The world of energy is a confusing place. What's better, nuclear or solar? What's the difference between fluorescent bulbs and LEDs? What's the difference between energy and power? And what the heck is a kilowatt-hour?!

Half a century ago, astronauts got on top of a really big rocket and sent a tiny little capsule on a 384,000 km trip to the moon and back. And they were able to do it because a lot of extremely smart and dedicated people pushed...

We've heard news of "peak oil" and "the end of the oil age" for years now, but we keep coming up with ways to find and pump more of it to the surface. Rising CO2 levels and the changing climate that results from burning fossil fuels mean...

This is a video about nothing. Hope you learn something!

Hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones are Earth’s most powerful storms, capable of unleashing destruction and death on coastal areas worldwide. As climate change warms Earth’s oceans, we face more risk of storms rapidly...

I don’t want to alarm you, but the world is going to end. All of this. Gone. And scientists are certain all of this will happen. On the bright side this isn’t going to happen for 4-5 billion years. It makes me wonder: In a universe...

Glass is made of sand, which is a kind of rock. But glass is transparent, and rocks aren’t transparent. What’s up with that? Why is glass clear? And why can I sit on a chair? And why can we touch anything? Today we zoom down to the weird...

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider may have just discovered a new fundamental particle that could change the way we look at the universe. Is this Dark Energy? A giant Neutrino? The big brother of the Higgs Boson? Or could it be the...

If I roll a pair of dice and you get to bet on one number, what do you choose? The smart choice is 7 because there are more ways for 2 dice to come up 7 than any other number. Well, it turns out that you can apply the same logic to...

In 2015, two men drove a Volkswagen across the US on just over 100 gallons of fuel. Their 81-mile-per-gallon performance doubled the car's estimated fuel rating, and set the record for the lowest fuel consumption ride of a diesel car....

The word "sustainability" gets thrown around a lot these days. But what does it actually mean for humanity to be sustainable? Environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie digs into the numbers behind human progress across centuries,...

Fifteen years ago, Uruguay was experiencing an energy crisis brought on by its reliance on fossil fuels; today, the nation produces 98 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (and even exports extra energy to neighboring...

The power sector generates the electricity that sustains modern life -- but it's also the number one contributor to climate change. We need a swift and equitable shift to renewable energy, says 2023 Audacious Project grantee and...

AI can be a transformational tool in our fight against climate change, says Sims Witherspoon, a leader at the AI research lab Google DeepMind. Using wind power as her case study, she explains how powerful neural networks can help us...

The shipping industry is vital to the global economy, but it's also a huge contributor to the climate crisis. Morten Bo Christiansen, a leader of the energy transition for the global shipping company A.P. Moller – Maersk, talks to TED's...

The developing world is most affected by climate change but has contributed the least to the problem. Meanwhile, rich countries historically exacerbated the environmental crisis and grew wealthy as a result -- but aren't helping...

The key to revolutionizing the world's energy landscape may lie in an unlikely love story, says energy innovator Olivia Breese. She details the fateful marriage of a green electron and a water molecule -- a powerful source of...

Almost all batteries, even single-use batteries, are theoretically rechargeable. That's because the metals and other chemicals are still there in the battery. So chemically speaking, a dead battery is actually not that different from a...

A hydrogen atom is traveling high within the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere. This particular atom first entered the exosphere millions of years ago, but today it overcomes Earth's gravitational pull and escapes, joining the...

What would it take to make global supply chains cleaner and greener? Bo Cerup-Simonsen -- who's helping decarbonize the maritime industry as CEO of the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping -- discusses why tenacious...

What's it like keeping the lights on during war? Ukrainian energy executive Maxim Timchenko shares how his company has diversified Ukraine's power structures to survive Russian attacks, highlighting the resilience of renewable energy....

In 1926, Robert Goddard launched Nell — the very first (successful) liquid fuel rocket. But Nell wasn't built like other modern rockets, including a notable lack of casing and an exhaust nozzle suspended above the propellant tanks.

The Sun is green, actually. We'll go into why the blackbody effect means the Sun emits more green visible light than any other color, and why evolution and color perception mean it's ok to see it as yellow, anyway.

Mildred Dresselhaus was a giant in the field of nanoscience. She didn't invent anything you have in your home right now, but she made it possible for us to have self-charging phones, smarter refrigerators, and more.