Bhakti Sharma is a record-breaking Indian open water swimmer.

A Tony Award winner, theater producer David Binder is interested in taking performances off the stage.

Tim Ferriss is an early-stage tech investor, best-selling author and podcaster.

To showcase vital new art from African nations and the diaspora, Touria El Glaoui founded the powerhouse 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair.

The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys is made up of 11-year-old banjo sensation Jonny Mizzone and his brothers Robbie, 14, on fiddle, and Tommy, 15, on guitar.

TED Fellow Su Kahumbu is working to improve farmer livelihoods and contribute to nutritional security and environmental sustainability.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth studies the traits that allow us to stick to our goals — and she chose four great talks that explore other facets of how human beings behave.

Writer, comedian and advocate Stella Young was the editor of Ramp Up, an online space for news, discussion and opinion about disability in Australia.

Long revered in the UK for her wit and candor, Sandi Toksvig is now lending her familiar voice to a greater cause -- equality for women.

Eric Haseltine applies discoveries about the brain to innovation and forecasting game-changing advances in science and technology.

Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible -- with deep social and political implications.

As Dave Eggers says, "The best TED Talks make sense of complicated ideas and trends, and have an elegant simplicity to them. It’s plenty of time to get across a clear and bold idea.” Below, his notes on 4 great talks.

Britt Wray's work is about life and what we make of it: past, present and future.

Design veteran Kevin Bethune argues that designers' talents are often undervalued in business. He says that all designers have four key superpowers: x-ray vision, shapeshifting, extrasensory perception (ESP) and the ability to make others superhuman. Sound unbelievable? Watch and learn what can happen when designers are given space in the workpl...

Eduardo Paes is the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, a sprawling, complicated, beautiful city of 6.5 million. He shares four big ideas about leading Rio -- and all cities -- into the future, including bold (and do-able) infrastructure upgrades and how to make a city "smarter."

At age 12, Freeman Hrabowski marched with Martin Luther King. Now he's president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where he works to create an environment that helps under-represented students -- specifically African-American, Latino and low-income learners -- get degrees in math and science. He shares the four pillars of U...

In the face of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we need a new radical humanism, says Tim Leberecht. For the self-described "business romantic," this means designing organizations and workplaces that celebrate authenticity instead of efficiency and questions instead of answers. Leberecht proposes four (admittedly subjective) principl...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. An underwater museum. Off the south coast of Lanzarote, 12 to 14 meters beneath the sea, lies artist Jason DeCaires Taylor’s latest museum, Museo Atlántico, which opened on January 10. Three years in the making, the installation is not only an artisti...

By Kylie Dunn What do you get when you cross a 39-year-old perfectionist with 54 TED Talks and far more honesty than any person probably needs to experience? You get my Year of TED. I’ve been inspired by TED Talks for years, and felt the urge to do something noteworthy and challenging to ring in my fortieth year on the planet. Inspira...

It’s a challenge for anyone with a cause: How do you frame the issue so that people feel excited to get involved? For some causes, the answer is asking people to dump a bucket of ice on their head. For others, making that personal connection is even more tricky.  This is exactly how a small group of attendees felt when they were posed with...

A kidney donation chain could narrow the huge gap between organ supply and demand. Kidney matchmaker and transplant surgeon Jayme Locke explains how. In a typical year, roughly 100,000 people in the United States are anxiously waiting on the list for a kidney transplant, and only about 17,000 of them end up getting donor organs -- 11,000 from d...

What makes us happy? It’s one of the most complicated puzzles of human existence -- and one that, so far, 87 speakers have explored in TEDTalks. In today’s talk, Matt Killingsworth (who studied under Dan Gilbert at Harvard) shares a novel approach to the study of happiness -- an app, Track Your Happiness, which allows people to chart their ...

This morning's Session 4 explored the ways we connect -- the pathways our money takes, our communication, our trust, even our intelligence(s). Read on: Trust in your neighbor, but maybe not in your bank. Why is it that, despite being told "don't get into a car with a stranger" for as long as we can remember, five million of us opt to do this ...

Beverly + Dereck Joubert: Conservationists and documentary filmmakers Beverly & Dereck Joubert focus on iconic cats, particularly the leopard. Heather + Tony Podesta: We like artwork where, when you close your eyes, you still see it. You see it in 4 minutes, in 4 hours. Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe + Deqo Mohamed: Somal...

"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...

In a searching session of talks hosted by curator and photographer Deborah Willis and her son, artist Hank Willis Thomas (who spoke together at TEDWomen 2017), 12 speakers explored conflict, love, the environment and activism, and more. The session featured duet talks from Paula Stone Williams and Jonathan Williams, Neha Madhira and Haley Stack,...

We’ve all heard about the gender gap in tech. Women simply aren’t thriving in one of the most promising fields in the United States -- and not for lack of talent. And here’s the truth: It’s not solely a problem for women. It’s a problem for men, too. In just five years, there will be a million unfilled computer science–related jobs in the United...

Essential, data-derived advice for leading a happy, healthy life, shared by researcher and psychiatrist Robert Waldinger. Have you ever wished you could fast-forward your life so you could see if the decisions you’re making will lead to satisfaction and health in the future? In the world of scientific research, the closest you can get to that i...

After more than 13 years of research convinced him that children have the ability to learn almost anything on their own, 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra aspires to shape the future of learning by building a School in the Cloud, helping kids “tap into their innate sense of wonder.” In the spirit of Mitra’s invitation to the world to “ask ki...

To keep pace with our ever-changing world, we need out-of-the-box ideas that are bigger and more imaginative than ever. The speakers and performers from this session explore these possibilities, challenging us to think harder about the notions we've come to accept. The event: TEDSummit 2019, Session 4: Business Unusual, hosted by Whitney ...