Session 5, hosted by TED Curator Chris Anderson and astrophysicist and TED Fellow Jedidah Isler, is called “space to dream.” As Isler points out, we’re not just talking about outer space -- it’s also about "the right to take up space, to dream, to do.” Seven dreamers, doers and designers offer a variety of ways to look at this theme. Lear...

About this event: This year our theme is Bits, Atoms, Neurons, Genes (or BANG BANG as we're calling it). The digital world and the real world are interconnected like never before. You can send off online for a personal genome readout and control physical objects with your mind. Computer thinking is driving medicine, music and play. With brain-computer interfa...

Behold, your recap of TED-related news: Remembering Billy Graham. For more than 60 years, pastor Billy Graham inspired countless people around the world with his sermons. On Wednesday, February 21, he passed away at his home in North Carolina after struggling with numerous illnesses over the past few years. He was 99 years old. Raised on ...

Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week: In case you haven't seen it yet, To This Day is a beautiful collaborative project that combines spoken word poetry and a flurry of eclectic animations to raise awareness about bullying. Watch seven TED Talks on the wonder of 3D printing. The f...

Via the TEDx Blog: Patrick Newell, organizer of TEDxTokyo, has been collecting and sharing news from TEDx communities affected by the recent tragic events in Japan. He sends this report: The effects of the earthquake that struck the Tohoko region of Japan on Friday, March 11, has had an impact all around the world. Here in Tokyo, thousa...

If your home had been devastated by a disaster, would you stay? Why do people choose to remain in potentially life-threatening places? These are just a few of the complex questions that photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart and filmmaker Holly Morris explore in their respective work, documenting the lives of people living in Chernobyl and Fuk...

Yes, it takes enough time and energy to be a good person in the here and now, but we also need to start considering future generations, too. Writer Bina Venkataraman tells us how we can start acting in ways that benefit those to come. We live in a culture that encourages instant gratification, amid markets that turn on quarterly profits. Yet ma...

Andrew Bastawrous dreams of a bakery in Nakuru, Kenya, that will not only make delicious treats but raise money for subsidized vision care. Robert Simpson envisions First Responders, a program to make satellite data available to citizen scientists in crisis situations, to guide aid efforts from afar. Cesar Harada wants to create larger prototype...

About this event: TEDxGöteborgLive will return this month with a live-streaming of the first TED conferences of the third day of TED 2013, straight from Long Beach Performing Arts Center in California. In 2013, the TED line-up will have the largest number of speakers in the conference series' history, as a result of TED's first-ever global talent search. Thr...

Award-winning Canadian photographer Ed Ou fell into photojournalism as a teenager, while studying political science in Jerusalem. Since then, he has blazed a trail of cinematic images covering the Egyptian revolution, the Somali Civil War, victims of radiation poisoning in the Soviet Union, and beyond, capturing moments of beauty and humanit...

Great science fiction writers don’t just imagine the future, they shape it. The idea that omnipresent social data networks would one day seem as normal as toothbrushes was a borderline-preposterous theory back in the early 1980s. Then a rookie science-fiction writer named William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in a short story, sparking th...

TED2014 will bring together more than 70 speakers with fresh thinking on topics as diverse as leadership, genetics and the magic of fireflies. But this is our 30th anniversary conference, and it’s also time to look back at some of the incredible ideas surfaced in the past. At TED2014, we will hold five All-Stars sessions that bring 50+ favorite ...

Last time we saw Stewart Brand on the TED stage was in 2010, in his debate with Mark Z. Jacobson over whether the world needs nuclear energy. Brand, perhaps surprisingly, gave a passionate pro argument. But today he's here for a very different -- and potentially very controversial -- purpose. Extinction is not just death, but death for ev...

About this event: LIVE SIMULCAST (LIVE WEBCASTING) OF THE TED 2013 CONFERENCE (from Los Angeles, California) ‘The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered’. We will ONLY screen (LIVE, with Exclusive License and in English only), the Fourth and Fifth Session of the 27th line-up (the entire conference actually lasts 4 days but it is allowed to screen only the 27th): ‘DIS...

