TED Fellow Carrie Nugent is an asteroid hunter -- part of a group of scientists working to discover and catalog our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors. Why keep an eye out for asteroids? In this short, fact-filled talk, Nugent explains how their awesome impacts have shaped our planet, and how finding them at the right time could mean noth...

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.

Last Sunday, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a helium balloon from over 24 miles in the sky, and shattered world records by freefalling from an altitude of 128,100 feet to Earth. With the jump, Baumgartner became the first human to break the sound barrier, reaching an astonishing peak speed of 833 mph and creating a new ans...

Before you can create a new world, you have to imagine new possibilities. The speakers in this session are the visionaries who propose that which couldn't be seen before, and suggest new paths that not only haven't been traveled yet -- but haven't been thought of. Here are the speakers in this session. Click their name to read a recap of thei...

Imagine a squid so big that, when sprawled out, it is the size of a two-story house. Edith Widder has now seen this enormous ocean creature, once the stuff of nautical legend, six times. In today’s talk, Widder shares how we now have filmed proof of the giant squid’s existence, thanks to a mission conducted by herself, Tsunemi Kubodera and St...

Around the world, hundreds of thousands of lost ancient sites lie buried and hidden from view. Satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak is determined to find them before looters do. With the 2016 TED Prize, Parcak is building an online citizen-science tool called GlobalXplorer that will train an army of volunteer explorers to find and protect the wo...

Ranging in age from 17 to 25, they are challenging their country’s gender norms by learning engineering and coding, and setting their sights on infinity and beyond. In Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a dedicated group at the Kyrgyz Space Program is intently focused on building their nation’s first-ever satellite and prepping it for a 2019...

Strange as it may seem, archaeologists often look to the sky to discover sites buried deep beneath the earth. Space archaeology, as it’s called, refers to the use of high-resolution satellite imaging and lasers to map and model everything from hidden Mayan ruins in Central America to specific features on the ancient Silk Road trade route in ...

In the concise space of less than 100 pages, How We’ll Live on Mars delivers an elegant overview of the history, science, and technology relevant to Martian colonization. But more than a technical primer, Petranek’s new book is a manifesto. Gizmodo About the book When the first humans set foot on Mars, the moment will be more significant in ter...

In today’s thrilling TED-Ed lesson, Bill Nye the Science Guy admits that he has S.O.D., otherwise known as Sundial Obsessive Disorder. But there is a good reason for it -- a sundial helped Nye’s father escape from a prison camp in China during World War II, launching a lifelong obsession that Nye eventually picked up himself. At an event s...

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Should we be putting humans on Mars? A panel of space experts brings up the big questions we need to ask before we blast off. Mars! It’s a planet we humans have been eyeing with intent since we first looked upward. Someday, the Red Planet might become a place to house Earth's expanding population ... it could be a lucrative place to mine natura...

TEDx and TED Fellows joined forces to bring Morocco its first hackerspace -- “Sahara Labs,” a place for people of all ages to play with DIY engineering. The brainchild of TEDxTarfaya organizer El Wali El Alaoui Mohamed El Mostapha. He decided to bring this enterprise to his city because of the lack of education opportunities for children and...

Taking design cues from origami, robotician Jamie Paik and her team created "robogamis": folding robots made out super-thin materials that can reshape and transform themselves. In this talk and tech demo, Paik shows how robogamis could adapt to achieve a variety of tasks on earth (or in space) and demonstrates how they roll, jump, catapult like ...

Dessa is an internationally touring rapper, singer and writer who built a career by defying genre conventions and audience expectations.

Space physicist Miho Janvier studies solar storms: giant clouds of particles that escape from the Sun and can disrupt life on Earth (while also producing amazing auroras). How do you study the atmosphere on the Sun, which burns at temperatures of up to around 10 million degrees Kelvin? With math! Join the TED Fellow as she shares her work trying...

It sounds like science fiction, but journalist Stephen Petranek considers it fact: within 20 years, humans will live on Mars. In this provocative talk, Petranek makes the case that humans will become a spacefaring species and describes in fascinating detail how we'll make Mars our next home. "Humans will survive no matter what happens on Earth,"...

About this event: We believe humankind has come to a turning point in its evolution as it must acknowledge it has gained the power to alter not only its children’s life but also their biological, technological and cognitive perspectives for the centuries to come, either in a positive or a negative way. This conclusion leads us to wonder on the stance humanity ...

TED Talks are available in 94 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 8,500 volunteers have created the upwards of 33,500 translated talks. To celebrate this accomplishment, every week the TED Blog is bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, mee...

Six TED speakers have been recognized in the 2013 class of MacArthur Fellows. Each recipient will heretofore be unofficially known as a "genius" and will very officially receive a no-strings-attached prize of $625,000 to support his or her creative instincts for the benefit of society. We salute all 24 of this year's winners, of course. B...

Xaero. Stratolauncher. Atlas V. Dream Chaser. If you built a spaceship, wouldn't you name it something awesome too? These four spacecraft, and many more, are detailed in a recent report in which NASA examines the evolving landscape of spaceflight. As the authors admit, the space agency's own budgets are shrinking, so companies and individuals ar...

About this event: Human civilization has been through unbelievably subversive revolutions in the last two centuries. However, when these changes happened, we were unconscious of being on a brand new journey. When think about the past today, we can clearly discover those significant moments that impact human development profoundly. 151 years ago, Das Kapital , p...

TED2014 Fellow Jorge Mañes Rubio is an artist and perpetual tourist who investigates invisible, forgotten places -- Chinese cities submerged by the Three Gorges Dam Project, a little-known Pacific island paradise destroyed by mining. He creates art that reimagines and revives these sites as attention-worthy destinations. Here, Rubio describes ...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A new civic gathering. To cope with political anxiety after the 2016 elections, Eric Liu has started a gathering called Civic Saturday. He explained the event in The Atlantic as “a civic analogue to church: a gathering of friends and strangers in a co...

This week, so much TED-related news hit the transom. Below, some of the highlights. Artist Olafur Eliasson (watch his TED Talk) muses on his latest work -- “Little Sun,” a miniature solar-powered lamp that puts five hours of sunlight in your pocket -- in this awesome video from our friends at The Creators Project. The best part: the video b...

An artwork's color or composition can pull you in -- and put you on the path to having important and difficult conversations, says artist Titus Kaphar. In this stunning talk, he reflects on his artistic evolution and takes us on a tour of his career -- from "The Jerome Project," which draws on religious icons to examine the US criminal justice s...

Since Johannes Kepler used Mars to explain the organization of the cosmos back in the 17th century, people have been royally obsessed with the Red Planet. And with the announcement that there’s running water on the planet, it seems we’re not getting over the fascination any time soon. Here, two confessed super-fans, Andy Weir, author of the book...

About this event: Join us for our fourth year of TEDxDesMoines, as we explore the theme "shift." Our event features a dynamic mix of local thought leaders and draws on TED footage of global experts who look to inspire and guide our collective exploration: Embrace disruption and move past yesterday's perception. Explore this new space. Awaken an awareness suit...

"When our ancestors looked up at the night sky, they saw tools for navigation. They saw myths, and they saw the heavens," says June Cohen, the host of Session 4 of TED2015. "But technology has given us so many new clues. ... Space exploration has never been as fascinating and relevant as it is today." Here's a recap of the talks in this s...

About this event: Building off the mathematical/geometric concept of a Möbius strip, a 2D construct that exists in a 3D space, we challenge our community to consider concepts that might be unfamiliar - or uncanny - at first glance, prompting the exploration of multidimensional ideas. Mobius allows us a creative form - both physical and ideological - to work within.