Immovable Object vs. Unstoppable Force - Which Wins

You've discovered a habitable exoplanet, but so has an an evil interplanetary mining corporation. Can you get to the planet before they strip it bare and leave it unsuitable for life? You're going to need a ship, the Lorentz...

On first glance, the painting Las Meninasc (The Maids of Honorc) might not seem terribly special, but it's actually one of the most analyzed pieces in the history of art. Why is this painting by Diego Velazquez so captivating? James...

Space, also known as The Final Frontier, has been in our collective dreams and fantasies for decades. Who WOULDN'T want to blast into space, experience zero gravity, or walk on the moon?! But with limited funding to NASA, the day that...

We've misplaced the building blocks of the cosmos -- and particle physicists like Claire Malone are on a mission to find them. Despite scientists hitting a "major snag" in uncovering what exactly makes up dark matter and dark energy, she...

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...

This video is about how the way we describe the world can influence the way we perceive it. In particular, with regards to Bohmian mechanics, Schrodinger wave functions, Feynman path integrals, and Galilean...

Beasts of No Nation is available to stream on Netflix (as it is a Netflix release). Some films are about war, some films are about kids, but some films are about kids during a time of war. Even more upsetting are films about kids who...

This video is chapter 5 in my series on special relativity, and it covers how things that are moving (that is, moving relative to an inertial reference frame) at different speeds appear to be shorter in length... and longer in...

Great dreams aren't just visions, says Astro Teller, "They're visions coupled to strategies for making them real." The head of X (formerly Google X), Teller takes us inside the "moonshot factory," as it's called, where his team seeks to...

Sinead Burke is acutely aware of details that are practically invisible to many of us. At 105 centimeters (or 3' 5") tall, the designed world -- from the height of a lock to the range of available shoe sizes -- often inhibits her ability...

There’s a small asteroid that appears to orbit Earth in a horseshoe shape. Sometimes referred to as Earth’s second moon, but it's orbit is much weirder than that.

A full third of the world's population -- 2.6 billion people -- play video games, plugging into massive networks of interaction that have opened up opportunities well beyond entertainment. In a talk about the future of the medium,...

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...

What job is best for a young man who's been a tennis ace, a cross-country traveler, a chemistry nerd and an NFL draftee? How about ... astronaut? Leland Melvin tells the story of the challenges he's accepted and the opportunities he's...

We live in a world of unseeable beauty, so subtle and delicate that it is imperceptible to the human eye. To bring this invisible world to light, filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg bends the boundaries of time and space with high-speed...

In 1956, a team of scientists conducted an experiment that, seemed kind of trivial, but the results would challenge one of our fundamental beliefs about the entire universe.

Roberto D'Angelo and Francesca Fedeli thought their baby boy Mario was healthy -- until at 10 days old, they discovered he'd had a perinatal stroke. With Mario unable to control the left side of his body, they grappled with tough...

For humans, being upside-down isn’t a comfy way to hang out for very long, but for these six animals, upside-down feels just right!

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This video is about the definition of a day, and how it applies (or not) on the sun. Solar day, sidereal day, universal coordinated time (UTC) day, etc. Length of a day.

From the TED archives: The legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser dives deep into a new painting inspired by Piero della Francesca. From here, he muses on what makes a convincing poster, by breaking down an idea and making it new.

Hank explains how quasars and blazars are both the same thing - just oriented differently in respect to us - and how that impacts the way we perceive them and how it also effects the ways we can study them.

Speaking up is hard to do, even when you know you should. Learn how to assert yourself, navigate tricky social situations and expand your personal power with sage guidance from social psychologist Adam Galinsky.

Bees have been rapidly and mysteriously disappearing from rural areas, with grave implications for agriculture. But bees seem to flourish in urban environments -- and cities need their help, too. Noah Wilson-Rich suggests that urban...