With 12 mainstage sessions and 5 sessions of All-Stars, there wasn't much time for exploring Vancouver during TED2014. As a great prequel to the conference, Car2Go offered up vehicles so attendees could enjoy a spin around the city. It also provided a map of some spots to check out, featuring locations selected by five TED Fellows: Kitra Cah...

TED's musical director, Thomas Dolby, will be touring the United States in October, talking about his online game, The Floating City, and playing songs from his new album live. Here's where you can catch him: Washington, DC, The Loft: Oct. 3. New York City, Tribeca: Oct. 5. Chicago, Martyr’s: Oct. 7. Seattle, The Triple Door: Oct...

Well, Met “I am delighted that digital technology can open the doors to this trove of images from our encyclopedic collection," said Thomas Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as he unleashed more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images for free (non-commercial, scholarly) use. (See Campbell’s TED Talk.) A tale of two inequalities...

Björk commissioned some truly unusual instruments for her Biophilia tour, which is headed to Paris next in 2013. The Icelandic songstress, who revealed her favorite TED Talks earlier this month, shares the stage with a sharpsicord, a gameleste and a musical Tesla coil. But perhaps the most dramatic instrument is a gravity harp, which stands ...

As the one-year anniversary of the TED-Ed website nears, the TED-Ed team created a new video to walk users through the features on the site, like the ability to add questions, upload "dig deeper" materials and start discussion chains relating to any video. (This newest feature makes the website even more interactive for any type of learner.) ...

Comedian Maz Jobrani has some advice for anyone who happens to be Middle Eastern and getting on a plane in the United States. “As a Middle Eastern male, I know there’s certain things I’m not supposed to say on an airplane in the U.S. I can’t walk down the aisle and be like, ‘Hi, Jack.’ Even if I’m there with my friend Jack, I say, ‘Greeting...

Astronaut Cady Coleman, who's on a six-month tour on the International Space Station, recorded this talk last week to address the opening session of TED2011. Join her on a tour of the space station ... with a view. TED's Film + Video director Jason Wishnow, who directed and edited this short film with the help of NASA, tweeted: ...

Born on June 17, 1907, Charles Eames was a design world tour de force. Working with his wife, Ray, he was a champion of systems design before such a thing even had a name, and together the pair delighted in working across media, shooting films, manufacturing furniture, designing houses, training clowns. You know. The usual. Back in 2007, the...

Air conditioning used to be a luxury -- but as Doris Kim Sung points out in this talk from TEDxUSC, modernized society has become thoroughly air-conditioning reliant. This is largely a problem of materials, says Sung, a professor at the USC School of Architecture. Many new buildings -- especially skyscrapers -- are built with floor-to-ceiling...

TEDActive is like TED, only with a few buttons loosened and its hair let down. An annual simulcast of the TED conference held two hours away in Palm Springs, California, TEDActive is for those who treasure ideas and want to immerse themselves in them. Last year, TEDActive participants journeyed to Joshua Tree to take sound baths, went on a bike ...

Tonight, as those of you in the US pull out of the tryptophan haze, we highly recommend that you ask for your family’s remote control and turn to ABC’s Nightline. Tonight, the show features an hour-long special on TED Fellow Darius Weems, an advocate for those suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Darius was diagnosed with the genetic ...

It's time for TED! And first on our *brand-new stage* in Vancouver is the iridescent Kevin Olusola from Pentatonix, who starts the show off in a typically mind-shifting way, playing cello and, well, beatboxing. In honor of the fact that this is, after all, the 30th year of the conference, he takes us on a whistlestop tour through some hits fro...

People worldwide upload more than one billion images a day, preserving their memories to enjoy them in the future. But it turns out: all our photography may be obstructing our recall, says tech podcaster Manoush Zomorodi. When it comes to obsessional tech habits, photo-taking probably isn’t the worst for relationships. If you’re not gazing into...

Before TEDActive sessions begin, Monday’s TEDActive-ists signed up for a slate of pre-conference sessions and fun. See more photos on TEDActive's daily photo album. TED Prize Workshop with Insight Labs: A three-hour intensive TED Prize workshop, with Insight Labs, asked: How can we get better and better at working together on massive proj...

