TEDYouth is a day-long event for middle and high school students, with live speakers, hands-on activities and great conversations. Scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, artists, performers (and more!) share short talks on what they do best, serving both as a source of knowledge and inspiration for youth around the globe. About TEDYout...

The phrase “truth or dare” is a false binary -- facing the truth often requires daring action, and vice versa. That’s why, at TED2015: Truth and Dare, the two go hand-in-hand. TED2015 happens March 16-20 in Vancouver and Whistler, and we dare to think this will be the most provocative, invigorating, mind-shifting TED yet. The 58 speakers on o...

What's that too-often quoted aphorism? "Good artists copy; great artists steal"? In this nuanced conversation, biologist and founder of Biomimicry 3.8 Janine Benyus speaks with Tim Brown, chief executive of IDEO, to discuss what's really interesting about borrowing. Tim Brown: As a creative person, I’ve always believed that I can’t be creativ...

“This is a little different than the mainstage at TED, in a sense that this is a little more relaxed,” says our host, the poet and TED speaker Clint Smith. “These are speakers who have not been selected specifically for the mainstage, but they’re just as talented, just as brilliant, and just as important.” A spectrum of ideas, stories, pe...

Greg Gage, onstage at TED Fellows Talks. Photo: Ryan Lash On the afternoon before TED2012 mainstage sessions begin, the Center Theater was packed to the rafters for two sessions of TED Fellows talks. Here's what happened ... Christine Marie, shadow artist With a clap of thunder and a flash of light, the TED2012 Fellows talks open with...

After watching the collection of talks on Cyber-Influence and Power, read a thoughtful recap of the major points in this TED Study, and learn where experts believe things are headed. Where next? Trends and questions in politics, cyber-influence and power As the year 2012 drew to a close, the Syrian government shut down the Internet in order to c...

The lights go down. A voice emerges — strong and hopeful. It’s Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of philanthropic powerhouse Emerson Collective. “Among the many things I love about TED is the simplicity and clarity of its mission — to spread ideas,” she says. “But in order to create lasting change at scale, we need to turn the boldest of thes...

Science catalyzes progress. It allows us to explore our biggest questions, generate new ideas and seek out solutions. At TED@NAS, 19 speakers and performers explored how science is igniting change and fueling our way forward -- through radical collaboration, quantum leaps and bold thinking. The event: TED@NAS, for which The National Acade...

Aerospace economist

About this event: TED speakers share a blueprint for a beautiful net-zero future. This plan – along with inspiring stories of local Colorado action – will be amplified by hundreds of TEDx Countdown events around the world and through a special global live stream event. Mark your calendars for the Countdown global live stream. Building on the success of the 2020 ...

Written by the educator who created What Makes Us Human?, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in his field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material. As a biological anthropologist, I never liked drawing sharp distinctions between human and non-human. Such boundaries ma...

War physicist

Charmian Gooch, co-founder of anti-corruption NGO Global Witness, tracks money to expose deep-rooted global corruption. In yesterday's talk, Gooch demonstrates that dirty money goes all the way to the top, and more sinister is that these cases of corruption are well-known to leaders and corporate elites. Nobody -- banks, big oil, government ...

Danielle Wood leads the Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab, where she works to tear down the barriers that limit the benefits of space exploration to only the few, the rich or the elite. She identifies six technologies developed for space exploration that can contribute to sustainable development across the world -- from observati...

Across sub-Saharan Africa, small farmers are the bedrock of national and regional economies—unless the weather proves unpredictable and their crops fail. The solution is insurance, at a vast, continental scale, and at a very low, affordable cost. Rose Goslinga and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture pioneered an unconventional wa...

Tuna are ocean athletes -- fast, far-ranging predators whose habits we're just beginning to understand. Marine biologist Barbara Block fits tuna with tracking tags (complete with transponders) that record unprecedented amounts of data about these gorgeous, threatened fish and the ocean habitats they move through.

Rivers are one of nature's most powerful forces -- they bulldoze mountains and carve up the earth, and their courses are constantly moving. Understanding how they form and how they'll change is important for those that call their banks and deltas home. In this visual-packed talk, geoscientist Liz Hajek shows us how rocks deposited by ancient riv...

A shooting star crashes onto Earth and a hideous blob emerges. It creeps and leaps, it glides and slides. It's also unstoppable: no matter what you throw at it, it just re-grows and continues its rampage. The only way to save the planet is to cut the entire blob into precise acute triangles while it sleeps, rendering it inert. Can you stop the b...

They're the second-largest fish in the world, they're almost extinct, and we know almost nothing about them. In this talk, Simon Berrow describes the fascinating basking shark ("great fish of the sun" in Irish), and the exceptional -- and wonderfully low-tech -- ways he's learning enough to save them.

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.

Want to help map the world? Community builder Rebecca Firth explains how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is using open-source software powered by volunteers to put one billion people on the map in the next five years. (This ambitious plan is a part of the Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)

Sarah Parcak hoped the power of the crowd could help accelerate archaeological discovery. See how 90-year-old Doris Mae Jones heard her call -- and jumped in to search more than 50,000 tiles in Expedition Peru. With cat assistants.

At Serious Play 2008, Charles Elachi shares stories from NASA's legendary Jet Propulsion Lab -- including tales and video from the Mars Rover project.

What if you could search the surface of the Earth the same way you search the internet? Will Marshall and his team at Planet use the world's largest fleet of satellites to image the entire Earth every day. Now they're moving on to a new project: using AI to index all the objects on the planet over time -- which could make ships, trees, houses an...

Estamos pescando más rápido que la capacidad de los peces de repoblar los mares, convirtiendo a nuestros océanos en zonas muertas. Pero el ecologista marino Enric Sala tiene un plan radical para salvar a los océanos y al mismo tiempo potenciar la industria pesquera. Él propone crear una reserva marina gigante que cubriría dos tercios de la super...

Arctic explorer Ben Saunders recounts his harrowing solo ski trek to the North Pole, complete with engaging anecdotes, gorgeous photos and never-before-seen video.

At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up.

What if we could save the fishing industry and protect the ocean at the same time? Marine ecologist Enric Sala shares his bold plan to safeguard the high seas -- some of the last wild places on earth, which fall outside the jurisdiction of any single country -- by creating a giant marine reserve that covers two-thirds of the world's ocean. By pr...

What if robots could build and optimize themselves -- with little to no help from humans? Computer scientist Emma Hart is working on a new technology that could make "artificial evolution" possible. She explains how the three ingredients of biological evolution can be replicated digitally to build robots that can self-assemble and adapt to any e...

We're in the dawn of a new space revolution, says engineer Peter Beck: the revolution of the small. In a talk packed with insights into the state of the space industry, Beck shares his work building rockets capable of delivering small payloads to space rapidly and reliably -- helping us search for extraterrestrial life, learn more about the sola...