TED Talks
Jill Shargaa: Please, please, people. Let's put the 'awe' back in 'awesome'
Which of the following is awesome: your lunch or the Great Pyramid of Giza? Comedian Jill Shargaa sounds a hilarious call for us to save the word "awesome" for things that truly inspire awe.
SciShow
How Close Are We to the Perfect Smart Home?
Want to do more than talk to your refrigerator and control your lights with your phone? Hank explains how close we are to the smart home that can do everything for us.
TED Talks
TED: How I went from child refugee to international model | Halima Aden
Halima Aden made history when she became the first hijab-wearing model on the cover of Vogue magazine. Now she returns to Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp -- where she was born and lived until the age of seven -- to share an inspiring message...
Crash Course
Language: Crash Course Psychology
You know what's amazing? That we can talk to people, they can make meaning out of it, and then talk back to us. In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank talks to us and tries to make meaning out of how our brains do this thing...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Evolution's great mystery: Language | Michael Corballis
What we call language is something more specific than communication. Language is about sharing what's in our minds: stories, opinions, questions, the past or future, imagined times or places, ideas. It is fundamentally open-ended, and...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Why should you read "Macbeth"? - Brendan Pelsue
There's a play so powerful that an old superstition says its name should never be uttered in a theater. A play that begins with witchcraft and ends with a bloody, severed head. A play filled with riddles, prophecies, nightmare visions,...
TED Talks
TED: The most powerful yet overlooked resource in schools | Heejae Lim
When teachers and families work together, everyone wins, says education technology entrepreneur and TED Fellow Heejae Lim. She shines a light on an underutilized resource in US public education -- a family's love for their children --...
SciShow
Calendars, Codes & Virgins: 3 Myths About the Maya
Hank talks about the Maya, and helps dispel some myths about their historic civilization, revealing how, ultimately, they were just like us: smart, flawed, and awesome.
TED Talks
Ajit Narayanan: A word game to communicate in any language
While working with kids who have trouble speaking, Ajit Narayanan sketched out a way to think about language in pictures, to relate words and concepts in "maps." The idea now powers the FreeSpeech app, which can help nonverbal people...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How the Normans changed the history of Europe - Mark Robinson
In the year 1066, 7,000 Norman infantry and knights sailed in warships across the English Channel. Their target: England, home to more than a million people . Around the same period of time, other groups of Normans were setting forth all...
SciShow
The Stroop Task: The Psych Test You Cannot Beat
The task sounds like it should be pretty easy, but the Stroop task is a fantastic, and very well studied, example of how your brain’s automatic processing can trip you up!
TED Talks
Nandan Nilekani: Ideas for India's future
Nandan Nilekani, the visionary co-founder of outsourcing pioneer Infosys, explains four brands of ideas that will determine whether India can continue its recent breakneck progress.
TED Talks
Anthony Veneziale: "Stumbling towards intimacy": An improvised TED Talk
In a hilarious, completely improvised talk, improv master Anthony Veneziale takes to the TED stage for a truly one-of-a-kind performance. Armed with an audience-suggested topic ("stumbling towards intimacy") and a deck of slides he's...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: How interpreters juggle two languages at once - Ewandro Magalhaes
Language is complex, and when abstract or nuanced concepts get lost in translation, the consequences may be catastrophic. Given the complexities of language and cultural exchange, how do these epic miscommunications not happen all the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Pazit Cahlon and Alex Gendler: What "Machiavellian" really means
From Shakespeare's plays to modern TV dramas, the unscrupulous schemer for whom the ends always justify the means has become a familiar character type we love to hate. For centuries, we've had a single word to describe such characters:...
SciShow
The Science of Lying
Hank gets into the dirty details behind our lying ways - how such behavior evolved, how pathological liars are different from the rest of us, and how scientists are getting better at spotting lies in many situations.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Infinity according to Jorge Luis Borges | Ilan Stavans
What would it be like to have a limitless memory? Can the meaning of life be found in an infinite library? Is time a labyrinth or a single moment? Jorge Luis Borges explored these questions of infinity in his many works. His body of...
TED Talks
Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration
After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good. In this talk, he shares how his ambitious new project,...
TED Talks
Alix Generous: How I learned to communicate my inner life with Asperger's
Alix Generous is a young woman with a million and one ideas -- she's done award-winning science, helped develop new technology and tells a darn good joke (you'll see). She has Asperger's, a form of autistic spectrum disorder that can...
SciShow
Save Tesla!
Hank comes to you from his inner sanctum of science news to bring you a couple of things you never knew about human origins, the latest from his best friend on Mars, and what you can do to help one of the craziest, greatest people in the...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The pleasure of poetic pattern - David Silverstein
Humans are creatures of rhythm and repetition. From our breath to our gait: rhythm is central to our experience, and often brings us pleasure. We can find pleasure in the rhythm of a song, or even the rows of an orchard. Of course, too...
Crash Course
100 Years of Solitude Part 2: Crash Course Literature 307
In which we continue our exhaustive look at One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
SciShow
How Swearing Can Help With Pain
If you've ever been chastised for erupting into profanity after stubbing your toe in the middle of the night, science has your back on this one.
SciShow
Why ‘Dad Jokes’ Aren’t Bad Jokes
If, when your childhood pet passed away, your father remarked, “Well, I’ll be dog-gone,” you might be the victim of a dad joke. Fortunately, dad jokes might actually be a good thing.