The hymen is a human structure that is surrounded by myths and misunderstandings. So today, we shed some light on what the hymen actually is, where it comes from, and why it can’t actually tell you anything about a person.

Roughly two billion people worldwide don't have access to banks or financial services like credit, insurance and investment -- or even a way to formally prove their identity. How do we bridge this divide? Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga sits...

Anonymous companies protect corrupt individuals – from notorious drug cartel leaders to nefarious arms dealers – behind a shroud of mystery that makes it almost impossible to find and hold them responsible. But anti-corruption activist...

Biologist Juliana Machado Ferreira, a TED Senior Fellow, talks about her work helping to save birds and other animals stolen from the wild in Brazil. Once these animals are seized from smugglers, she asks, then what?

This week Craig Benzine is going to talk about the structure of the U.S. court system and how exactly it manages to keep things moving smoothly. We’’ll talk about trial courts, district courts, appeals courts, circuit courts, state...

Hank tells us of a fascinating new experiment in synthetic biology - scientists have created a jellyfish out of silicone and rat heart cells.

Bill Ford is a car guy -- his great-grandfather was Henry Ford, and he grew up inside the massive Ford Motor Co. So when he worries about cars' impact on the environment, and about our growing global gridlock problem, it's worth a...

We need women to work, and we need working women to have babies. So why is America one of the only countries in the world that offers no national paid leave to new working mothers? In this incisive talk, Jessica Shortall makes the...

Ethan Lindenberger never got vaccinated as a kid. So one day, he went on Reddit and asked a simple question: "Where do I go to get vaccinated?" The post went viral, landing Lindenberger in the middle of a heated debate about vaccination...

Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.

At TEDGlobal U, Cameron Sinclair shows the unreported cost of real estate megaprojects gone bust: thousands of migrant construction laborers left stranded and penniless. To his fellow architects, he says there is only one ethical response.

In a wildly entertaining discussion with Richard Saul Wurman, architect Frank Gehry gives TEDsters his take on the power of failure, his recent buildings, and the all-important "Then what?" factor.

What if your job didn't control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don't have to). It's a...

Since the dawn of humanity, an estimated 100.8 billion people have lived and died, a number that increases by about 0.8% of the world's population each year. What happens to all of those peoples' bodies after they die? And will the...

On April 3, 2016 we saw the largest data leak in history. The Panama Papers exposed rich and powerful people hiding vast amounts of money in offshore accounts. But what does it all mean? We called Robert Palmer of Global Witness to find...

According to two new papers, Mars may have gigantic drinkable glaciers and we might have found the reason that galaxies glow.

We tend to focus on the brain in psychology, but it's part of an entire system! Other organs, even your liver, play a big role in psychological health.

Conventional wisdom says that to win an election, you need to play to your constituencies' basest, most divisive instincts. But as a candidate for mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, G.T. Bynum decided to skip the smear campaigns, tell voters what...

We increasingly make decisions based on short-term goals and gains -- an approach that makes the future more uncertain and less safe. How can we learn to think about and plan for a better future in the long term ... like,...

What went wrong with SpaceX's Falcon 9 on September 1st? And an update on our old friend Philae!

Want your local politician to pay attention to an issue you care about? Send a monthly handwritten letter, says former mayor Omar Ahmad -- it's more effective than email, phone, or even writing a check. He shares four steps to writing a...

Artist Dianna Cohen shares some tough truths about plastic pollution in the ocean and in our lives -- and some thoughts on how to free ourselves from the plastic gyre.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is a trooper as it continues its 2-year-long mission.

For nearly half a century, scientists have been trying to create a process for transplanting animal organs into humans, a theoretical dream that could help the hundreds of thousands of people in need of a lifesaving transplant. But the...