A new technology aspires to harness the powerful human sense of smell to enhance our daily lives.  Someday this approach might even be used to benefit our health. How is this possible? Step one: Just inhale. We’re living in a playlist world, with many of us curating soundtracks to get us through life’s daily ups and downs, such as a tough commu...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson "So I have this android copy of myself," says Henrik Schärfe drily. You know. As you do. But first, Schärfe wants to share a personal story, of waking up one dark November night to the police at his door, informing him of an accident in which his parents had both been killed. "I knew what was going on but ...

The Gates Foundation and TEDx are presenting another extraordinary TEDxChange event -- this time in New Delhi, India. In partnership with TEDxDelhi, TEDxChange @ TEDxDelhi is about some of the most interesting and creative development work happening in India right now. India is a hub of creative problem-solving for many of the issues that can ma...

TEDYouth will be livestreamed on Saturday, November 15, for free -- and not just in English. This event, meant for students and, well, anyone sparked by general curiosity, will be translated on the spot into both Spanish and Arabic, to make it watchable by more people around the world. Five intrepid live interpreters will make this happen...

Is it possible to define, measure and even increase how wise a person is? Psychiatrist Dilip Jeste is attempting to answer those questions. To assess our health, we weigh ourselves, measure our blood pressure, and check our cholesterol. But one scientist is trying to figure out the connection between our well-being and something much more diffi...

A philosopher walks into a bar, and a barfly asks him, “What’s the meaning of life?” That philosopher is me, and it’s an inevitable question once people find out that I am a philosopher and psychology researcher who specializes in studying the meaning of life. I’ve been asked that question enough times to have a one-liner ready. I’ll firs...

"This was my cancer," TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi begins his TEDGlobal talk, showing a slide of brain scans taken last summer, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 39. Since the moment Iaconesi heard the word "cancer" come out of his doctors' mouth, he noticed something -- that the way people related to him turned on a dime. ...

Confidence and joy in your own body are the keys to healthy intimacy, says educator and author Emily Nagoski. Every weekday for the month of January, TED Ideas is publishing a new post in a series called “How to Be a Better Human,” containing a helpful piece of advice from a speaker in the TED community. To see all the posts in the series, clic...

Countdown is a global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. Watch the talks, interviews and performances from the Countdown Global Launch at ted.com/countdown. It's time to take action. This closing session of the Countdown Global Launch explored the road ahead: How to think urgently and long-term about climate change....

Cross-posted from the TEDx blog: On Monday, September 20, TED and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-host TEDxChange, a TEDx event that focuses on the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations 10 years ago. TEDxChange will look at how we've done in the past decade to meet the goals, and what needs to be done to ensure the ...

To keep our ancestors alive, our brains evolved an ongoing internal trickle of unease. It’s the little whisper of worry that keeps you scanning your inner and outer worlds for signs of trouble. This background of unsettledness and watchfulness is so automatic to most people that we can forget it’s there. See if you can tune in to a tension...

It's safe to say that economic inequality bothers us. But why? Harvard philosopher T. M. Scanlon offers four reasons we should tackle -- and fix -- the problem. The great inequality of income and wealth in the world, and within the United States, is deeply troubling. It seems, even to many of us who benefit from this inequality, that somethin...

First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon spoke at TEDSummit on Wednesday in Edinburgh about her vision for making collective well-being the main aim of public policy and the economy. (Watch her full talk on TED.com.) That same morning, Boris Johnson assumed office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the latest episode of the Brexit drama ...

. "Performance philosopher" Jason Silva creates brightly colored, fast-moving films about ideas. At TEDGlobal 2012, Silva delved into the concept of radical openness. In this new short film, Silva explores another big question: Is feeling awestruck good for us? In the movie trailer-esque video, Silva quotes recent research by three Stanford ...

The penultimate session of TEDSummit 2019 had a bit of everything -- new thoughts on aging, loneliness and happiness as well as breakthrough science, music and even a bit of comedy. The event: TEDSummit 2019, Session 5: Stages of Life, hosted by Kelly Stoetzel and Alex Moura When and where: Wednesday, July 24, 2019, 5pm BST, at the Edi...

