Writer and designer Graham Hill asks: Can having less stuff, in less room, lead to more happiness? He makes the case for taking up less space, and lays out three rules for editing your life.

Our obsession with productivity -- to-do lists, life hacks, morning routines -- is making us less productive, says digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush. She explains why we need to redesign our workday around creativity -- not just efficiency.

As the saying goes, less is more. The same goes for words. Listen as Politico and Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei shares what he's learned leading two media companies -- and how to radically rethink the way you write to keep people's attention in a distracted digital world.

What are our screens and devices doing to us? Psychologist Adam Alter studies how much time screens steal from us and how they're getting away with it. He shares why all those hours you spend staring at your smartphone, tablet or computer might be making you miserable -- and what you can do about it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has gotten more than his fair share of attention from his acting career. But as social media exploded over the past decade, he got addicted like the rest of us -- trying to gain followers and likes only to be left feeling inadequate and less creative. In a refreshingly honest talk, he explores how the attention-driven model ...

As medicine advances, so does the complexity and price of healthcare. For inspiration on ways to keep healthcare affordable, Jan Denecker shares three simple, yet effective innovations from the developing world, where constraints on resources have caused the healthcare industry to adopt a mentality of doing more with less.

Finding a job used to start with submitting your résumé to a million listings and never hearing back from most of them. But more and more companies are using tech-forward methods to identify candidates. If AI is the future of hiring, what does that mean for you? Technologist Priyanka Jain gives a look at this new hiring landscape.

Women own 39 percent of all businesses in the US, but female entrepreneurs get only two percent of venture funding. What's causing this gap? Dana Kanze shares research suggesting that it might be the types of questions start-up founders get asked when they're invited to pitch. Whether you're starting a new business or just having a conversation,...

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

Rising carbon levels in the atmosphere can make plants grow faster, but there's another hidden consequence: they rob plants of the nutrients and vitamins we need to survive. In a talk about global food security, epidemiologist Kristie Ebi explores the potentially massive health consequences of this growing nutrition crisis -- and explores the st...

Twerking is mainstream now ... but do you know where it came from? Superstar Lizzo traces booty shaking to a traditional West African dance and tells how Black women across generations kept the rhythm alive, from blues and jazz singers to modern rap and hip-hop performers. With her characteristic energy, she shares how twerking empowered her to ...

Every day, a typical hospital patient generates 150 million data points setting off over 1,300 alarms, 90% of which are never acted upon. Can we eliminate the incessant noise and also improve the quality of care? Inhi Cho Suh explains that by applying big data analytics, algorithms can inform medical personnel more successfully -- and more quietly.

Sara Menker quit a career in commodities trading to figure out how the global value chain of agriculture works. Her discoveries have led to some startling predictions: "We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system's structural capacity to produce food," she says. "People could s...

We all want to save more money -- but overall, people today are doing less and less of it. Behavioral scientist Wendy De La Rosa studies how everyday people make decisions to improve their financial well-being. What she's found can help you painlessly make the commitment to save more and spend less.

Feeling disconnected from creating art within classical conventions, artist Georgia O'Keeffe began experimenting with abstract drawings that defied easy classification. Using the shapes and rhythms of nature to capture her internal world, these experiments became the cornerstone of the movement known as American Modernism. Iseult Gillespie explo...

You take vacation days, sick days and mental health days; now it's time to add a financial health day to that list! What to do on it? Behavioral psychologist Wendy De La Rosa shares 10 simple steps you can take to spend less, save more -- and stress less.

In this thought-provoking talk, writer and podcaster Lucy Clayton examines the power of ordinary people in extraordinary outfits and describes how we can repurpose fashion in service of political expression.

"I dream of a world where geography classes teach about the climate crisis as this one great challenge that was won by people like you and me," says climate activist Luisa Neubauer. With Greta Thunberg, Neubauer helped initiate "Fridays For Future," the momentous international school strike movement that protests the lack of action on the climat...

We're heading for a world population of 10 billion people -- but what will we all eat? Lisa Dyson rediscovered an idea developed by NASA in the 1960s for deep-space travel, and it could be a key to reinventing how we grow food.

If we hope to one day leave Earth and explore the universe, our bodies are going to have to get a lot better at surviving the harsh conditions of space. Using synthetic biology, Lisa Nip hopes to harness special powers from microbes on Earth -- such as the ability to withstand radiation -- to make humans more fit for exploring space. "We're appr...

Physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi presents a controversial new model of the universe that -- just maybe -- answers all the big questions. If nothing else, it's the most beautiful 8-dimensional model of elementary particles and forces you've ever seen.

Many of the symptoms of menopause -- hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, memory lapses, depression and anxiety -- start in the brain. How exactly does menopause impact cognitive health? Sharing groundbreaking findings from her research, neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi reveals how decreasing hormonal levels affect brain aging -- and shares simple li...

TED Fellow Lucy McRae is a body architect -- she imagines ways to merge biology and technology in our own bodies. In this visually stunning talk, she shows her work, from clothes that recreate the body's insides for a music video with pop-star Robyn, to a pill that, when swallowed, lets you sweat perfume.

Louise Leakey asks, "Who are we?" The question takes her to the Rift Valley in Eastern Africa, where she digs for the evolutionary origins of humankind -- and suggests a stunning new vision of our competing ancestors.

How do you make a great public space inside a not-so-great building? Liz Diller shares the story of imagining a welcoming, lighthearted -- even, dare we say it, sexy -- addition to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. (From The Design Studio session at TED2012, guest-curated by Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell.)

Your research team has found a prehistoric virus preserved in the permafrost and isolated it for study. After a late night working, you're just closing up the lab when a sudden earthquake hits and breaks all the sample vials. Will you be able to destroy the virus before the vents open and unleash a deadly airborne plague? Lisa Winer shows how. [...

Imagine waking in the middle of the night to an elephant ripping the roof from your house in search of food. This is a reality in some communities in Africa where, as wild spaces shrink, people and elephants are competing for space and resources like never before. In this engaging talk, zoologist Lucy King shares her solution to the rising confl...

Louise Fresco shows us why we should celebrate mass-produced, supermarket-style white bread. She says environmentally sound mass production will feed the world, yet leave a role for small bakeries and traditional methods.

In this deeply moving talk, Lucy Kalanithi reflects on life and purpose, sharing the story of her late husband, Paul, a young neurosurgeon who turned to writing after his terminal cancer diagnosis. "Engaging in the full range of experience -- living and dying, love and loss -- is what we get to do," Kalanithi says. "Being human doesn't happen de...

New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly shares a portfolio of her wise and funny cartoons about modern life -- and talks about how humor can empower women to change the rules.