Engineer + biodiversity scientist

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...

Yes, we know it takes plenty of time and energy to be a good person in the here and now. But due to the major threats facing our society and planet, we need to consider our impact on future generations, too. Writer Bina Venkataraman explains why, and she tells us how we can start acting in ways that benefit those to come. We live in a culture t...

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...

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...

Neuroscientist

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 ...

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: 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...

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: Education is the basis of full value and progressive human being. High-quality changes are possible only in literate society. We as the students of Pedagogical University believe in that as anybody else. So our theme "Changes will happen when you fulfil yourself" is directly connected with self-development, self-education, lifelong education an...

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 ...

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...

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: 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...

About this event: Is an explosion a destructive phenomenon, or does it actually leave behind what fuels new beginnings? At the last stages of it's life, a star runs out of nuclear fuel and some of its mass flows into its core. Eventually, the core is so heavy that it cannot withstand its own gravitational force. The core collapses, which results in the giant exp...

Daniel Ogilvie was shocked when his 4-year-old daughter ran out of her bedroom screaming, "I don't want to be a thing that dies." But every child goes through this moment of recognizing their mortality. A Rutgers University professor who has studied philosophy for the past 25 years, Ogilvie has become fascinated with our beliefs about death ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

NASA has a plan to combat rogue interstellar objects -- and even a Planetary Defense Officer. Asteroid hunter, space scientist and writer Carrie Nugent reveals the array of tactics, from the tested to the far-out. On the whole, asteroids tend to leave Earth alone. And day to day, there really isn’t cause for most people to give them any thought...

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...

Wednesday marked the second-ever TEDxCERN, the event organized by the folks at CERN, the famed particle physics research center in Geneva, Switzerland, responsible for bringing us the World Wide Web, the Large Hadron Collider, and confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson. You know, just a few minor things. TEDxCERN brought togethe...

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,...

Danny Hillis has a book. It's a directory of everyone in the world who had an internet address in 1982, including the names, addresses and telephone numbers. And it was a very thin phonebook. That was the community. It was a tight community where everyone knew and trusted each other. Hillis has been a fixture of the tech world (see hi...

Watch this TEDTalk >> Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project. An interaction designer and an educator, the spirited Italian bounds onto the stage to tell us a story. "A few weeks ago, a friend gave a toy car to his 8-year-old son," he says. "But instead of going to buy one, he went to a website, he downloaded a file ...

A professor with schizophrenia Elyn Saks has chronic schizophrenia, and she is a professor of law, psychology and psychiatry at USC. She might have spent her life in the back ward of a hospital, but that's not what happened. She starts by telling of the time when Dr. White, her doctor after she graduated from law school, was getting re...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, says TED Curator Chris Anderson as he opens Session 2, “we used to think that democratically-powered capitalism was supposed to take over the world.” Political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously called it the “end of history.” So now what happens? Five TED speakers come to the stage to talk about the ...

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant remembers the day in 1974 when, while working for the United Nations in India, a mother handed him her young son, who had died only moments earlier from smallpox. Brilliant also remembers the day, about a year later, when he traveled by speedboat to an island in Bangladesh and met a 3-year-old girl who had surv...