Seafood is one of the healthiest foods you can eat. But fish and shellfish are not just yummy -- they also play a part in a large and interconnected system that involves the whole earth's well-being. In The Whole Fish: How Adventurous Eating of Seafood Can Make You Healthier, Sexier, and Help Save the Ocean, food writer Maria Finn takes us on a ...

Great news: TED Books are now available on Apple's iBookstore. It’s an exciting time for publishing, and we’re glad to work with Apple to make TED Books available to as many readers as possible. TED Books, which launched earlier this year, are an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional book...

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...

Sociologist Jill Suitor studies the truth about moms and their kids -- and the surprising effects that parental favoritism can have on us. If you want to start a fight in a multi-child family, try throwing out the question “Who is Mom’s favorite?” While most mothers will insist they love their children equally, many kids will say that Mom has a...

Today, we're thrilled to announce the launch of TED Books, an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, TED Books run less than 20,000 words each -- long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting. Books are available on the Kindle and Kindle R...

This session presents speakers who are at home in awe-inspiring places. These bold explorers come bearing discoveries from the tundra and the rainforest, from beneath the ocean's surface, and even from that most elusive of mighty spaces — the happy human heart. The speakers who’ll appear in this final session of the conference: Buddhist monk...

Growth is usually a good thing. For a person, it means more wisdom; for a business, it means more profit; for a country, it means increased prosperity. But growth has a darker side too: aging, a sense of impersonality, waste and pollution. At TED@BCG — the latest TED Institute event, held on June 30, 2015, at Old Billingsgate Market in Londo...

Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls out Feminism Lite -- "a hollow, appeasing and bankrupt idea." A few years ago, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a childhood friend and new mother, asking her how she could raise her baby girl to be a feminist. Adichie’s new book, Dear Iljeawele, is her response, and it contain...

What do a disease-fighting epidemiologist (retired) and an up-and-coming social psychologist have in common? They're both fascinated by the unseen social problems hidden behind the word "inequality."  Beyond the lack of access to money and power -- what does inequality do to us as human beings? Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson (TED Talk: ...

Australian Morgan Barnes posted a TED Conversation discussion question in December that was on many people’s minds: “Has the time come for the U.S. Second Amendment to be repealed or amended?” Over the next month, TED community members chimed in to voice their opinions nearly 1,400 times. The discussion closed this week, just as President Bar...

After his mainstage talk on the opening night of TED, psychologist Steven Pinker sat down with Chris Anderson to dive into his new book, Enlightenment Now. The two examined some criticisms of the book and the thesis behind it, dug into the data, and then threw the floor open for questions, in a session that offered the luxury of time to real...

My last fight came after, of all things, the movie Pacific Rim.  As my moviegoing companion and I walked out of the theater, he said of Guillermo del Toro’s latest, “That was awesome.” I, on the other hand, thought it was just okay, managing to slightly elevate its robots-versus-aliens premise. At first, we slightly disagreed. But within ...

. At the School in the Cloud learning lab in the village of Korakati, India, students sit on colorful stools in front of computer screens, talking over Skype to educators in England and Germany. So it might be surprising to discover that this high-tech education center was built in a place that can only be accessed by boat and rickshaw, wher...

The mad rush of the holidays can stress out the sunniest soul, and yet somehow, beneath it all, we remain cheerfully optimistic.  We look ahead, make New Year's resolutions and generally believe next year will be better than this one and the year before. Why? Tali Sharot, who spoke at TED2012, says we homo sapiens are genetically predisposed...

According to our best estimates, TED has surpassed a billion video views! Our most recent metrics show that TED Talks are being viewed at a rate of 1.5 million times a day -- which means that a new viewing commences 17 times a second. We in the TED office cannot thank you enough for helping us reach this milestone of 1,000,000,000 views -- n...