By not giving ourselves the minutes -- or hours -- free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us, says physicist and writer Alan Lightman. In 2016, the Harvard biologist emeritus and naturalist E.O. Wilson (TED Talk: Advice to a young scientist) published Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Figh...

Making this TED-Ed video required (a) a lot of knitting and (b) a ton of boxes of Nerds. When it came time to animate the lesson “How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?” from educator George Zaidan, our TED-Ed animators had a crazy idea for how to make cell division come alive -- using seeds and beans to animate what hea...

About this event: Welcome to the TEDxNewYork community! TEDxNewYork is a salon format TEDx event. We spend an hour each week watching a TED talk on a large screen, and discussing it in a dynamic group of New Yorkers. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDxNewYork brings together a community of people from diverse professions and backgrounds weekly to spark r...

About this event: Welcome to the TEDxNewYork community! TEDxNewYork is a salon format TEDx event. We spend an hour each week watching a TED talk on a large screen, and discussing it in a dynamic group of New Yorkers. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDxNewYork brings together a community of people from diverse professions and backgrounds weekly to spark r...

At concerts, lighters once swayed in the air during poignant moments, the audience belting out lyrics together in a moment of catharsis. Today, the group sing-alongs still happen, but the air shines with a different glow: the light of cell phones. Last week, while seeing a favorite band, I couldn’t help but notice the sea of undulating phones...

The TED iPad project was inspired by a number of requests coming in from TED fans wishing to see TEDTalks on mobile devices. In the past, the development community has graciously volunteered building various applications on both iPhone and Android platforms. When the iPad came out, we saw an opportunity to try our hand with our first foray i...

In Marco Tempest’s TED Talk, he introduces EDI the robot. EDI, one of Rodney Brooks’ Baxter robots, dances, makes jokes, does impressions of Woody Allen and even performs magic tricks. Though he was designed to aid in factory production, EDI also has a screen programmed with facial expressions, ostensibly to tell others with confused, surprised ...

Photo: Circe f. Ervina Announced onstage today at TED: JR, the street artist and the TED2011 TED Prize winner, has been working this week in Edinburgh on an Inside Out Project action in the home of TEDGlobal. Writer Celyn Bricker tells the story: That the UK uses the most CCTV surveillance in Europe is widely known, though perhaps less...

This week, TEDx has transformed St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn into a giant TED2017 watch party. This is TEDFest, a week for TEDx’ers to meet, share tips and tricks, and take in big ideas on the big screen. TEDFest kicked off Monday night with a welcome party at The Park, a greenery-filled space under the High Line in Manhattan. TEDx’ers...

Across the globe, anyone can watch TED Talks through TED.com, our YouTube channel, our mobile apps or our iTunes podcasts. (Have you checked out TED Studies on iTunes U?) Most recently, our new SmartTV app showcases TED in beautiful high definition through television set manufacturers like Samsung and telephone IPTV providers like TELUS, letting...

We're thrilled to announce that TED's official app is now available for iPhone, optimized for a small screen and introducing several much-requested features! Adapted from our award-winning iPad app, the new TED iPhone app allows users to browse and watch TEDTalks, videos ranging from 3 minutes to 18 minutes in length. TEDTalks feature gre...

"Do you think it's possible to control someone's attention, or even their behavior? To me that would be the perfect superpower," says Apollo Robbins at TEDGlobal 2013. "I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior in an unconventional way: by picking pockets." Robbins, whom The New Yorker called a "theatrical pickpocket" in their ...

By Kari Mulholland The techniques that video editors use to shape their content reveal a lot about how people create meaning in the world. Editors have a deep understanding of how people think, feel, remember and learn, and we use this knowledge to build powerful, moving stories and experiences. The best editing decisions come from empath...

Audience members at TEDxWWU, an event at Western Washington University, played a cathartic game of Jenga.  The TEDx’ers built and broke down structures made of Jenga blocks on which they had written ideas for how they would like to “renovate” their lives. The theme of this event in Bellingham, WA: “Renovations: Building Our Future.” This is t...

In January 2011, US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head in an attack on her entourage at a constituent meeting near Tucson. Six people died and thirteen others were injured. She survived, and her recovery has been a remarkable story. At TED2014 she took the stage with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, for a Q&A with the head of...

