In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, protests and unrest continued continued across Europe, and the Soviet Union was having increasing trouble holding its sphere of influence together. Today you'll learn about the labor strikes of...

The European Renaissance may have started in Florence, but it pretty quickly moved out of Italy and spread the art, architecture, literature, and humanism across Europe to places like France, Spain, England, and the Low Countries....

The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact had a huge impact on the countries of Eastern Europe. As the former satellite states turned away from communism and Soviet influence, some of them shifted toward...

The thing about European History is that it tends to leak out of Europe. Europeans haven't been great at staying put in Europe. As human beings do, the people of Europe were very busy traveling around to trade, to spread religion, and in...

European exploration had a lot of side effects. When the Old World and the New World began to interact, people, wealth, food, animals, and disease began to flow in both directions. In the New World, countless millions were killed by...

You may have noticed that the internet is terrible at religious discourse. Well, this is not a new phenomenon. In the early 16th century, the Roman Catholic church dominated Christianity in Europe, and the institution was starting to...

Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires are most of the classic gemstones adorning royal jewels. But they used to be accompanied by a stone that nowadays is most often found in museum gift shops: Amethyst. Here's the story of...

Over the last 40 years, Brazil has lost an area larger than California to deforestation — and 90 percent of the clear-cutting has been illegal, all part of a multi-billion-dollar global environmental crime economy. Civic entrepreneur...

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

What's the best way to develop and implement solutions to social problems? TED Fellow and human rights activist Monica Malta discusses why traditional, top-down policymaking often fails by excluding key voices and missing root causes....

The improper handling of waste is the third largest source of methane emissions in the world, says Aline Sousa, but waste pickers like her help reduce this environmental impact. She dives into the monumental effort of the...

So, rocks are hard. But the scale we use to rank them, the Mohs scale, is only really good at quantifying that for one kind of hardness, and topaz is a perfect stone to talk about to explain that. And you can check it out in our SciShow...

Did you know the world's largest tropical forest is partly formed by seeds emerging from poop? Ecologist Ludmila Rattis reveals the surprisingly fruitful benefits of letting nature take care of its own business, sharing how the digestive...

Lizards are incredibly widespread and diverse but it took them a long time to get to where they are now. Because they used to face some pretty stiff competition from a group of lizard look-alikes.

Check out Ms. Spider Hat and five other new species scientists have discovered and classified in the last year!

Poor Theater and Theater of the Oppressed were two sort of concurrent movements that shared some of the same aims. Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theater eschewed the use of lighting, props, costumes, makeup, and many of the other trappings of...

All across Brazil, slums — known as Favelas — have long been places of

crime and poverty, marked by overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
They
are among the hardest hit by the pandemic, in a country where
the...

Whether fleeing war, persecution, poverty or the effects of climate change, migrants and refugees worldwide routinely find themselves in great danger. Perhaps the most hazardous migrant trail of all is the Darien Gap, a wild, lawless...

Luzia, the oldest human fossil in the Western hemisphere, was lost to the Brazil National Museum fire, but around same time, three new species of ancient primates were discovered in San Diego Natural History Museum.

Africa, the Middle East, and South America have their own vibrant film communities and filmmakers. From social and political commentary to experimental films, these regions have made some very important pieces of cinema over the last...

European exploration had a lot of side effects. When the Old World and the New World began to interact, people, wealth, food, animals, and disease began to flow in both directions. In the New World, countless millions were killed by...

With fantastic new maps that show interactive, visual representations of urban fragility, Robert Muggah articulates an ancient but resurging idea: cities shouldn't just be the center of economics -- they should also be the foundation of...

Singing in Spanish, Portuguese and English, LADAMA brings a vibrant, energizing and utterly danceable musical set to the TED stage. In between performances of their songs "Night Traveler" and "Porro Maracatu," they discuss how...

Today, we're recapping some of the International Institute for Species Exploration's Top 10 New Species of 2016, and talking about some tiny flying robots that can stick to things using electricity!