Kiran Bedi has a surprising resume. Before becoming Director General of the Indian Police Service, she managed one of the country's toughest prisons -- and used a new focus on prevention and education to turn it into a center of learning and meditation. She shares her thoughts on visionary leadership...

The U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, made a surprise appearance at TEDWomen on Wednesday, Dec. 8. "The United States," she begins, "has made empowering women and girls a cornerstone of our foreign policy." In the 16-minute talk below, she details why it's of vital international importance that every...

Halla Tomasdottir managed to take her company Audur Capital through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland by applying five traditionally "feminine" values to financial services. At TEDWomen, she talks about these values and the importance of balance.

Halla Tomasdottir believes that women's values are key to solving...

Marcel Dicke makes an appetizing case for adding insects to everyone's diet. His message to squeamish chefs and foodies: Delicacies like locusts and caterpillars compete with meat in flavor, nutrition and eco-friendliness.

Marcel Dicke likes challenging preconceptions. He demonstrated that plants, far from being passive, send SOS signals by emitting...

From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world....

Designer Emily Pilloton moved to rural Bertie County, in North Carolina, to engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation. She's teaching a design-build class called Studio H that engages high schoolers' minds and bodies while bringing smart design and new opportunities to the poorest county in the state.

David Bismark demos a new system for voting that contains a simple, verifiable way to prevent fraud and miscounting -- while keeping each person's vote secret.

One of the main objections to e-voting is that it's difficult for each voter to know that her vote was recorded accurately and counted...

What do you think of people in poverty? Maybe what Jessica Jackley once did: "they" need "our" help, in the form of a few coins in a jar. The co-founder of Kiva.org talks about how her attitude changed -- and how her work with microloans has brought new power to...

Hans Rosling reframes 10 years of UN data with his spectacular visuals, lighting up an astonishing -- mostly unreported -- piece of front-page-worthy good news. Along the way, he debunks one flawed approach to stats that blots out such vital stories.

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will...

As the world faces recession, climate change, inequity and more, Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future.

Tim Jackson currently serves as the economics commissioner on the UK government's Sustainable Development Commission and...

When Jungian analyst Inge Missmahl visited Afghanistan, she saw the inner wounds of war -- widespread despair, trauma and depression. And yet, in this county of 30 million people, there were only two dozen psychiatrists. Missmahl talks about her work helping to build the country's system of psychosocial counseling, promoting...

Sebastian Seung is mapping a massively ambitious new model of the brain that focuses on the connections between each neuron. He calls it our "connectome," and it's as individual as our genome -- and understanding it could open a new way to understand our brains and our minds.

In the...

Rob Dunbar hunts for data on our climate from 12,000 years ago, finding clues inside ancient seabeds and corals and inside ice sheets. His work is vital in setting baselines for fixing our current climate -- and in tracking the rise of deadly ocean acidification.

Dunbar's research looks at the...

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that...

After hitting on a brilliant new life plan, our first instinct is to tell someone, but Derek Sivers says it's better to keep goals secret. He presents research stretching as far back as the 1920s to show why people who talk about their ambitions may be less likely to achieve...

Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation's success by its productivity -- instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn't have to cost the earth). Which countries rank...

Science columnist Lee Hotz describes a remarkable project at WAIS Divide, Antarctica, where a hardy team are drilling into ten-thousand-year-old ice to extract vital data on our changing climate.

Robert Lee Hotz is the science columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where he explores the world of new research and...

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.

Peter Molyneux demos Milo, a hotly anticipated video game for Microsoft's Kinect controller. Perceptive and impressionable like a real 11-year-old, the virtual boy watches, listens and learns -- recognizing and responding to you.

Game geeks have been buzzing about Project Natal for, seemingly, ever -- Microsoft's now-in-development gaming device that...

Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

Laurie Santos runs the Comparative Cognition Laboratory (CapLab) at Yale, where she and...