how vision is hardly needed to see. Short recaps of these bold talks ... The logic of the young mind. Scientists have to make generalizations on tiny amounts of data – and so do babies. Laura Schulz investigates the young min...

If you’d like to see the ways your mind is leading you astray, it’s not enough to look at what you’re thinking. You need to examine how you’re thinking, too. Psychologist Joan Rosenberg names five faulty thinking patterns and tells how you can start to change them. If you looked at the contents of your mind, would most of your thoughts be posit...

Want to reframe your view of what lies ahead? Innovation consultant Ari Wallach shares three transformative ways of thinking that could help us tackle our toughest problems. I’ve been a futurist for 20 years, working with businesses and nonprofits to try to anticipate and meet impending challenges. When I first started out, I’d sit down with pe...

In 2012, IDEO founder and longtime Stanford professor David Kelley took the TED stage in Long Beach and shared a deeply personal story. It was the tale of his own cancer diagnosis, of finding a lump in his neck and being told he had a 40% chance of survival. This was clearly a sobering moment, but he wasn't sharing the story to seek our sympathy...

Leyla Acaroglu aims to make people think about how the choices they make on a daily basis affect the environment. And she aims to make thinking about this fun. In today’s TED Talk, Acaroglu turns her attention to four bits of “environmental folklore,” like the idea that it’s more environmentally sound to opt for the paper bag over the plasti...