Best known for her role in the Broadway revival of "The Color Purple," Cynthia Erivo is a Tony-, Grammy- and Emmy-winning performer.

"The Pitch Coach" David S. Rose is an expert on the business pitch. As an entrepreneur, he has raised millions for his own companies. As an investor, he has funded millions more.

About this event: Thanks to digital devices, the world we live in is more connected than ever before. Every day is a constant juggling of googling, posting, tweeting, snapping, texting and/or emailing. In fact, the average adult spends more than 11-hours a day consuming media. Children and teens spend more than 7-hours a day looking at their screens; and every ye...

Tristan Harris helps the technology industry more consciously and ethically shape the human spirit and human potential.

What we see in movies matters: it affects our hobbies, our career choices, our emotions and even our identities. Right now, we don't see enough women on screen or behind the camera -- but waiting for Hollywood to grow a conscience isn't going to fix the problem, says Naomi McDougall Jones. Join forces with the actor and activist as she outlines ...

Maxillofacial surgeon Iain Hutchison works with people whose faces have been severely disfigured. By pushing to improve surgical techniques, he helps to improve their lives; and by commissioning their portraits, he celebrates their humanity. NOTE: This talk contains images of disfigured and badly injured faces that may be disturbing -- and Hutch...

António Guterres thinks that we can solve the global refugee crisis -- and he offers compelling, surprising reasons why we must try. In conversation with TED's Bruno Giussani, Guterres discusses the historical causes of the current crisis and outlines the mood of the European countries that are trying to screen, shelter and resettle hundreds of ...

About this event: It's amazing how technology and science has created major advancements in medicine, education, job training, knowledge of the earth and so much more. We are able to communicate with people across the world as if they were right in our living rooms sitting next to us. We can perform medical procedures with robots without ever touching the patie...

Artist Eric Dyer spent years working at a computer to produce images for the screen. Longing to get his hands back on his work, he began exploring the zoetrope, a popular 19th-century device that was used to create the illusion of motion long before the arrival of film. In this vibrant talk, he showcases his resulting art inventions: spinning sc...

How does Hollywood choose what stories get told on-screen? Too often, it's groupthink informed by a narrow set of ideas about what sells at the box office. As a producer, Franklin Leonard saw too many great screenplays never get made because they didn't fit the mold. So he started the Black List, an anonymous email that shared his favorite scree...

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward.

Glowing dogs ... mice that grow human ears ... bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe describes an astonishing series of recent bio-engineering experiments, and asks: Isn't it time to set some ground rules?

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...

About this event: Join us as we screen the following TED talks: One Seed at a Time, Protecting the Future of Food (Cary Fowler) Why Bees are Disappearing (Marla Spivak) The Secret of the Bat Genome (Emma Teeling) A lively moderated discussion will follow our screening! Refreshments will be served.

About this event: Our TEDx event takes the format of two videoed TED talks, shown on a large projector screen, with time between each talk for discussion among attendees. The May talks will be: "The surprising science of happiness" and "The jobs we'll lose to machines - and the ones we won't"

Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

During a Formula 1 race, a car sends hundreds of millions of data points to its garage for real-time analysis and feedback. So why not use this detailed and rigorous data system elsewhere, like at children's hospitals? Peter van Manen tells us more.

Along with a crew of technologists and scientists, Jorge Soto is developing a simple, noninvasive, open-source test that looks for early signs of multiple forms of cancer. Onstage at TEDGlobal 2014, he demonstrates a working prototype of the mobile platform for the first time.

Humorist John Hodgman rambles through a new story about aliens, physics, time, space and the way all of these somehow contribute to a sweet, perfect memory of falling in love.

Plenty of people need jobs with very flexible hours -- but it's difficult for those people to connect with the employers who need them. Wingham Rowan is working on that. He explains how the same technology that powers modern financial markets can help employers book workers for slivers of time.

Challenges and problems can derail your creative process ... or they can make you more creative than ever. In the surprising story behind the best-selling solo piano album of all time, Tim Harford may just convince you of the advantages of having to work with a little mess.

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." Dan Gilbert shares recent research on a phenomenon he calls the "end of history illusion," where we somehow imagine that the person we are right now is the person we'll be for the rest of time. Hint: that's not the case.

Laparoscopic surgery uses minimally invasive incisions -- which means less pain and shorter recovery times for patients. But Steven Schwaitzberg has run into two problems teaching these techniques to surgeons around the world: language and distance. He shares how a new technology, which combines videoconferencing and a real-time universal transl...

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.

"I have cerebral palsy. I shake all the time," Maysoon Zayid announces at the beginning of this exhilarating, hilarious talk. (Really, it's hilarious.) "I'm like Shakira meets Muhammad Ali." With grace and wit, the Arab-American comedian takes us on a whistle-stop tour of her adventures as an actress, stand-up comic, philanthropist and advocate ...

When you look at Muslim scholar Dalia Mogahed, what do you see: A woman of faith? A scholar, a mom, a sister? Or an oppressed, brainwashed, potential terrorist? In this personal, powerful talk, Mogahed asks us, in this polarizing time, to fight negative perceptions of her faith in the media -- and to choose empathy over prejudice.

"We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't," says poet and teacher Clint Smith. A short, powerful piece from the heart, about finding the courage to speak up against ignorance and injustice.

Twitter gives a voice to the voiceless, a way to speak up and hit back at perceived injustice. But sometimes, says Jon Ronson, things go too far. In a jaw-dropping story of how one un-funny tweet ruined a woman's life and career, Ronson shows how online commenters can end up behaving like a baying mob -- and says it's time to rethink how we inte...

At the center of a galaxy more than 55 million light-years away, there's a supermassive black hole with the mass of several billion suns. And now, for the first time ever, we can see it. Astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, speaks with TED's Chris Anderson about the iconic, first-ever image of a bla...

Nagin Cox is a first-generation Martian. As a spacecraft engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cox works on the team that manages the United States' rovers on Mars. But working a 9-to-5 on another planet -- whose day is 40 minutes longer than Earth's -- has particular, often comical challenges.