About this ad: With a surprise heartwarming twist, this Guinness ad embodies the best qualities of friendship (and storytelling).

Basketball is a fast-moving game of improvisation, contact and, ahem, spatio-temporal pattern recognition. Rajiv Maheswaran and his colleagues are analyzing the movements behind the key plays of the game, to help coaches and players combine intuition with new data. Bonus: What they're learning could help us understand how humans move everywhere.

Alison Quirk tells the personal story of taking in a teenager from Nigeria who was recruited to play basketball at her daughter's high school. Through midnight phone calls, hospital visits, and important milestones, Alison explores the wonderful messiness of families – and how to leave a mark on the world.

Why does the Earth spin? Does a basketball falling from a spinning merry-go-round fall in a curve, as it appears to, or in a straight line? How can speed be manipulated while spinning? In short, why is the spinning motion so special? Brian Jones details the dizzyingly wide array of ways that spinning affects our lives. [Directed by Flaming Medus...

Blue whales are the largest animals on the planet, but what helps them grow to the length of a basketball court? Asha de Vos explains why the size of krill make them the ideal food for the blue whale -- it's as if the blue whale was made to eat krill (and krill was made to be eaten by the blue whale). [Directed by Cognitive Media, narrated by As...

Matthew Williams believes that sport has the power to change lives.

Using advanced data analysis tools, Rajiv Maheswaran and Second Spectrum help make basketball teams smarter.

Close your eyes and listen to the grunts and jostling, the smack of rubber on cement and triumphant high-fives. You could be listening to a pickup basketball game anywhere. But you’re in Afghanistan and this is much more than just a game. It is the country’s very first wheelchair basketball tournament and the players are all disabled. Som...

Writer, comic and mental health activist Kevin Breel speaks up about depression.

John Wooden, affectionately known as Coach, led UCLA to record wins that are still unmatched in the world of basketball. Throughout his long life, he shared the values and life lessons he passed to his players, emphasizing success that’s about much more than winning.

Christine Porath helps organizations build thriving workplaces.

About this event: Springfield is the "City of Firsts" - the first basketball game, the first motorcycle, the first "Springfield". This event will focus on how to use our diversity to bring back the innovation.

First Lady Michelle Obama, a lawyer and administrator, is an advocate for working parents and education for girls all around the world.

In his influential poetry criticism, Stephen Burt links the contemporary with the classical, pinpoints new poetry movements, and promotes outstanding little-known poets.

Tony Porter is an educator and activist who is internationally recognized for his effort to end violence against women.

As a venture capitalist, I have a ringside seat to innovation. It is an amazing job; every day I learn about some new technology that is compelling enough that an otherwise rational human being has set aside his or her life to pursue it. It is hard not to get excited about what the future has to offer. But when Chris Anderson asked if I w...

TED is about ideas worth spreading, and these often come wrapped up in words worth knowing. Here are some of the great words from TED2015: 10. Neurodiversity. From Steve Silberman's talk on the history of the autism spectrum. It's a word that began popping up in 1998, and it means "the variety of configurations of the brain, especially wi...

About this event: Who Wins the Game? We believe that technology,design and entertainment are way involved in social media and sports.TEDxAlsancak will be interesting and having variety of knowledge which really worth to spread and meet with TED spirit and goal. TEDxAlsancak will be a cross-disciplinary event. TEDxAlsancak pulls speakers from various platf...

About this event: Someone once wrote “The future is just wasted on some people.” Well, not here. Not at TEDxDiliman. On September 15, 2012, our speakers will tell tales as they try to divine the future… To paraphrase Erin Morgenstern in The Night Circus, from the mundane to the profound… they will share visions and hopes and dreams of the future… ...

The Klong Toey Community Lantern -- a community space in the oldest and largest of Bangkok’s slums -- was built very quickly. Not quite as quickly as shown in this three-minute timelapse video, but construction for the project took just three weeks thanks to the help of the community. But while construction went fast, Norwegian architects ...

In an interview on the Today Show this morning, Kevin Breel reveals why he thinks his TED Talk has gone viral: not because his story is unique, but because it is so common. Breel’s talk, given at TEDxKids@Ambleside, has been watched about 1.5 million times so far. In it, the 19-year-old reveals that, while he seemed to be living a great l...

Boyd Varty’s talk brings together many fascinating moments: a tribute to Nelson Mandela (who passed away just hours before Varty took the stage at TEDWomen 2013 last week), incredible footage of animals shot on the Londolozi Game Reserve (which Varty’s family transformed from a hunting ground to a game reserve in 1973, and where Varty curren...

The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius," or, in English, "Faster, higher, stronger." And as sports science reporter David Epstein points out from the TED2014 stage, "Athletes have fulfilled that motto — and they’ve done so rapidly." Epstein investigates why it is that, year upon year, runners, swimmers, gymnasts, basketball players...

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 ...

TED Fellows Juliette LaMontagne, Diana Yousef, Suzanne Lee and Cesar Harada at TEDGlobal 2012, June 23, 2012, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo: Ryan Lash It's been an intense first full day for the TEDGlobal Fellows, starting with a morning workshop on public speaking from coach Richard Mullholland. The South African former roadie's methods ...

Simon Sinek leads off his TED Talk, and his new book, with a moving story about a US military commander who loves his troops. It's among several TED Talks featuring lessons in leadership from the military. But when civilians are asked to draw such lessons from military leaders, let’s agree: It’s complicated. A few thing we don't have in commo...

Mellody Hobson’s talk asks us to be open about race -- not to avoid talking about it. The news this past few weeks has been full of people who have great big opinions about race. And some of them are -- not to put a fine point on it -- jerks. Two widely covered examples from the US just in the past two weeks: A basketball team owner, Donal...

Perhaps you know Ken Jennings by name, perhaps you simply know him as “that guy with the winning streak on Jeopardy.”  In 2004, this trivia enthusiast won an incredible 74 consecutive times on Jeopardy, setting the record as the classic game show’s most winning contestant and securing the Guinness World Record at the time for “most cash won ...

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...

"I am so happy to be here, because I can actually breathe the air," says Peggy Liu, who lives in China, as she steps on the TED2014 stage. Her typical day begins not with checking the time, but by checking the air pollution levels on her phone to determine whether her children will need to wear face masks that day. In Brussels, Belgium, if the...