In 2013, international migrants sent $413 billion home to families and friends — three times more than the total of global foreign aid (about $135 billion). This money, known as remittances, makes a significant difference in the lives of...

For millennia, the people of Britain had been using bronze to make tools and jewelry, and as a currency for trade. But around 800 BCE, that began to change: the value of bronze declined, causing social upheaval and an economic crisis—...

As chairman of the world's largest maritime shipping company, Jim Hagemann Snabe thinks a lot about how goods get where they need to go and the impact their journey has on the planet. Leading the effort to decarbonize shipping by 2050,...

How much more damage do we have to endure before we realize that it's cheaper to save this planet than to ruin it? asks engineer and investor John Doerr. In conversation with Countdown cofounder Lindsay Levin, Doerr and systems innovator...

In 2020, China's President Xi Jinping pledged that China would both peak its emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 -- a change that will require action at an unheard-of scale and speed. Can the country actually achieve...

This week, a group of scientists estimated the cost of saving just one small village in America’s Chesapeake Bay from rising sea levels, and another found evidence that Smilodon (aka the saber-toothed cat) actually helped take care of...

The math of backpropagation, the algorithm by which neural networks learn.

In this energizing talk, Amory Lovins lays out his simple plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy.

News about climate change is often full of doom, guilt, and anxiety. This can make many people reluctant to pay attention to or discuss it. We asked former Vice President Al Gore to help us find a different way to talk about climate change.

Engineer RA Mashelkar shares three stories of ultra-low-cost design from India that use bottom-up rethinking, and some clever engineering, to bring expensive products (cars, prosthetics) into the realm of the possible for everyone.

MacArthur winner Sendhil Mullainathan uses the lens of behavioral economics to study a tricky set of social problems -- those we know how to solve, but don't. We know how to reduce child deaths due to diarrhea, how to prevent...

It was the dawn of 1863, and London's not-yet-opened subway system - the first of its kind in the world - had the city in an uproar. Most people thought the project, which cost more than 100 million dollars in today's money, would never...

How does education work? Where does the money come from? Who pays for it? Is going to college a good investment? Adriene and Jacob are talking today about the economics of education. Most countries require that their citizens get some...

Five billion people can't use the internet. Aleph Molinari empowers digitally excluded people, by giving them access to computers and sharing the know-how to use them.

3 Ways to Prevent Hurricanes (Maybe)

Brit Garner is here to give Hank a breakdown of the May 2019 preview of the IPBES report, and Jessi from Animal Wonders brings along Kizmit, the African Crested Porcupine.

Nobody really knows how much it would cost to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Yet historian Yuval Noah Harari's analysis, based on the work of scientists and economists, indicates that humanity might avert catastrophe by...

Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library -- every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history ... It's all free to the public -- unless someone else gets to it first.

Air travel opens our eyes to the world, but it also comes at a high cost to the environment. Piloting us into a future of green aviation, innovator Ryah Whalen shares three ways to lower the industry's carbon footprint through smarter...

Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization.

The math of backpropagation, the algorithm by which neural networks learn.

At his carpet company, Ray Anderson has increased sales and doubled profits while turning the traditional "take / make / waste" industrial system on its head. In a gentle, understated way, he shares a powerful vision for sustainable...

The hard choices -- what we most fear doing, asking, saying -- are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail,...

Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things -- from alien abductions to dowsing rods -- boils down to two of the brain's most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into...