For Sissel Tolaas, even the liveliest city may be a “blandscape” if it's missing the smells of urban life. Meet an artist/chemist who celebrates everything we smell -- good and bad. Sissel Tolaas is a champion of smell, including odors normally considered unpleasant. To her, the perfumes, soaps and pumped-out bakery scents that camouflage the a...

About this event: 'Infinity and beyond' when simplified equates to limitless possibilities, be it in mathematics, astronomy, quantum physics, or simply, human capabilities. In order to use human capabilities to accomplish any goal, one has to transit from the ordinary to the extraordinary by scaling higher limits. Imaginary boundaries only limit us. In realit...

On March 12, TED welcomed its latest class to the TED Residency program, an in-house incubator for breakthrough ideas. These 19 Residents will spend 14 weeks in TED’s New York headquarters working and thinking together; the class includes exceptional people from all over the map, including Brazil, the Netherlands and Korea. The new Reside...

Call it green energy -- by giving every employee a plant, engineer Mike Robinson created an environment where both humans and their leafy friends thrive. Plus, 9 recommendations for hardy, hard-to-kill plants to call your own. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from som...

For the past four years, TED has held an annual evening salon in New York City to find talents, voices and ideas that the world needs to hear. At TED@NYC, an energetic audience gathers over dinner and drinks and watches a passionate lineup of speakers deliver short, rapid-fire talks and performances. The twist? For this event, we put out an op...

“Let’s skip ahead and assume that children of the future are always connected,” said education innovator Sugata Mitra. Thinking out loud about the evolution of screen sizes and the future of wearables, he came to the conclusion: “The Internet is a subject as important as science or mathematics.” Mitra shared this in a presentation at the ...

Where do a zebra’s stripes, a leopard’s spots and our fingers come from? The key was found years ago -- by the man who cracked the Enigma code. In 1952 a mathematician published a set of equations that tried to explain the patterns we see in nature, from the dappled stripes adorning the back of a zebra to the whorled leaves on a plant stem,...

Humanity is defined by its immense body of knowledge. Most times it inches forward, shedding light onto the mysteries of the universe and easing life's endeavors in small increments. But in some special moments, knowledge and understanding leap forward, when one concentrated mind or one crucial discovery redirects the course of things and ch...

TEDYouth session two has just finished. You can read about each of the 12 speakers below, and also see summaries of the Session 1 speakers here. Olivier Guyon, Optical Physicist and Astronomer Olivier designs powerful telescopes that search for exoplanets — earth-like planets that exist outside of our solar system. The problem with search f...

Art so often seeks to capture the beauty of the natural world -- from cave drawings of animals, to paintings of landscapes, to sculptures of the human form in marble, bronze or wood. But in this playlist, find artists and designers who take this to the next level, making art based on the laws of nature and the invisible workings of biology i...

Legacy is a delightfully complex concept, and it's one that the TED@Westpac curators took on with gusto for the daylong event held in Sydney, Australia, on Monday December 11th. Themed around the idea of "The Future Legacy," the day was packed with 15 speakers and two performers and hosted by TED's Cyndi Stivers and TED speaker and monster p...

Chris Anderson introduces Session 3 with a compelling idea: "Most of the new things happening right now that feel like magic — whether it’s self-driving cars or online translations suddenly getting much better — there’s machine learning behind it." In this session we look at the issues around machines that learn. The challenge of teaching...

About this event: Dear TEDxers, We are excited to announce our next Virtual Salon event on how Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in the lab translates to Human Health in the 21st Century. The Salon is scheduled for Tuesday October 27th, 2020 at 17:00 CET (5.00pm Monaco Time*) and will last approximately 60 minutes. Save the date and sign-up to our...

We are thrilled to announce the new class of Fellows for TED2016. These 21 world-changers work at the very forefront of their fields and represent 12 countries around the world – including, for the first time in the program, Kyrgyzstan. This group includes a Hawaiian geneticist focused on establishing ethnic diversity in genome studies; an I...

About this event: SPACE 2011 – is the year of cosmonautic in Russia, it’s the year of the 50th anniversary of the fly first man in the space –Yuri Gagarin and the anniversary of his 70 years from the birth. Due to all reasons we devoted our first conference in 2011 to the theme SPACE. As for the venue we chose a symbolic place – the Memorial museum of cosmonau...

