Over the course of history, we've discovered hundreds of thousands of asteroids. But how do astronomers discover these bits of rock and metal? How many have they found? And how do they tell asteroids apart? Carrie Nugent shares the story...

The path to skill around the globe has been the same for thousands of years: train under an expert and take on small, easy tasks before progressing to riskier, harder ones. But right now, we're handling AI in a way that blocks that path...

Cave diver Jill Heinerth explores the hidden underground waterways coursing through our planet. Working with biologists, climatologists and archaeologists, Heinerth unravels the mysteries of the life-forms that inhabit some of the...

Jay Walker, curator of the Library of Human Imagination, conducts a surprising show-and-tell session highlighting a few of the intriguing artifacts that backdropped the 2008 TED stage.

Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated -- until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can...

Our universe is strange, wonderful and vast, says astronomer Natasha Hurley-Walker. A spaceship can't carry you into its depths (yet) -- but a radio telescope can. In this mesmerizing talk, Hurley-Walker shows how she probes the...

SciShow explains the science of detecting exoplanets -- planets in orbit around distant stars -- and how a new observatory being built in California may open up whole new worlds to us, literally!

There's a creepy transformation taking over our cities, says architecture critic Justin Davidson. From Houston, Texas to Guangzhou, China, shiny towers of concrete and steel covered with glass are cropping up like an invasive species....

Sunitha Krishnan has dedicated her life to rescuing women and children from sex slavery, a multimilion-dollar global market. In this courageous talk, she tells three powerful stories, as well as her own, and calls for a more humane...

Check out nine abundant animals that help support the food chain in their ecosystems!

In her New Orleans neighborhood, artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang turned an abandoned house into a giant chalkboard asking a fill-in-the-blank question: "Before I die I want to ___." Her neighbors' answers -- surprising, poignant, funny...

Street artist JR made a wish in 2011: Join me in a worldwide photo project to show the world its true face. One year after making his TED Prize wish, he shows how giant posters of human faces, pasted in public, are connecting...

Our asteroid news edition this week clears up some misleading headlines regarding 3200 Phaethon, and our interstellar visitor has both a new name and a shape we haven’t seen before.

Aliens - Are We Looking in the Wrong Place?

Back in 2009, Paul Romer unveiled the idea for a "charter city" -- a new kind of city with rules that favor democracy and trade. This year, at TED2011, he tells the story of how such a city might just happen in Honduras ... with a little...

To see is to believe, says Oren Yakobovich — which is why he helps everyday people use hidden cameras to film dangerous situations of violence, political fraud and abuse. His organization, Videre, uncovers, verifies and publicizes...

A very unsexy-sounding piece of technology could mean that the police know where you go, with whom, and when: the automatic license plate reader. These cameras are innocuously placed all across small-town America to catch known...

What is the world's favorite fossil? Why the orthoceras of course! Hank will tell why that is in this episode of SciShow. Find out how you can get your very own orthoceras fossil.

We can't control if we'll die, but we can "occupy death," in the words of Peter Saul, an emergency doctor. He asks us to think about the end of our lives -- and to question the modern model of slow, intubated death in hospital. Two big...

Wish you could vote in another country's election? Simon Anholt unveils the Global Vote, an online platform that lets anybody, anywhere in the world, "vote" in the election of any country on earth (with surprising results).

The night sky is about to look a little different, but that's nothing new!

SciShow Space News looks into two recent rocket failures over U.S. soil, exploring possible causes and sizing up the risks of spaceflight since humans first started reaching for the stars.

Schiaparelli crashing into Mars wasn't exactly what the Exomars mission scientists were hoping for, but we're still going to get some useful information from the little probe's descent. And scientists have observed two of the brightest...

Local reporters are on the front lines of important stories, but their work often goes unnoticed by national and international news outlets. TED Fellow and journalist Gangadhar Patil is working to change that. In this quick talk, he...