What's a proven way to lower your energy costs? Would you believe: learning what your neighbor pays. Alex Laskey shows how a quirk of human behavior can make us all better, wiser energy users, with lower bills to prove it.

Modern medicine is in danger of losing a powerful, old-fashioned tool: human touch. Physician and writer Abraham Verghese describes our strange new world where patients are merely data points, and calls for a return to the traditional...

No business, no matter how innovative and amazing it is, will survive if people haven’t heard of it. If people don’t know something exists, they’ll never be able to purchase it. It’s time to work on our communication skills.

Hank pays tribute to Carl Sagan, noting his accomplishment as an astronomer and his contributions to culture -- both pop and otherwise -- as one of the great popularizers of science. Happy Carl Sagan Day!

We’ve done a lot of searching for life in the universe and we need to continue to if we hope to make contact. But not all of our attempts were expected to succeed. That’s where Beacon in the Galaxy comes in.

Investor and prankster Yossi Vardi delivers a ballsy lecture on the dangers of blogging. Specifically, for men.

In the year leading up to this talk, the web tool Twitter exploded in size (up 10x during 2008 alone). Co-founder Evan Williams reveals that many of the ideas driving that growth came from unexpected uses invented by the users themselves.

Del Harvey heads up Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team, and she thinks all day about how to prevent worst-case scenarios -- abuse, trolling, stalking -- while giving voice to people around the globe. With deadpan humor, she offers a window...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences.

The way we're taught to live has got to change, says author Casey Gerald. Too often, we hide parts of...

Tech columnist David Pogue shares 10 simple, clever tips for computer, web, smartphone and camera users. And yes, you may know a few of these already -- but there's probably at least one you don't.

Paul Andersen explains how changes in the signal transduction pathway can affect organisms. He begins with a brief discussion of the tetrodotoxin produced by the California Newt and then explains how anthrax affects adenylate cyclase...

Hank interviews Administrator Gina McCarthy of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. They discuss getting people to care about climate change, the EPA's goals going into the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and the...

Artist Uldus Bakhtiozina uses photographs to poke fun at societal norms in her native Russia. A glimpse into Russian youth culture and a short, fun reminder not to take ourselves too seriously.

Ann Morgan considered herself well read -- until she discovered the "massive blindspot" on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of english and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the english-speaking world. So she set an...

We continue our tour of the nervous system with a look at synapses and the crazy stuff cocaine does to your body.


r/>
--

/>Table of Contents:

Electrical Synapses Use Ion Currents Over Gap Junctions to...

In the radio race, one inventor came out ahead while the other was overshadowed. Michael Aranda goes into the history of the radio and the many people who contributed to make the tool we use every day.

What’s with all the "G"s and why do we keep having to develop new ones to use our phones in this technology.

When a piece of cryptography is described as having "256-bit security", what exactly does that mean? Just how big is the number 2^256?

How will we communicate with the ships that we send to other stars? Scientists think the answer might involve using the sun as a giant lens to strengthen the signal.

Every wire, memory chip, and radio link is constantly fending off data corruption with error detecting and correcting codes. With the help of these codes, electronics can keep up the illusion of perfection… most of the time.

Squeaks is very bored, so he shows Mister Brown some of his favorite rainy day experiments!

After 14 years of going unnoticed, a vulnerability in Wi-Fi security was published last week. It's a serious problem, but it's already in the process of being fixed.

In Brazil, "catadores" collect junk and recyclables. But while they provide a vital service that benefits all, they are nearly invisible as they roam the streets. Enter graffiti artist Mundano, a TED Fellow. In a spirited talk, he...

In the event of a nuclear fallout, every piece of digital and written information could all be lost. Luckily, there is a way that all of human history could be recorded and safely stored beyond the civilization's end. And the key...