In this episode Hank talks about global medical history and recorded death certificates with journalist Jeremy Smith. Special guest from Animal Wonders and SciShow Kids Jessi Knudsen Castañeda brings Freya the Northern Pine Snake.

every artist has a name, and every artist has a story. Laolu Senbanjo's story started in Nigeria, where he was surrounded by the culture and mythology of the Yoruba, and brought him to law school, to New York and eventually to work on...

Across sub-Saharan Africa, small farmers are the bedrock of national and regional economies—unless the weather proves unpredictable and their crops fail. The solution is insurance, at a vast, continental scale, and at a very low,...

Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions. With his...

African growth is a trend, not a fluke, says economist and former Finance Minister of Nigeria Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. In this refreshingly candid and straightforward talk, Okonjo-Iweala describes the positive progress on the continent and...

The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest on Earth, and yet there are no sea snake populations to be found there. What’s keeping aquatic serpents from making a home in these waters?

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Ghanaian economist George Ayittey unleashes a torrent of controlled anger toward corrupt leaders in Africa -- and...

Researcher Kwabena Boahen is looking for ways to mimic the brain's supercomputing powers in silicon -- because the messy, redundant processes inside our heads actually make for a small, light, superfast computer.

When TED Fellow Xavier Vilalta was commissioned to create a multistory shopping mall in Addis Ababa, he panicked. Other centers represented everything he hated about contemporary architecture: wasteful, glass towers requiring tons of...

You might consider humans or beavers to be the best engineers on the planet, but these 5 other animals go to great lengths to put our houses and dams to shame. Chapters SOCIABLE WEAVER 0:38 GREAT BOWERBIRD 2:13 PUFFERFISH 3:39 4 ORIENTAL...

Climate action can be a vehicle to deliver dignity, opportunity and equality for all. UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed invites us to reimagine what the journey to net-zero could look like if we invest in people's climate...

Conservation efforts in Africa have typically been led by "parachute conservationists" -- outsiders who drop in thinking they have all the answers, hire locals to implement them and then disappear. But conservationist Resson Kantai Duff...

Two extinct relatives of horses and rhinos are closely related to each other but have strikingly different body plans. How did two of the same kind of animal, living in the same place, end up looking so different?

Despite all the hardship of being a Black person in Colonial America, some Black people were able to defy the harsh conditions and create art. Today we're learning about a teenager who attained literacy and wrote poems that reached a...

When he was just 14 years old, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from rough plans he found in a library book.

Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, physicist Neil Turok speaks out for talented young Africans starved of opportunity: by unlocking and nurturing the continent's creative potential, we can create a change in Africa's future.

In 1912, a fossil collector discovered some strange bone fragments in the eerie, beautiful Cretaceous Bahariya rock formation of Egypt. Eventually, that handful of fossil fragments would reveal to scientists one of the strangest...

Stories are necessary, but they're not as magical as they seem, says writer Sisonke Msimang. In this funny and thoughtful talk, Msimang questions our emphasis on storytelling and spotlights the decline of facts. During a critical time...

Zombies have a distinct lineage— one that traces back to Equatorial and Central Africa. For three centuries, African people were enslaved and brought to the Caribbean Islands. There, a religion known as vodou developed, along with the...

When Julius Maada Bio first seized political power in Sierra Leone in 1996, he did so to improve the lives of its citizens. But he soon realized that for democracy to flourish, its foundation needs to be built on the will of the people....

A volcanic eruption and series of earthquakes in 2005 were important not because they did a great deal of damage to humans, but because they’re geologic evidence of where Earth’s next ocean will most likely pop up.

The Gros Michel banana lost the battle with fungus in the 1950s, but was replaced by the Cavendish. This time we might not have a new banana to come to the rescue. Could this be the end of bananas?

The debate over foreign aid often pits those who mistrust "charity" against those who mistrust reliance on the markets. Jacqueline Novogratz proposes a middle way she calls patient capital, with promising examples of entrepreneurial...

Nathan Myhrvold and team's latest inventions -- as brilliant as they are bold -- remind us that the world needs wild creativity to tackle big problems like malaria. And just as that idea sinks in, he rolls out a live demo of a new,...