TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Does math have a major flaw? | Jacqueline Doan and Alex Kazachek
A mathematician with a knife and ball begins slicing and distributing the ball into an infinite number of boxes. She then recombines the parts into five precise sections. Moving and rotating these sections around, she recombines them to...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Why do people fear the wrong things? - Gerd Gigerenzer
A new drug reduces the risk of heart attacks by 40%. Shark attacks are up by a factor of two. Drinking a liter of soda per day doubles your chance of developing cancer. These are all examples of a common way risk is presented in news...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why are some people left-handed? - Daniel M. Abrams
Today, about one-tenth of the world's population are southpaws. Why are such a small proportion of people left-handed -- and why does the trait exist in the first place? Daniel M. Abrams investigates how the uneven ratio of lefties and...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Can machines read your emotions? - Kostas Karpouzis
Computers can beat us in board games, transcribe speech, and instantly identify almost any object. But will future robots go further by learning to figure out what we're feeling? Kostas Karpouzis imagines a future where machines and the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Daniel Finkel: Can you solve the alien probe riddle?
Your team has developed a probe to study an alien monolith. It needs protective coatings — in red, purple and green — to cope with the environments it passes through. Can you figure out how to apply the colors so the probe survives the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The psychology behind irrational decisions - Sara Garofalo
Often people make decisions that are not "rational" from a purely economical point of view - meaning that they don't necessarily lead to the best result. Why is that? Are we just bad at dealing with numbers and odds? Or is there a...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Should you trust unanimous decisions? - Derek Abbott
Imagine a police lineup where ten witnesses are asked to identify a bank robber they glimpsed fleeing the scene. If six of them pick the same person, there's a good chance that's the culprit. And if all ten do, you might think the case...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man of math - James Earle
What's so special about Leonard da Vinci's Vitruvian Man? With arms outstretched, the man fills the irreconcilable spaces of a circle and a square -- symbolizing the Renaissance-era belief in the mutable nature of humankind. James Earle...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you solve the passcode riddle? - Ganesh Pai
In a dystopian world, your resistance group is humanity's last hope. Unfortunately, you've all been captured by the tyrannical rulers and brought to the ancient coliseum for their deadly entertainment. Will you be able to solve the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Mysteries of vernacular: Zero - Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel
Though the first written number system can be dated back to 2500 years ago in Mesopotamia, a zero-like symbol did not appear until 7th century CE India. Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel track the evolution of zero from a dot to the symbol...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Can you solve the control room riddle? - Dennis Shasha
As your country's top spy, you must infiltrate the headquarters of the evil syndicate, find the secret control panel, and deactivate their death ray. But your reconnaissance team is spotty, and you have only limited information about the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What causes an economic recession? | Richard Coffin
For millennia, the people of Britain had been using bronze to make tools and jewelry, and as a currency for trade. But around 800 BCE, that began to change: the value of bronze declined, causing social upheaval and an economic crisis—...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Making a TED-Ed Lesson: Visualizing complex ideas
How can animation convey complex, intangible concepts? A visual metaphor, or an idea represented through imagery, can take an idea as massive as Big Data and tie it to the familiar depiction of a growing tree. TED-Ed animators explain...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you solve the human cannonball riddle? | Alex Rosenthal
They call you the human cannonball. Your act involves flying through rings of fire, bouncing through a trampoline course, and catching the trapezist in the grand finale. Today's pre-flight test fails dramatically, and upon inspection,...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Can you solve the pirate riddle? - Alex Gendler
It's a good day to be a pirate. Amaro and his four mateys _ Bart, Charlotte, Daniel, and Eliza have struck gold _ a chest with 100 coins. But now, they must divvy up the booty according to the pirate code - and pirate code is notoriously...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Calculating the odds of intelligent alien life - Jill Tarter
Could there be intelligent life on other planets? This question has piqued imagination and curiosity for decades. Explore the answer with the Drake Equation -- a mathematical formula that calculates the possibility of undiscovered life.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you solve the giant cat army riddle? - Dan Finkel
The villainous Dr. Schrodinger has developed a growth ray and intends to create an army of giant cats to terrorize the city. Your team of secret agents has tracked him to his underground lab. You burst in to find. . . that it's a trap!...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Where we get our fresh water - Christiana Z. Peppard
Fresh water accounts for only 2.5% of Earth's water, yet it is vital for human civilization. What are our sources of fresh water? In the first of a two part series on fresh water, Christiana Z. Peppard breaks the numbers down and...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The greatest mathematician that never lived | Pratik Aghor
When Nicolas Bourbaki applied to the American Mathematical Society in the 1950s, he was already one of the most influential mathematicians of his time. He'd published articles in international journals and his textbooks were required...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you solve the penniless pilgrim riddle? - Daniel Finkel
After months of travel, you've arrived at Duonia, home to the famous temple that's the destination of your pilgrimage. The walk from the welcome center to the temple isn't a long one ... but there's a problem. Can you outsmart the city's...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you solve the killer robo-ants riddle? - Dan Finkel
The good news is that your experimental robo-ants are a success. The bad news is that you accidentally gave them the ability to shoot deadly lasers . . . and you can't turn it off. Can you stop them from escaping their habitat before the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Network theory - Marc Samet
From social media to massive financial institutions, we live within a web of networks. But how do they work? How does Googling a single word provide millions of results? Marc Samet investigates how these networks keep us connected and...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The origin of countless conspiracy theories - PatrickJMT
Why can we find geometric shapes in the night sky? How can we know that at least two people in London have exactly the same number of hairs on their head? And why can patterns be found in just about any text - even Vanilla Ice lyrics?...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How high can you count on your fingers? (Spoiler: much higher than 10) - James Tanton
How high can you count on your fingers? It seems like a question with an obvious answer. After all, most of us have ten fingers -- or to be more precise, eight fingers and two thumbs. This gives us a total of ten digits on our two hands,...