TED
TED features talks and performances from the TED Conference, along with originals, podcasts, and other content on technology, entertainment, design, science, business, global issues, the arts, and related subjects.
Printing in Gel Could Move 3D Printing From Prototypes to Production
Designer and TED Fellow Schendy Kernizan argues that printing objects inside a reusable gel could help move 3D printing beyond prototypes and into more efficient production. The gel supports shapes as they are made, reducing the need for disposable support structures and allowing forms that gravity would otherwise make difficult to print. Kernizan sees the method as a way to make customized products, including medical devices, more practical and to give manufacturers greater freedom to test new designs.
Free Time Is a Civil Right, Not a Reward for Work
Writer and work expert Danielle Roberts argues that free time is a civil right, not a reward for hard work or a benefit to postpone until retirement. She warns that unequal access to time raises a question for democracy: whether citizens can participate when they do not control their own hours. Rest, she says, is infrastructure for civic life and for pursuing happiness.
War Drawings Reveal the Human Stories Headlines Leave Out
Reportage artist George Butler argues that drawing can reveal what breaking news leaves out: not just what happened in a war, but how it felt to the people living through it. In his TED talk, he describes sitting with Ukrainians—including a 99-year-old famine survivor, a man collecting books from a rose garden after a missile strike and an injured architect—to listen and record details that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Women Composers’ Missing Music Is Also Missing From AI Training Data
Classical singer Gabriella Di Laccio argues that music history has excluded thousands of women composers, leaving audiences—and the datasets used to generate music—with an incomplete record of what was written. After finding an encyclopedia of women composers whose work she barely knew, she built a foundation that has identified more than 18,000. Di Laccio says recording that music is essential to making it audible to listeners and available to the systems shaping what they hear next.
Make Attention Capture Harder and Connection Easier
Author Catherine Price and horticulturist Rebecca McMackin argue that the obsession with productivity reflects a culture that makes attention capture and measurable output the default while treating play, friendship and contact with nature as indulgences. Price recommends changing those defaults by adding friction to compulsive phone use and protecting activities that need not produce anything, while McMackin makes the case for gardens and less-managed lawns as ways to relinquish control and make room for other life.
Public Health Must Treat Misinformation as an Outbreak
Epidemiologist and science communicator Jessica Malaty Rivera argues that public-health emergencies involve two outbreaks: the pathogen itself and the information surrounding it. In conversation with TED’s Whitney Pennington Rodgers, she says trust cannot be assumed or commanded through expertise; it must be earned through listening, transparent explanation of evidence and uncertainty, and messages that account for people’s histories and fears. Rivera’s case is that communication is not an add-on to prevention but part of the intervention.
Uncertainty Threatens Both Our Plans and Our Sense of Self
Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar and author Simone Stolzoff argue that uncertainty is painful not only because it obstructs planning, but because it can destabilize the identities people use to understand themselves. Their case is not for treating fear or loss as inherently beneficial: rather, they say people can navigate upheaval by anchoring themselves in values and relationships that outlast a role, naming what they feel and acting before certainty arrives.
Harmony Changes a Note’s Emotional Meaning Without Changing Its Pitch
Musician Jacob Collier argues that music derives its expressive force from “the wiggle”: movement and changing relationships rather than fixed notes or technical precision. Using Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” he shows how melody gains meaning through contour, rhythm through phrasing and space, and harmony through the way an unchanged note can take on a different emotional color when its chord changes. For Collier, musical structure matters not because it stays rigid, but because it allows tension, difference and return to register.
Ashiya Puts Residents at the Center of Municipal Tradeoffs
Ashiya mayor Ryosuke Takashima, Japan’s youngest-ever mayor, argues that local government should not merely consult residents but involve them in defining problems and making contested choices. Through informal conversations with students, dialogue sessions with older residents and citizen-led workshops, he says, the city has turned local concerns into decisions ranging from school air conditioning to elder-care services and street closures. For Takashima, government’s role is to support a vision created by citizens rather than impose one of its own.
Primordial Sound Waves Still Shape the Distribution of Galaxies
Astronomer Mark Whittle argues that the cosmic microwave background preserves the pressure waves that moved through the universe’s primordial gas, and that their harmonic structure remains detectable in the later clustering of galaxies. These baryon acoustic oscillations froze when the universe became transparent about 400,000 years after its birth, leaving a measurable link between quantum-scale fluctuations and the large-scale distribution of matter. Whittle’s collaboration with sound artist Ander Mikalson and composer Caroline Shaw turns a deliberately altered sonification of those data into a choral work.
Bullying Gains Power When Bystanders Supply Silence and Support
Amy Cuddy argues that bullying is not simply conflict or criticism but a serial, coordinated effort to isolate a target—and that its power depends on the bystanders who laugh, stay silent or amplify the attack. Drawing on research and her experience of a public campaign against her academic work, the social psychologist says groups can interrupt bullying early through “social bravery”: visible, shared acts of support that deny an attacker the audience and validation they need.
Four Steps for Receiving Difficult Feedback Without Defensiveness
Leadership expert Chris Wheatley argues that the person receiving hard feedback—not only the person giving it—determines whether candor is safe enough to recur. Drawing on a colleague’s blunt critique of his own defensive, condescending tendencies, he sets out a four-step “TACT” method: thank the speaker, acknowledge their experience without necessarily agreeing, commit to a next step, and follow up with thanks. The aim, he says, is to reduce the personal risk of speaking honestly across relationships and hierarchies.