The TED Interview Jennifer Egan on storytelling in a data-hooked world July 21, 2022 [00:00:00] Steven Johnson: Welcome to the TED Interview. I'm Steven Johnson. If you've been following the news from the technology world, you might have noticed that the headlines have gotten a little, well, strange lately. I mean, one big tech company is convi...

About this event: You are cordially invited to the next TEDxTheHague salon! Our November edition — themed Mind Is Blown — is curated by TEDxTheHague: "Everything you see is delayed and upside down. Yet your brain does an incredible job at adapting to this. It processes widely varied information faster than the blink of an eye, stores complex experiences, and ad...

About this event: Would you rather be exceptionally talented at a few things or be sufficiently skilled at everything? Renaissance, our proposed annual event theme, asserts that one should pursue a wide base of knowledge. For example, the Italian Renaissance is known as a period of controversy, rebirth, and intense discussions in art, religion, mathematics, educa...

While it may result in tremendous good, empathy can also be narrow, biased and surprisingly insensitive, argues psychology professor Paul Bloom. Does empathy make the world a better place? It certainly looks like it. After all, empathy drives people to treat others’ suffering as if it were their own, which then motivates action to make the suff...

Much ado has been made in recent years over the quickly rising cost of healthcare in the United States. But the cost of college tuition and fees has skyrocketed at nearly twice that rate. Going to college today will cost a student 559% more than it did in 1985, on average. In an exciting talk given at TEDGlobal 2012, Stanford professor Da...

Environmental entrepreneur

Whether your weeks ahead contain travel, vacations or just longer and lazier days than usual, our list of recommendations from TED speakers has books for all moods, activities and tastes. When you want to understand why we humans do what we do Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (TED Talk: Our buggy...

TED Fellows are scientists, artists and activists and musicians. But they are also biodiversity mathematicians, culinary historians and any other combination of disciplines you can imagine. Below, read short recaps of the talks in the second session of TED Fellows talks at TED2016, each a big idea that will make you think again. Honor ...

On stage at TEDGlobal 2011, Geoffrey West talked about the universal mathematics that govern cities and corporations. Knowing only the population of a city, he can predict the number of patents, the crime rate, the average walking speed and many other features of a city. Before the conference, TED's Ben Lillie reached him in his office at...

Were you intrigued by "The $8 Billion iPod," Rob Reid's short TEDTalk about the new science of Copyright Math (TM)? We were. We needed to know more. More numbers, Rob! we said. And Rob (whose comic novel Year Zero comes out in July) sent us this treatise, a master class in creative mathematics: A few weeks back, I gave a short TED talk ab...

By Thu-Huong Ha and Kate Torgovnick The morning session of TEDYouth "The Spark" was incredible. But in many ways it was just an appetizer. In the afternoon, Sessions 2 and 3 delivered talks on topics ranging from how to make an Easy Bake Oven gender-neutral to the mathematics of Pixar animation to the familial structures of elephants. And it ...

And you thought all that could be done with scissors and a sheet of paper is making snowflakes? Take a look at the spellbindingly intricate tapestries that artist Karen “Bit” Vejle conjures with just her scissors and imagination. At Easter in Denmark, children commonly make greetings called gækkebrev. Taking a piece of paper, they fold it and c...

Collective wisdom might best be found when small groups of people are given a chance to discuss and deliberate, say social scientists Mariano Sigman, Joaquin Navajas, Gerry Garbulsky and Dan Ariely. Could this suggest a better way to vote? For many years, problems with democracy have been pushed under the carpet in the general belief that “demo...

It seems like a story made for the movies: the first general-purpose computer was actually programmed by a half-dozen female math whizzes. Yet for too long, their efforts have been largely unknown. Lawyer and digital-rights advocate Kathy Kleiman describes her quest to learn about them and bring them some overdue recognition. When I was a colle...

Time is precious, we know. Here, compiled from past reading lists, are suggestions for two dozen short but mighty books to pick up. fiction & literature The Summer Book by Tove Jansson The quintessential celebration of summer in Scandinavia -- 22 vignettes of a girl and a grandmother on an island. Jansson is best known as the creator of M...