What does it mean when a virus is airborne? It turns out it's more than just what comes out when you sneeze

Hank brings us the story of Elizabeth Blackburn, the Nobel Prize-winning Australian woman who discovered telomeres and telomerase, and helped scientists begin to understand the process of aging at a genetic level.

You can use your smartphone to find a local ATM, but what if you need a defibrillator? Lucien Engelen shows us online innovations that are changing the way we save lives, including a crowdsourced map of local AEDs.

What if we could find cancerous tumors years before they can harm us -- without expensive screening facilities or even steady electricity? Physician, bioengineer and entrepreneur Sangeeta Bhatia leads a multidisciplinary lab that...

They've been called the "saints of Somalia." Doctor Hawa Abdi and her daughter Deqo Mohamed discuss their medical clinic in Somalia, where -- in the face of civil war and open oppression of women -- they've built a hospital, a school and...

When ebola broke out in March 2014, Pardis Sabeti and her team got to work sequencing the virus's genome, learning how it mutated and spread. Sabeti immediately released her research online, so virus trackers and scientists from around...

Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world's psychics: Prove what you do is real, and...

On average, adults catch more than 150 colds throughout their lives. Even with similar symptoms, the cause could be different each time. Common colds are caused by at least 8 different families of virus, each of which can have its own...

In 1982, a young nurse was suffering from severe, unrelenting depression. She couldn’t work, socialize or concentrate. One controversial treatment changed everything: after two courses of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) her symptoms...

After a traumatic brain injury, it sometimes happens that the brain can repair itself, building new brain cells to replace damaged ones. But the repair doesn't happen quickly enough to allow recovery from degenerative conditions like...

Swallowing pills to get medication is a quick, painless and often not entirely effective way of treating disease. A potentially better way? Lasers. In this passionate talk, TED Fellow Patience Mthunzi explains her idea to use lasers to...

Someday, the information in our genome could transform healthcare as we know it, but one major hurdle we have to get over is the lack of diversity in our studies.

Our medical systems are broken. Doctors are capable of extraordinary (and expensive) treatments, but they are losing their core focus: actually treating people. Doctor and writer Atul Gawande suggests we take a step back and look at new...

The heart is one of the least regenerative organs in the human body -- a big factor in making heart failure the number one killer worldwide. What if we could help heart muscle regenerate after injury? Physician and scientist Chuck Murry...

Developmental disorders in children are typically diagnosed by observing behavior, but Aditi Shankardass suggests we should be looking directly at brains. She explains how one EEG technique has revealed mistaken diagnoses and transformed...

In 2011, eye surgeon and TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous developed a smartphone app that brings quality eye care to remote communities, helping people avoid losing their sight to curable or preventable conditions. Along the way, he noticed...

After a terminal cancer diagnosis upended 12 years of remission, all Elaine Fong's mother wanted was a peaceful end of life. What she received instead became a fight for the right to decide when. Fong shares the heart-rending journey to...

There are many mysteries around fever, but we do know that all mammals, some birds and even a few invertebrate and plant species feel fever's heat. It has persisted for over 600 million years of evolution. But it has a significant cost:...

Arthritis and injury grind down millions of joints, but few get the best remedy -- real biological tissue. Kevin Stone shows a treatment that could sidestep the high costs and donor shortfall of human-to-human transplants with a novel...

We can use a mosquito's own instincts against her. In a rather unforgettable presentation, Bart Knols demos the imaginative solutions his team is developing to fight malaria -- including Limburger cheese and a deadly pill.

From a new method of drug design to an antiviral agent for herpes, Gertrude Elion's works totally transformed the world of drug development.

Reuse of syringes, all too common in under-funded clinics, kills 1.3 million each year. Marc Koska clues us in to this devastating global problem with facts, photos and hidden-camera footage. He shares his solution: a low-cost syringe...

Christien Meindertsma, author of "Pig 05049" looks at the astonishing afterlife of the ordinary pig, parts of which make their way into at least 185 non-pork products, from bullets to artificial hearts.

Aspirin isn't just an old medicine cabinet stand-by, it's one of the oldest medicines we humans learned how to make ourselves. And our research into aspirin did more than just make it better at relieving pain, it opened the door to whole...