After losing her mother in a house fire when she was just six years old, Danielle Torley saw two paths before her: a life full of fear, or one that promised healing and recovery. In this inspiring talk, she describes how she turned her grief into beauty in a most unexpected way -- by dancing with fire.

A massive generation of young people is about to inherit the world, and it's the duty of everyone to give them a fighting chance for their futures, says UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore. In this forward-looking talk, she explores the crises facing them and details an ambitious new global initiative, Generation Unlimited, which aims to en...

Sitting around a campfire, you can feel its heat, smell the woody smoke, and hear it crackle. If you get too close, it burns your eyes and stings your nostrils. You could stare at the bright flames forever as they twist and flicker in endless incarnations... But what exactly are you looking at? Elizabeth Cox illuminates the science behind fire. ...

In the spring, just after a heavy rainfall, male and female fire ants swarm the skies for a day of romance, known as the nuptial flight. Thousands of reproduction-capable ants take part in a mating frenzy, and for one successfully mated female, her work is only beginning. Walter R. Tschinkel details how the new queen builds a colony and protects...

Someone has tripped the magical alarms in the Element Temple. When you and the other monks arrive on the scene, you know you have a disaster on your hands. Four young apprentices broke into the temple's inner chamber to steal the sacred element crystals. But when the alarm went off they panicked, and each of them swallowed a crystal. Can you det...

Multi-instrumentalist Ane Brun joins the Lyris Quartet to perform two haunting, mesmerizing songs: the cabaret-inspired "It All Starts With One" and folk-infused "You Light My Fire," with backing vocals from Rebecca Lichtenfeld.

Designer Jared Ficklin creates wild visualizations that let us see music, using color and even fire (a first for the TED stage) to analyze how sound makes us feel. He takes a brief digression to analyze the sound of a skatepark -- and how audio can clue us in to developing creativity.

Thinking startup? David S. Rose's rapid-fire TED U talk on pitching to a venture capitalist tells you the 10 things you need to know about yourself -- and prove to a VC -- before you fire up your slideshow.

Keep your ears and eyes wide open for the several different ways you can interact with sound and color.

Explore the transforming power of music.

UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore is a champion of economic development, education, health and humanitarian assistance.

Can an algorithm forecast the site of the next riot? In this accessible talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows how complex social behavior can be analyzed and perhaps predicted through analogies to natural phenomena, like the patterns of a leopard's spots or the distribution of predators and prey in the wild.

Finding the right mate is no cakewalk -- but is it even mathematically likely? In a charming talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows patterns in how we look for love, and gives her top three tips (verified by math!) for finding that special someone.

Can a bird that symbolizes death help the living catch criminals? In this informative and accessible talk, forensic anthropologist Lauren Pharr shows us how vultures impact crime scenes -- and the assistance they can provide to detectives investigating murders. (This talk contains graphic images.)

Traveling is tricky right now and, for most, the boundaries of our worlds have shrunk dramatically. So a lot of people are spending a lot more time in virtual places, like Sea of Thieves, Fortnite, Ultima Online and more. Explore how these online worlds help us push past real-world boundaries and have vastly new experiences, even become new vers...

There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer Joshua Foer describes the technique -- called the memory palace -- and shows off its most remarkable feature: anyone can learn how to use it, including him.

Algorithms play a big part in our day-to-day lives. From search engines to architecture, explore how these formulas affect the way we view and interact with the world around us.

Nearly 400 years ago, a tiny town in Germany made a bargain with God: spare its people from the Black Plague and we'll put on a play in your honor... forever. And it worked! Now every decade, the entire town comes together to stage the play, drawing massive crowds to one of the largest religious spectacles in the world. But problematic parts of ...

What happens to a tourist paradise when no one shows up to visit? Rapa Nui, known to many as Easter Island, typically welcomes more than 120,000 visitors each year—which is a lot for a place with only 10,000 residents. After COVID-19 shuts down flights to this remote island, citizens reimagine what their lives, their livelihood, and their home c...

Trust is the foundation for everything we do. But what do we do when it's broken? In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it -- something she worked on during a recent stint at Uber. "If we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unpre...

Meet Liberato Kani, a hip hop artist in Lima, Peru -- or as he says, "the Andean Bronx". At his concerts, a typical call and response you hear is "Quechua es resistencia": Quechua is resistance. Though Quechua is spoken by nearly ten million people, Peru's native language is at risk of dying off because of anti-indigenous prejudice. Liberato and...

Whether you are washing dishes, dusting the shelves or cleaning the car, these talks will help the next hour and a half fly by. No need to watch—just listen.

These speakers sport impressive moustaches. Watch in honor of Movember, the month in which men let their ‘staches grow wild to raise money for men’s health causes.

Eric Lewis, an astonishingly talented crossover jazz pianist -- seen by many for the first time at TED2009 -- sets fire to the keys with his shattering rendition of Evanescence's chart-topper, "Going Under."

Natalie Jeremijenko's unusual lab puts art to work, and addresses environmental woes by combining engineering know-how with public art and a team of volunteers. These real-life experiments include: Walking tadpoles, texting "fish," planting fire-hydrant gardens and more.

At his day job, Steve Truglia flips cars, walks through fire and falls out of buildings -- pushing technology to make stunts bigger, safer, more awesome. He talks us through his next stunt: the highest jump ever attempted, from the very edge of space.

Nine days before TED2008, filmmaker David Hoffman lost almost everything he owned in a fire that destroyed his home, office and 30 years of passionate collecting. He looks back at a life that's been wiped clean in an instant -- and looks forward.

These TED speakers gained remarkable knowledge by closely studying animal behavior. What do their insights mean for you?

In a funny, rapid-fire 4 minutes, Alexis Ohanian of Reddit tells the real-life fable of one humpback whale's rise to web stardom. The lesson of Mister Splashy Pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age.

How comfortable are you with robots taking over your life? Covering a wide range of potential applications -- from the mundane (robot house cleaner) to the mischievous (robot sex partner) to the downright macabre (uploading your brain to live on after death) -- technology strategist Lucy Farey-Jones shares data-backed evidence of how our willing...