How much do you think about your future self? If your answer is not much, you're not alone. It can be difficult to plan for a version of yourself you haven't met yet, says psychologist Meg Jay. Sharing how to close the empathy gap...

Where do you draw the line between work and life? Writer Simone Stolzoff explores the problem with defining yourself by your job — and shows what it takes to reclaim your time and sense of meaning beyond the office.

For years, Jean Béliveau walked from country to country, with the goal of circumnavigating the globe on foot. While few people have the time or desire to walk such extreme lengths, research shows that adding even a modest amount of...

After witnessing a bird carrying a single golden hair, King Mark of Cornwall declared his future bride must have equally radiant locks. The only royal matching this description was Princess Isolde of Ireland. So the king sent Tristan,...

As one of the agency’s best employees, you’ve been selected as a finalist to take on a new top-secret mission. You’ve already shown your aptitude for surveillance and disguise, but the agency’s looking to test one last critical skill:...

Mount Teide is one of the world’s largest active volcanoes, and there may be a way to use the basalt rock inside it to save humanity. Obviously, destroying an ancient volcano would cause catastrophic and unpredictable ecological fallout....

Agriculture is key to solving the climate crisis, but most farmers don’t have the financial incentive to switch to more eco-friendly practices, says banker and farmer Berry Marttin. He explores how improving the systems around carbon and...

While doom and gloom may wake people up, joy keeps them in the fight, says drag queen and environmentalist Pattie Gonia. With humor, creativity and a dress made of thrifted shower curtains and upcycled pink flamingo pool floaties, Pattie...

Actor and writer Natasha Rothwell takes the stage for “On the Spot,” TED’s rapid-fire Q&A format. Answering a stream of unexpected questions, she dishes on everything from creativity and representation in TV to love, the first “pinch me”...

Lots of languages and species are going extinct, but because others keep getting found or described, the official counts of languages and species are still increasing.

Hurricane path prediction seems straightforward, until it is not – that’s because hurricanes can encounter atmospheric effects that turn their paths into erratic nonsense.

A person’s genes alone don’t tell us enough about how to most effectively treat their cancer.

Electric eels can emit some of the largest shocks in the animal kingdom - but why don't they shock themselves?

The Grand Canyon is super-wide and super-deep, which might make you think that the Colorado River, which carved it, is particularly old or powerful. Or at least that's what I thought.

Premature babies majorly benefit from skin-to-skin contact with a parent –also known as “kangaroo care”– because it reduces infections and hypothermia and increases weight gain and parental involvement.

The ancestors of gars, horseshoe crabs and coelacanths looked almost the same as their modern relatives. Darwin called species like these “living fossils'' because they seem like they are evolutionarily frozen in time. But Darwin was wrong.

When we say a meme goes “viral,” we aren't actually saying it's making people sick. But the math behind a meme’s spread suggests it's actually a pretty spot-on analogy.

Despite the seemingly basic things we don't know about dinosaurs, we do know some surprising things – like their body temperatures.

Because of the way digestion works, human poop not only contains dangerous microbes, it also contains a wide variety of other things, many of which we could potentially put to use.

We are in the Golden Age of Solar Eclipses, but only for the moment. In fact, I'd argue we're already past peak solar eclipse and it's all downhill from here.

Solar eclipses don't just happen here on earth - moons of other planets also pass between those planets and the sun, resulting in various types of solar eclipses on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and even non-planets like Pluto,...

The sun rises in the east, the moon rises in the east, and the stars rise in the east... but solar eclipses, oddly, come from the west. If total eclipses are caused by the sun and the moon, why don't they behave like the sun and the moon?

Humans eat a lot of different animals, but almost none of them are carnivores - why?

When a ship sinks, lots of factors, like the ship’s materials, the water quality, and the depth of the seafloor all play a role in determining how long the ship will last down there - as a result, the Titanic will be gone in fifty years,...