To have screen time, or to not have screen time? These talks duke out the good and bad of our everyday tech.

We check our phones upwards of 50 times per day -- but when our kids play around with them, we get nervous. Are screens ruining childhood? Not according to children's media expert Sara DeWitt. In a talk that may make you feel a bit less guilty about handing a tablet to a child while you make dinner, DeWitt envisions a future where we're excited ...

Like many parents, technology researcher Jordan Shapiro knew little about video games -- and what he knew, he didn't like. But that's what his kids wanted to play. Through exploration and experimentation, he found they can be used to teach valuable lessons and build togetherness. On afternoons when I have custody of my 11- and 13-year-old boys,...

"Ethan Hawke has quietly emerged as perhaps our boldest and most distinctive screen actor," writes The New York Times.

After years of research on touch-driven computer displays, Jeff Han has created a simple, multi-touch, multi-user screen interface that just might herald the end of the point-and-click era.

Eric Dyer is an artist and educator who brings animation into the physical world with his sequential images, sculptures and installations.

Anand Agarawala's job: to imagine and build the computers you'll use in 20 years.

Jane Fonda has had four extraordinary careers (so far): Oscar-winning actor, author, fitness guru and impassioned activist.

When you think of telecommuting, you might think of a remote colleague's face in a tiny square on a screen. But with Jinha Lee's augmented reality platform, Spatial, distant coworkers can now teleport as digital avatars into a shared virtual space. Check out the incredible potential and possibilities for colleagues on different continents or in ...

The border between our physical world and the digital information surrounding us has been getting thinner and thinner. Designer and engineer Jinha Lee wants to dissolve it altogether. As he demonstrates in this short, gasp-inducing talk, his ideas include a pen that penetrates into a screen to draw 3D models and SpaceTop, a computer desktop prot...

Jeff Han shows off a cheap, scalable multi-touch and pressure-sensitive computer screen interface that may spell the end of point-and-click.

Rob Legato creates movie effects so good they (sometimes) trump the real thing. In this warm and funny talk, he shares his vision for enhancing reality on-screen in movies like Apollo 13, Titanic and Hugo.

Iraqi-born Zainab Salbi founded and runs Women for Women International, and has dedicated her life to helping women in war-torn regions rebuild their lives and communities.

By coding computer simulations with biologically modeled nervous systems, Torsten Reil and his company NaturalMotion breathe life into the animated characters inhabiting the most eye-poppingly realistic games and movies around.

America Ferrera believes stories have the power to make people better. She uses her voice to speak up for more humanity and justice in the world.

2005 TED Prize winner Edward Burtynsky has made it his life's work to document humanity's impact on the planet. His riveting photographs, as beautiful as they are horrifying, capture views of the Earth altered by mankind.

Sebastien de Halleux is a technology entrepreneur with a lifelong passion for building impactful businesses.

On the heels of the breakout success of his film "Crazy Rich Asians," director Jon M. Chu reflects on what drives him to create -- and makes a resounding case for the power of connection and on-screen representation.

Bob Stein has long been in the vanguard: immersed in radical politics as a young man, he grew into one of the founding fathers of new media. He’s wondering what sorts of new rituals and traditions might emerge as society expands to include increasing numbers of people in their eighties and nineties.

Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships: with others, with ourselves, with it.

Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

Sometimes, against a uniform, bright background such as a clear sky or a blank computer screen, you might see things floating across your field of vision. What are these moving objects, and how are you seeing them? Michael Mauser explains the visual phenomenon that is floaters. [Directed by Reflective Films, narrated by Pen-Pen Chen].

Where are all the women and girls in film? Social scientist Stacy Smith analyzes how the media underrepresents and portrays women -- and the potentially destructive effects those portrayals have on viewers. She shares hard data behind gender bias in Hollywood, where on-screen males outnumber females three to one (and behind-the-camera workers fa...

Artist and TED Fellow Aparna Rao re-imagines the familiar in surprising, often humorous ways. With her collaborator Soren Pors, Rao creates high-tech art installations -- a typewriter that sends emails, a camera that tracks you through the room only to make you invisible on screen -- that put a playful spin on ordinary objects and interactions.

Stacy Smith shows how Hollywood’s homogenous (and overwhelmingly male) culture systematically excludes women and minorities.

Pick up a book, magazine or screen, and more than likely you'll come across some typography designed by Matthew Carter. In this charming talk, the man behind typefaces such as Verdana, Georgia and Bell Centennial (designed just for phone books -- remember them?), takes us on a spin through a career focused on the very last pixel of each letter o...

It's not a demo, more of a philosophical argument: Why did Sergey Brin and his team at Google want to build an eye-mounted camera/computer, codenamed Glass? Onstage at TED2013, Brin calls for a new way of seeing our relationship with our mobile computers -- not hunched over a screen but meeting the world heads-up.

"The computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression," says designer and TED Fellow James Patten. But right now, we interact with computers, mainly, by typing and tapping. In this nifty talk and demo, Patten imagines a more visceral, physical way to bring your thoughts and ideas to life in the digital world, taking the computer i...

Deborah Rhodes is an expert at managing breast-cancer risk. The director of the Mayo Clinic’s Executive Health Program is now testing a gamma camera that can see tumors that get missed by mammography.

Her voice described as a “sweet gleaming soprano,” Danielle de Niese breathes new life into opera, astonishing critics and making audiences sit up and listen.