In his TED Talk, “The shared experience of absurdity,” Charlie Todd shared the hilarity he creates for his fellow New Yorkers through flashmobs like the No Pants Subway Ride. The flashmob idea has, of course, spread widely. In the video above, watch one coordinated by the organizers of TEDxAden, a spontaneous musical performance in the elevat...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson As it happens, the majority of anatomy classes don't actually have access to dead bodies. This stark, somewhat gruesome topic is the focus of the next talk in The Lab, where Jack Choi is demonstrating a virtual dissection table developed to help students learn about anatomy and dissection without the need to g...

Technology professor Khurram Siddiqi enjoys a complicated relationship with his hometown of Lahore, Pakistan. For one thing, he spent many years away from it, living and learning in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United States. In 2009, he returned for good, hoping to reconnect with both his family and his roots, and motivated to "uncove...

“How can I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?” With these questions the majestic Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go, closes talks for Day 1 of TEDGlobal 2014. Having just come back from a tour, Selasi is irked and perplexed by the consistently inconsistent way she was introduced at each event: by a biography...

Seth Godin: This is broken Why are so many things broken? In a hilarious talk from the 2006 Gel conference, Seth Godin gives a tour of things poorly designed, the 7 reasons why they are that way, and how to fix them. Watch now

Ever had the impulse to put everything in storage, sublet your place and travel across the country in an Airstream trailer? That’s what Emily Janssen did when she joined the StoryCorps Mobile Tour as a facilitator, someone who helps people record their own StoryCorps interview. She’d worked for StoryCorps before, at their headquarters ...

Young Guru, best known for producing Jay-Z’s albums, may be on tour in Europe. But he couldn’t resist the opportunity to remix the teenage singers, MCs and thinkers who contributed their vocals at TEDYouth. At the event on November 17, World Up -- a non-profit dedicated to making the world smaller through hip hop, technology and education --...

On the morning after more than a billion viewers worldwide tuned into the Academy Awards and its glitzy salute to motion pictures, 44 TEDsters trekked up to one of the most enduring signs of moviedom for a tour of the fabled Hollywood sign and an update on the successful battle to preserve the scenic hills around it from development. The jour...

This year, TED is using Facebook and Instagram to give our online audience behind-the-scenes access to the ideas we're discussing at TED2018: The Age of Amazement. New for 2018, our online community will be able to join the conference via the Facebook Watch show TED: Backstage Pass. Throughout the week, we'll offer exclusive interviews, live ...

Click to watch the session-opening animation. We end TEDGlobal2012 with a session that steps back and asks, "How do we, as a society, communicate with each other?" The public sphere, the place where we engage with society at large, has undergone tremendous change -- driven and empowered by the digital revolution, but also, perhaps, by a dee...

David Li has lived in Shanghai since 2003, when the Taiwan-born consultant and entrepreneur moved to the city to take advantage of a place in which he felt like "everything was possible." A decade later, he's still relishing all that the city has to offer, from vast cultural spaces to XinCheJian, the small community hackerspace he runs in the ci...

“Let’s skip ahead and assume that children of the future are always connected,” said education innovator Sugata Mitra. Thinking out loud about the evolution of screen sizes and the future of wearables, he came to the conclusion: “The Internet is a subject as important as science or mathematics.” Mitra shared this in a presentation at the ...

Do you still know every word to Macy Gray’s lovesick ballad “I Try?” Us too. In fact, Gray’s chart-toppling album, On How Life Is, still sounds as refreshingly modern as it did when it was released in 1999. At TEDGlobal2012, Macy Gray took to the stage and got the audience on their feet with a medley of songs, including a re-do of Radiohe...

If you could ask a stranger any question, what would it be? This is the question Davy Rothbart set out to answer when he embarked on a nationwide tour to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his magazine, Found. Rothbart -- a writer, reporter and documentary filmmaker known for his curiosity about other people’s lives -- traveled across North A...

"I started writing songs to be heard, to get attention. In life, being understood is really important to me," says Lissie in a near-whisper into the microphone. "I write songs to process my emotions, and when we tour it's cool to see other people process their emotions with my songs." And with that, she and her band launch into a rocking set i...

The internet has inflated people's expectations about what success looks like -- any achievement that doesn't go viral can seem skimpy. By changing our perspective and appreciating human-size, human-scale achievements, we can move towards our goals, says educator Mehrnaz Bassiri. Every weekday for the month of January, TED Ideas is publishing a...