How often does technology interrupt us from what we really mean to be doing? At work and at play, we spend a startling amount of time distracted by pings and pop-ups -- instead of helping us spend our time well, it often feels like our...

A long time ago in New York City, Steve Addis stood on a corner holding his 1-year-old daughter in his arms; his wife snapped a photo. The image has inspired an annual father-daughter ritual, where Addis and his daughter pose for the...

When we witness something amazing, many of us instinctively pull out our phones and snap pictures. Is this obsession with photographing everything impacting our experiences? In a meditative talk, Erin Sullivan reflects on how being more...

The earth is a big place to keep clean. With Litterati -- an app for users to identify, collect and geotag the world's litter -- TED Resident Jeff Kirschner has created a community that's crowdsource-cleaning the planet. After tracking...

The hashtag, so simple and ubiquitous, raises the image from mere photo to a new complex entity.

In the wake of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, mixed into the wreckage were lost and damaged photos of families and loved ones. Photo retoucher Becci Manson, together with local volunteers and a global group of colleagues she...

Facebook's "like" and "share" buttons are seen 22 billion times a day, making them some of the most-viewed design elements ever created. Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook's director of product design, outlines three rules for design at...

On the web, a new "Friend" may be just a click away, but true connection is harder to find and express. Ze Frank presents a medley of zany Internet toys that require deep participation -- and reward it with something more nourishing....

If you traced your family tree back 185 million generations, you wouldn't be looking at a human, a primate, or even a mammal. You'd be looking at a fish. So where along that line does the first human show up? The answer may surprise you

Dan Barasch and James Ramsey have a crazy plan — to create a park, filled with greenery, underneath New York City. The two are developing the Lowline, an underground greenspace the size of a football field. They're building it in a...

Today we’re going to talk about how computers see. We’ve long known that our digital cameras and smartphones can take incredibly detailed images, but taking pictures is not quite the same thing. For the past half-century, computer...

With the amount of fake and doctored photos and videos out there, how can we know what to trust? Most of us are used to thinking that "seeing is believing" but as technology makes it easier and easier to spread unreliable content online...

Photographs do more than document history -- they make it. At TED University, Jonathan Klein of Getty Images shows some of the most iconic, and talks about what happens when a generation sees an image so powerful it can't look away -- or...

Photographer Brian Skerry shoots life above and below the waves -- as he puts it, both the horror and the magic of the ocean. Sharing amazing, intimate shots of undersea creatures, he shows how powerful images can help make change.

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says...

The origins of the cameras we use today were invented in the 19th century. Or were they? A millenia before, Arab scientist Alhazen was using the camera obscura to duplicate images, with Leonardo da Vinci following suit 500 years later...

Paul Andersen surveys organisms in the protists. He reviews the diversity found within the domain Eukarya and explains that the Kindgom Protista is simple a junk drawer for organisms that don't fit elsewhere.

New technology has revolutionized how we study wild animals, but it has also bogged down scientists with data...luckily, there's an *intelligent* solution.

You may have had an ultrasound before, and wondered what that gel does. Well, that weird alien goop has a purpose, and it has to do with being like our weird human skin.

You might have had the experience of heading out for the night, feeling good, snapping a few selfies with friends that memorialize for all time how great your hair is looking. But the next day, you’re tagged in someone else’s photos and…...

Curious about modes of nutrition? Join the Amoeba Sisters in learning about autotrophs and heterotrophs. Video explains these terms as well as how their carbon source differs. Photoautotrophs, photoheterotrophs, chemoautotrophs, and...

Today, we're going to talk about five common types of algorithmic bias we should pay attention to: data that reflects existing biases, unbalanced classes in training data, data that doesn't capture the right value, data that is amplified...

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it visualizes the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can...

Null Island - The Busiest Place That Doesn't Exist