Africa’s Learning Crisis Requires Technology Built for Overcrowded Classrooms
Rapelang Rabana argues that Africa’s learning crisis cannot be solved by trying to reproduce Western-style school systems: staffing classrooms to ideal ratios alone would require 15 million additional teachers and nearly $40 billion a year. Her alternative, through Imagine Worldwide, is offline, solar-powered adaptive learning software embedded in public schools, giving children individualized literacy and numeracy practice in overcrowded classrooms. Rabana says the model is designed with governments and local conditions in mind, rather than as a standalone technology rollout.
Male Friendship Requires Deliberate Structure, Not Occasional Availability
Journalist Joshua Johnson and entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie argue that loneliness and shallow conversation are not solved by simply telling people to socialize more. Johnson says people need to identify what kind of connection they want and use direct, patient questions to make room for it; Mycoskie argues that friendship and vulnerability often require deliberate structure and unhurried time. Both treat digital contact as potentially useful, while acknowledging that no invitation or conversation can compel another person to reciprocate.
Staffed Homes Give Women Leaving Prison a Path to Reentry
Susan Burton argues that women leaving prison need a staffed, accountable community—not merely a bed—to avoid being pulled back into the conditions that led to incarceration. Drawing on her own experience of repeated imprisonment, she built a Los Angeles network of 12 homes that combine housing with work, legal and financial support, shared responsibilities and peer relationships. Through the Sisterhood Alliance for Freedom and Equality, Burton is training women to replicate that model, framing stable reentry as family preservation, community repair and public safety.
Science Lessons Should Start With Questions, Not Answers
Former NASA engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober argues that science instruction should begin with a phenomenon that makes students want an explanation, rather than with equations or definitions they are asked to memorize. His proposed free Class CrunchLabs curriculum for grades three through eight uses videos to create that initial question, hands-on activities to investigate it, and teachers to guide the learning. Rober’s case is that spectacle can earn attention, but inquiry and teacher-led discussion must turn it into understanding.
MAS Vocal Gives “Bridge Over Troubled Water” a Collective Voice
Music maker Jacob Collier introduces MAS Vocal, a high-school choir conducted by Cindy Ellis, as a group whose singing can divide a listener’s life into a before and after. In Collier’s arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the choir gives collective force to the song’s promise of staying near, offering comfort and taking another person’s part in hardship.
Cities Could Replace Wall Street Financing With Public Banks
TED Fellow Trinity Tran argues that cities should treat financing as a local public function by creating publicly owned banks rather than relying solely on Wall Street to structure and fund municipal borrowing. Cities will still need long-term capital, she says, but public banks could keep interest and loan repayments circulating locally while allowing communities to set lending priorities around housing, infrastructure, small businesses or emergency recovery. Tran points to the Bank of North Dakota as evidence that a publicly owned lender can pursue public purposes while generating returns.
Scientific Capacity Has Outpaced the Systems That Turn Discoveries Into Cures
Science communicator Saloni Dattani argues that medicine has made substantial, often incremental gains—from steep declines in heart-disease deaths to new vaccines and cancer treatments—but scientific capability alone does not produce cures. In her TED talk, she says treatments are delayed when markets do not reward development, trials cannot recruit enough patients, or research is poorly matched to how diseases spread. Malaria, childhood leukemia and Ebola show how targeted funding, cross-border trial networks and adaptive study designs can turn existing knowledge into lifesaving care.
Salehe Bembury Builds Sneaker Stories Through Form, Function, and Place
Sneaker designer Salehe Bembury argues that footwear gains meaning when its form, function, materials and visual world tell the same story. In conversation with TED’s Cloe Shasha Brooks, he explains how projects for New Balance, Crocs, Versace and others use place-based references, practical details and recognizable design language to build affiliation without relying on logos. His approach, he says, is to change familiar products at the level of construction while preserving enough of their identity to bring existing customers with him.
Citizen-Led Action Creates the Space for Democratic Reform
Jon Alexander, a citizen strategist and author of Citizens, argues that democratic renewal begins when people organize around shared problems rather than wait for politicians or institutions to act. Drawing on efforts in Melbourne and Altadena, California, he contends that citizens can build the relationships, goals and practical capacity that formal politics can later adopt and support. His alternative to a democracy of periodic consumer choice is a more participatory model in which people create what their communities need together.
The Universe Will End, and Meaning Must Exist Now
Cosmologist Katie Mack argues that the universe’s eventual end offers no final accounting that can make human life meaningful in retrospect. In conversation with designer and podcaster Debbie Millman, Mack describes five broad cosmic fates physicists have modeled—from collapse and heat death to vacuum decay and cyclic rebirth—while explaining how the cosmic microwave background preserves a direct trace of the early universe. Her conclusion is personal as well as scientific: for temporary beings in a changing cosmos, meaning must exist in the present rather than await a cosmic resolution.
Turkana Sessions Uses Repetition Instead of Lyric Translation
Turkana Sessions’ TED performance centers on Elizabeth Korkel’s Turkana-language singing, using repeated lines and returning phrases rather than translation or spoken explanation to orient listeners. Recorded at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, the performance is presented as a tour through the soundscape of northwest Kenya, with Eddie Grey on guitar; its setting provides context without assigning a meaning to lyrics the record leaves untranslated.
Governments Should Track Aspirations Alongside Economic Growth
Consumer researcher Lance Katigbak argues that GDP and other economic measures can show growth without revealing whether citizens believe they are moving toward the lives they want. Drawing on a nationwide survey of more than 1,500 Filipinos, he says governments should track ambitions, barriers and perceived progress alongside conventional indicators—starting with the widespread desire for financial security against health shocks. Katigbak’s proposed “Department of Dreams” would use that data to test whether health, labor, education and industry policy aligns with citizens’ goals.