NEW: Video auditions are closed; thank you for entering! This year we're holding the first-ever audition for TED Talks. It will take place in New York in front of a live audience made up of TED staff and members of the TED community. The audition will be recorded, and the best talks could either be posted on TED.com or win an invitation f...

This talk from TEDxBrussels felt like a breath of fresh stage. A collaboration among science writer John Bohannon, choreographer Carl Flink and the dance troupe Black Label Movement, the talk is illustrated with dance, not slides. “I think that bad PowerPoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy," Bohannon says. “As you’...

When you watch a video on TED.com, we’re proud of the advertisement you see afterward -- it’s not your usual blaring video ad. We ask all of TED.com’s sponsors to make their post-roll video as thoughtful and idea-driven as the TED Talk it’s helping to support. In fact, we’ll sometimes work with the sponsor to create original video just for us...

In today’s thought-provoking talk, author Pico Iyer looks at the complex nature of the simple question: "Where are you from?" Because while his family comes from India, he grew up in the United Kingdom. As soon as he left school, however, he moved to the United States -- where he was required to carry a card declaring him a “permanent alien”...

When you watch a TED Talk, you see a speaker on a stage sharing a big idea. But for us in TED's post-production department, we see each talk as the final product of a complex recipe. The speaker and their words are the most important ingredient, of course. But there are other, less-obvious ingredients in the video too -- like the TED intro, ...

The TED Conference always celebrates dreams. Not the fluffy, snoozy kind — but the big, bold, beautiful visions that have the potential to send ripples of change out into the world. That’s why the theme of TED2016 is: Dream. We are thrilled it begins tomorrow. Over the next week, 65 speakers will share their dreams on the TED mainstage, i...

Take a trip back to the future with this week's TED Radio Hour, as six TED speakers share their prophecies for what lies ahead. From curing cancer to self-driving cars, these TEDsters offer exciting visions for the future, but not without cautionary warnings. The episode starts with a walk down memory lane with Nicholas Negroponte, who made s...

At age 33, Reshma Saujani had a moment of bravery: Against all odds of winning, she ran for Congress. It was a serious long shot: People called her crazy, and said there was no way that she would win. And, well, she didn’t. But through her recklessness, the founder of Girls who Code learned an unexpected lesson. “It was the first time ...

Writer Elaine Morgan has died at age 92. Perhaps best known for her book The Descent of Woman, at TEDGlobal 2009 she made her case for the "aquatic ape hypothesis" -- an admittedly non-standard idea about human origins. Earlier this year, in The Guardian, Erika Milam offered a compelling new take on Morgan's place in scientific discourse -- ...

This morning onstage, Gary Kovacs of Mozilla announced a fascinating browser add-on for Mozilla: Lightbeam. (Watch his TEDTalk.) It allows you to track who's tracking you online ... and the results are surprising, to say the least. In summer of 2011, we stumbled onto an early version of the add-on, then called Collusion. How did we find it? B...

"Let's talk about what's in our heads and how to get it out," says Mary Lou Jepsen as she begins her talk at TED2013. Jepsen, a display engineer, recently had brain surgery. Afterward she faced a stigma: "Are you still smart? If not, can you make yourself smart again?" Well, her surgery gave her a chance to experiment in an extraordinary ...

Susan Solomon is an advocate for more research into a promising treatment for many conditions: human stem cells. "They are our bodies' own repair kits, because they are pluripotent -- they can morph into any cells in our bodies." We can use them to model and study disease, but she hopes for much more. She hopes, and believes, that our childr...

Science-fiction films do not come cheap. Star Trek Into Darkness reportedly had a budget of $190 million, while the Will and Jaden Smith vehicle After Earth, which opens this weekend, cost $130 million. (Side note: Jaden Smith recently shared with New York Magazine that his dad watches "hours and hours of TED Talks.") That's why it's so thor...

Alessandro Acquisti thinks we are about to have an Adam and Eve moment, where all of a sudden we realize that we aren’t wearing any clothes. Up until now, we have -- for the most part -- willingly offered up our personal information online without thinking too much about it. But as Acquisti puts it in today’s talk, “any personal information ...

Today on TED.com, you’ll notice some changes. That’s because we have launched our first major redesign since the site debuted in 2007, back when online video was just a twinkle in the Internet’s eye. You might notice that this redesign responds to the things that you, the TED community, have told us on repeat. First: You need TED to be as ea...