Leah Buechley is an MIT electronics designer who mixes high and low tech to create smart and playful results.

At Pixar, Danielle Feinberg delights in bending the rules of light to her every whim.

With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography, Paula Scher is a master conjurer of the instantly familiar.

Stuart Russell wrote the standard text on AI; now he thinks deeply on AI's future -- and the future of us humans, too.

The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns that lead organizations and managers astray.

Through his new project, MuckWork, Derek Sivers wants to lessen the burdens (and boredom) of creative people.

Nikki Webber Allen is working to create a safe space for honest conversations about mental health in communities of color.

As president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Dan Gross seeks to cut US gun deaths in half by 2025.

If his career began and ended with "I [heart] N Y," Milton Glaser would still be a legend. But over his multi-decade career, his body of work is sprinkled with similarly iconic images and logos.

Do kids these days have short attention spans, or does the world just move too slow? Gabe Zichermann suggests that today's video games are making children smarter -- and we should all embrace gamification.

TED Fellow Mei Lin Neo is helping giant clams step out of their shells and show the world that they can be the heroes of the oceans, too.

Many African countries are poor for a simple reason, says entrepreneur Magatte Wade: governments have created far too many obstacles to starting and running a business. In this passionate talk, Wade breaks down the challenges of doing business on the continent and offers some solutions of her own -- while calling on leaders to do their part, too.

Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle has devoted her career to exploring our solar system's nearby worlds. Her latest project is Dragonfly, a robotic rotorcraft-lander designed to explore Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times and a tech correspondent for CBS News. He's also one of the world's bestselling how-to authors, with titles in the For Dummies series and his own line of "Missing Manual" books.

Dr. Darria Long leverages the best of science to make lives healthier, better and easier.

Sitting down for brief periods can help us recover from stress or recuperate from exercise. But nowadays, our lifestyles make us sit much more than we move around. Are our bodies built for such a sedentary existence? Murat Dalkilinç investigates the hidden risks of sitting down. [Directed by Oxbow Creative, narrated by Addison Anderson].

A TEDGlobal Fellow, Catarina Mota plays with "smart materials" -- like shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric structures that react to voltage -- and encourages others to do so too.

Adam Garske loves enzymes and thinks you should, too. He engineers enzymes for use in industrial applications, ranging from laundry detergents to animal nutrition.

Joel Leon is a performer, author and storyteller from the Bronx. He is the author of "A Book About Things I Will Tell My Daughter" and "God Wears Durags Too," and a father to Lilah and West.

Robert Neuwirth’s writings on the street-level reality of the developing world have opened a new dialogue on development and economics.

Fascinated by exploration both on and off this planet, Nadia Drake writes and thinks about both the very big (astronomy) and the very small (spiders).

Naomi Klein is a public intellectual, journalist and activist.

Death, the afterlife, and now sex -- Mary Roach tackles the most pondered and least understood conundrums that have baffled humans for centuries. (She's funny, too.)

Sheena Iyengar studies how people choose (and what makes us think we're good at it).

Rita F. Pierson spent her entire life in or around the classroom, having followed both her parents and grandparents into a career as an educator.

Catherine Crump is an assistant clinical professor at Berkeley Law School who focuses on the laws around data and surveillance.

Miguel Nicolelis explores the limits of the brain-machine interface.

Nora McInerny makes a living talking to people about life's hardest moments.

Emma Marris is a writer focusing on environmental science, policy and culture, with an approach that she paints as being "more interested in finding and describing solutions than delineating problems, and more interested in joy than despair."

Iwan Baan's photographs capture the many ways people shape their shared built environment -- from high architecture to handmade homes.