People around the world are demanding clean air -- and cities are starting to respond, says electrification advocate Monica Araya. She takes us on a world tour of urban areas that are working to fully electrify their transportation systems over the next decade, shifting to emission-free motorcycles, cars, buses, ferries and beyond. See what a fu...

Boniface Mwangi is an award-winning Kenyan photographer, artist and activist. He is a TED Fellow.

Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of fascinating TED-related news items. Here, some highlights. Jeff Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon (watch his TED Talk), made waves on Monday when it was announced that he will buy The Washington Post for $250 million. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its ow...

Leslie Morgan Steiner is a writer and outspoken advocate for survivors of domestic violence -- which includes herself.

A record-setting triathlete, Minda Dentler is a polio survivor committed to inspiring people to move beyond their fear of failure and achieve their goals.

Dave Meslin is a "professional rabble-rouser." Based in Toronto, he works to make local issues engaging and even fun to get involved in.

Samy Nour Younes is a trans actor and activist who highlights the diversity of the trans experience -- not just in their struggles, but also in their triumphs.

Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both....

What do you get when you give a design tool a digital nervous system? Computers that improve our ability to think and imagine, and robotic systems that come up with (and build) radical new designs for bridges, cars, drones and much more -- all by themselves. Take a tour of the Augmented Age with futurist Maurice Conti and preview a time when rob...

Nagin Cox explores Mars as part of the team that operates NASA's rovers.

In the US, Black women are nearly 300 percent more likely to die as a result of childbirth than white women. Sharing appalling statistics on maternal mortality as well as her own tragic story of loss, Wanda Irving explains how racism and bias in health care minimizes and dismisses Black women's pain -- and makes a personal plea for leaders in th...

At Novalia, Kate Stone and her team use ordinary printing presses to manufacture interactive electronics, which combine touch-sensitive ink technology and printed circuits into unique and cost-effective products.

Why has there been so little mention of saving Black lives from the climate emergency? For too long, racial justice efforts have been distinguished from climate justice work, says David Lammy, Member of Parliament for Tottenham, England. In a stirring talk about building a new movement to care for the planet, Lammy calls for inclusion and suppor...

David R. Liu leads a research group that combines chemistry and evolutionary techniques to create revolutionary new medicines.

Susan Solomon enables support for human stem cell research, aiming to cure major diseases and empower more personalized medicine.

In this rousing call to action, three participants of the Race To Zero -- a global campaign for cities, businesses, investors and individuals to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 -- discuss how we can move forward with speed and urgency to create a more fair, healthy and sustainable world. Watch as Miao Wang, United Nations Young Champio...

Iraqi-born Zainab Salbi founded and runs Women for Women International, and has dedicated her life to helping women in war-torn regions rebuild their lives and communities.

It’s 2012. And many of us no doubt imagined that flying cars would be all the rage by now. While that hasn’t happened yet, some major driving innovations are on their way down the pipeline. In a new TEDTalk, Chris Gerdes of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (awesomely abbreviated as CARS) explains that he and his team are busy ...

Should we be putting humans on Mars? A panel of space experts brings up the big questions we need to ask before we blast off. Mars! It’s a planet we humans have been eyeing with intent since we first looked upward. Someday, the Red Planet might become a place to house Earth's expanding population ... it could be a lucrative place to mine natura...

Why does race matter so profoundly for health? David R. Williams developed a scale to measure the impact of discrimination on well-being, going beyond traditional measures like income and education to reveal how factors like implicit bias, residential segregation and negative stereotypes create and sustain inequality. In this eye-opening talk, W...

As America becomes more and more multicultural, Rich Benjamin noticed a phenomenon: Some communities were actually getting less diverse. So he got out a map, found the whitest towns in the USA -- and moved in. In this funny, honest, human talk, he shares what he learned as a black man in Whitopia.

Crisis interventions often focus on a single aspect of a big, complicated problem, failing to address the broader social and economic context. Kwame Owusu-Kesse describes how the Harlem Children's Zone is taking a more holistic approach to the pandemic, weaving together a network of services to help communities recover and rebuild. Learn more ab...

Eric Dyer is an artist and educator who brings animation into the physical world with his sequential images, sculptures and installations.

Global scholar, University of Pennsylvania civil rights sociologist and law professor Dorothy Roberts exposes the myths of race-­based medicine.

Margaret Bourdeaux investigates the best ways to protect, recover and reconstruct health systems and institutions disrupted by war or disaster.

Carolyn Jones creates projects that point our attention towards issues of global concern.

A flat piece of plastic that can shape itself into a shoe? An orthodontic device that moves into position to straighten teeth? Computational architect Skylar Tibbits is shaking up the material world. Ever tried to assemble an Ikea table? Turning a two-dimensional pile of wood and plastic into a useful 3D object can be a challenge. Now imagine o...

Mary Bassett is fighting what may be the greatest stumbling block to equitable health care in the US: institutional racism.

Shocking, but true: the United States has the highest rate of deaths for new mothers of any developed country -- and 60 percent of them are preventable. With clarity and urgency, physician Elizabeth Howell explains the causes of maternal mortality and shares ways for hospitals and doctors to make pregnancy safer for women before, during and afte...

Turns out, it's less about "teaching" creativity to children -- and more about creating a fertile environment in which their creativity will take root, grow and flourish. Researcher Mitch Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT, explains how we can do this. There’s a common misconception that the best way to encourage childr...