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.

A powerhouse of scientific leadership in Africa, Christian Happi sequences and studies the genomes of infectious diseases like Ebola, HIV and coronavirus.

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.

Naomi McDougall Jones is a vocal advocate and activist for bringing gender parity to film, both on and off screen.

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...

In this hilarious, whirlwind tour of the last four billion years of evolution, paleontologist and TED Fellow Lauren Sallan introduces us to some of the wildly diverse animals that roamed the prehistoric planet (from sharks with wings to galloping crocodiles and long-necked rhinos) and shows why paleontology is about way more than dinosaurs.

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...

For week 4 of TED2020, leaders in international development, history, architecture and public policy explored how we might rebuild during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing protests against racial injustice in the United States. Below, a recap of their insights. Achim Steiner, head of the United National Development Programme Big id...

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 ...

For Session 4 of TED2020, experts in biohacking, synthetic biology, psychology and beyond explored topics ranging from discovering the relationship between the spinal cord and asparagus to using tools of science to answer critical questions about racial bias. Below, a recap of the night's talks and performances. Andrew Pelling, biomedical...

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...