About this event: Join us on Wednesday 27th February for our second "TEDxLive" event showing an exclusive live webcast of the TED 2013 conference in Longon Beach, California. You're welcome to bring your laptops and iPads along to work on throughout the evening while we watch the live show. VENUE: Project Space (1st floor), Loughborough University School Of...

From machine intelligence to post-subsistence economies, Google's Blaise Agüera y Arcas lays out 6 (okay, 7) ways everything is set to change. How will our minds be blown in the next 30 years? Well, that's quite a long time, given the acceleration in history. Still, I'll be brave and make six hypotheses. 1. Machine Intelligence I think that...

Neuroscientist

Engineer + biodiversity scientist

Photo: James Duncan Davidson "The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago," says MIT professor, Donald Sadoway, now on stage at TED2012 to talk power. "The way things stand, electricity demand must be in balance with electricity supply." The problem is: coal and nuclear plants can't address demand fa...

Let it be noted, says co-host Chris Anderson, that this year's TED started with a roaring cheer and with a scream of anguish. Our job this week is to explore what's amazing, in every sense of the word, from the jaw-droppingly wonderful to the shocking and urgent. So Chris and co-host Helen Walters have decided to kick off Session 1 with a qu...

About this event: TEDxEonjuro's first event was held under the slogan "We All Together: MED and You". The event was based on a single keyword, 'companion,' showing how the medical field and the non-medical field amalgamating these days. TEDxEonjuro explored diverse applications of medical sciences in this monumental first event. Moreover, people engaged in di...

Physicist Brian Green promises he will tell the audience at TED 2014 the whole history of the universe in four minutes. "Forgive me," he says, "if I leave out a detail here or there." He does it with two metaphors. One from the beginning till now, and another from now till the end. The universe today is 13.8 billion years old, and it c...

About this event: Speakers will deliver inspiring talks on subjects close to their hearts: 1) Exploring new technologies, such as AI and Nuclear energy. Can technology solve all of the world’s problems? Can the use of humour and lateral thinking debunk well-established scientific assumptions? Why: Our school has a strong focus on the sciences and our students...

This week, during a computer security conference in Las Vegas, researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller demonstrated how easily they could hack into the systems of moving cars using just a laptop computer. Illustrating that modern devices are worryingly vulnerable to hacking, Valasek and Miller showed their ability to jerk seatbelts, turn wh...

About this event: Following the footsteps of the TEDxFulbright community in Washington D.C., Santa Monica, Frankfurt & Dublin, TEDxFulbrightMelbourne will be the first to premiere in the Southern Hemisphere, hosting eight incredible speakers over three hours at the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre this April. Our theme, 'A Certain Optimism: Changing the...

About this event: The Washington Branch Library will be hosting a TEDx Talk on the topic of Internet safety and privacy. This program will be held at the Washington Branch Library, located at 220 N. 300 E. in Washington. “This particular topic was chosen as a TEDx Talk discussion because Internet safety and privacy are a major issue in today’s technology rich ...

Born and raised in Seoul, Suki Kim posed as an English teacher at an all-male university in Pyongyang run by evangelical Christians; she spent six months teaching the 19-year-old sons of North Korea’s ruling class. In this excerpt from her investigative memoir, she describes the experience. "Essay" was a much-dreaded word among my students. It ...

In Phil Plait’s talk from TEDxBoulder, “How to defend earth from asteroids,” he astonishes the audience, sharing how a single rock hurtling through space could damage our civilization as we know it. This weekend, TED Weekends on the Huffington Post features Plait’s spine-tingling talk. Below, some of our favorite essays from this edition,...

Anxiety could be the price that we have to pay for freedom, suggests psychologist Steven Pinker. When it comes to happiness, many people are underachievers. Americans are laggards among their first-world peers, and their happiness has stagnated in the era sometimes called the American Century. The Baby Boomers, despite growing up in peace and p...

Hyeonseo Lee’s story is a tale bound to pull at your heartstrings. She's a North Korean refugee -- and while helping her family flee the country in 2009, Lee’s mother and brother were detained in a Laos prison.  At TED2013, Lee described how it was an enormously generous gift from a stranger that helped her family to safety. This week’s T...