Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a...

Craft curator Nora Atkinson takes us on a trip to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to see the beautifully designed and participatory art of Burning Man, revealing how she discovered there what's often missing from museums: curiosity and...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, war photographer James Nachtwey shows his life's work and asks TED to help him...

The combined market capitalization of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google is now equivalent to the GDP of India. How did these four companies come to infiltrate our lives so completely? In a spectacular rant, Scott Galloway shares...

Today we know pathogens -- viruses, bacteria, and certain other microbes -- are responsible for many diseases. But linking specific diseases to the microbes that cause them has been surprisingly tricky, and some research practices lead...

In this prescient 2005 talk, Clay Shirky shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.

In 1925, Frida Kahlo was on her way home from school in Mexico City when the bus she was riding collided with a streetcar. She suffered near-fatal injuries and her disability became a major theme in her paintings. Over the course of her...

In the 1930s, broadcast radio introduced an entirely new form of storytelling; today, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter are changing the scene again. Andrew Fitzgerald takes a look at the (aptly) short but fascinating history of new...

Despite what you might've seen on some wilderness-survival show, there's increasing evidence that your pee isn't sterile. So don't do anything crazy with it. Sci Show explains!

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Paola Antonelli, design curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, wants to spread her appreciation of design --...

When we define racism as behaviors instead of feelings, we can measure it -- and transform it from an impossible problem into a solvable one, says justice scientist Phillip Atiba Goff. In an actionable talk, he shares his work at the...

Feeling disconnected from creating art within classical conventions, artist Georgia O'Keeffe began experimenting with abstract drawings that defied easy classification. Using the shapes and rhythms of nature to capture her internal...

How much of what you think about psychology is actually wrong? In this whistle-stop tour of disproved ideas, Ben Ambridge shares nine popular ideas about psychology that have been proven wrong -- and uncovers a few surprising truths...

A husband and wife were in despair. The woman had just given birth to their 13th child, and the growing family was quickly running out of food and money. Wandering into the woods, the father encountered a skeletal figure with sunken eyes...

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing...

After a surprise appearance by Edward Snowden at TED2014, Chris Anderson said: "If the NSA wants to respond, please do." And yes, they did. Appearing by video, NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett answers Anderson's questions about the...

From the 1200s through the 1600s, parts of Europe were afflicted with deadly, mysterious outbreaks of seemingly contagious, unstoppable dancing. While it's still unclear exactly why these "dancing plagues" happened, modern psychology may...

All humans share some common bits of DNA, passed down to us from our African ancestors. Geneticist Spencer Wells talks about how his Genographic Project will use this shared DNA to figure out how we are -- in all our diversity -- truly...

Still invisible and often an afterthought, indigenous peoples are uniting to protect the world's water, lands and history -- while trying to heal from genocide and ongoing inequality. Tribal attorney and Couchiching First Nation citizen...

Black history in the US is rich, profound -- and at risk of being lost forever, if not for the monumental efforts of Julieanna L. Richardson. As the founder of The HistoryMakers -- the largest national archive of African American...

Beginning in the third century BCE, the Romans conquered the Iberian peninsula. This period gave rise to several regional languages in the area that's now Spain, including Castilian, Catalan, and Galician. One of these would become...

Journalist Mustafa Akyol talks about the way that some local cultural practices (such as the seclusion of women) have become linked, in the popular mind, to the articles of faith of Islam. Has the world's general idea of the Islamic...

Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity -- and offers some stirring encouragement to make it...

Who deserves to be in a museum? For too long, the answer has been "the extraordinary" -- those aspirational historymakers who inspire us with their successes. But those stories are limiting, says museum curator Ariana Curtis. In a...