TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

Standing on the TED stage looking stunning in a blue dress, neuroscientist and author Sandra Aamodt  reveals that three and a half years ago on New Year’s Eve, she made a decision: She gave worrying about her weight. Instead, she learned to eat mindfully — and lost 10 pounds. For Aamodt, who had been dieting […]

On a tablet, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes us on a walk through Edinburgh Castle, less than a mile from the TEDGlobal 2013 theater. With a swipe of his finger, we fly through the 15th-century castle — people and objects dissolving as we go — as if we were in a scene from a movie orchestrated by […]

You never would have guessed musical alchemist Elizaveta was fighting strep throat only days before her performance. In Session 2 of TEDGlobal, “Those Flying Things,” she steps out onto a darkened stage in an ethereal white dress and a magnificent lace crown and launches into a long, beautiful and flawless soprano note. Trained in opera performance at […]

TEDGlobal 2013, themed “Think Again,” begins today — June 10 — in Edinburgh, Scotland. After an impressive buildout over the weekend, attendees have started streaming in. The first session of talks, “Moments of Truth,”  will begin on Tuesday morning at 11 am BST. We’ll be tweeting in detail from @TEDGlobal and more sparingly from @TEDNews. You’ll […]

Daniel Suarez is a former systems consultant turned novelist who will speak in session two at TEDGlobal 2013. Officially subtitled “Those Flying Things,” this is unofficially known as the drone session, and it will feature various speakers tackling the topic of unmanned aerial vehicles. For his part, Suarez will expound on some of the themes he […]

Convinced? Here’s where to apply » This graphic originally ran on the TED Fellows Blog. Read more »

At TED 2011, Sunni Brown encouraged doodling everywhere – classrooms and meeting rooms included. “The doodle … engages all four learning modalities simultaneously, with the possibility of an emotional experience,” she says in her classic talk. Yes, it’s proven that doodling helps you remember things more efficiently. Graphic notetaking is the doodle, evolved and tamed. […]

This weekend, thousands gathered in Washington, DC, to help lay one million handmade representations of human bones — 1,018,260 bones, to be exact – on the National Mall. This breathtaking installation created a haunting river of bones leading to the US Capitol, and represents the culmination of a nearly five-year social activism project imagined by TED […]

Shadia Ramsahye is a Mauritian-born digital media student living in Paris. She speaks four languages — Mauritian Creole, French, English and Urdu — and translates TED Talks into the latter, which she describes as “the language of poetry, the language of the heart.” “Translating for TED has helped me keep in touch with this language […]

If you sped up the scene at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre today, it would look like blurs of red and green streaks — the red from the TED logos on the T-shirts of the crew who are busily setting up for TEDGlobal 2013, and the green from the name badges worn by staff members […]

When TEDGlobal 2013 kicks off tomorrow, June 10, you’ll be able to “Think Again” with like-minded idea enthusiasts — al fresco and possibly with a picnic. As the conference begins, we’ll be airing TED Talks on big screens in eight cities around the world. And by big screens, we mean huge screens. Think: screens of […]

There’s a time and a place for the big picture; there’s a time and a place for the tiny one. This week, watch the playlist “The world of tiny things,” all about viewing the unseen and looking at the world on a very small scale. In this playlist, E.O. Wilson makes a plea for insects […]

David Blaine is the master of the endurance stunt.  In 1999, he was buried alive in a clear box underneath three tons of water. Over the course of seven days, about 75,000 people stopped by to watch him in his self-made tomb. In 2008, Blaine attempted to set the Guinness World Record for holding his […]

Below, find some interesting and insightful pieces from around the web this week that have the TED staff intrigued: The second installment in the smart, darkly funny “Damsel in Distress” series, a three-part analysis of female tropes pervasive in video games. Contains game spoilers and violent images. [YouTube] You can also watch Part 1. We think Jackson’s Katz’s […]

In the noise of a city, peace and quiet can be hard to find. Australian composer and sound artist Jason Sweeney has a solution — Stereopublic, a free smartphone app that lets users geo-locate and share their favorite tranquil city spaces. This week, in advance of TEDGlobal 2013, Stereopublic has launched a custom Edinburgh version […]

Telling stories is that thing that makes us human. Stories ignite our imagination, and let us leap over cultural walls and cross the barriers of time. They bring us to other worlds and let us explore other lives and yet, at the same time, give us a better understanding of our own time, place and […]

Science-fiction films do not come cheap. Star Trek Into Darkness reportedly had a budget of $190 million, while the Will and Jaden Smith vehicle After Earth, which opens this weekend, cost $130 million. (Side note: Jaden Smith recently shared with New York Magazine that his dad watches “hours and hours of TED Talks.”) That’s why it’s so thoroughly amazing that Mars […]

Catering a TEDx event can be — how do you say it? – costly. So we think it’s so cool that the organizers of TEDxSydney decided to crowdsource the food for the 2,200 people attending the event in May. All the food in the amazing spread above comes from community gardens and from plants grown […]

At Opower, Alex Laskey and colleagues are running what they describe as “the largest behavioral science experiment in the world.” Laskey explains some of the thinking behind it in his TED Talk, “How behavioral science can lower your energy bill,” and he shared further insights into the importance of the field in this discussion with Harvard […]

TEDGlobal 2013: Think Again is right around the corner — and the program is packed with illustrious speakers addressing some of the most challenging and fascinating questions we face today. So how should you prepare for this influx of ideas from politics, science, the arts and beyond? To familiarize you with our speakers’ past work […]