A species of ant has been discovered to rescue and tend to the battle wounds of other ants injured while hunting, and scientists think that this is the first time this behavior has ever been observed in insects.

"Doctor, is this really necessary?" Backed by startling statistics about overtreatment, neurosurgeon Christer Mjåset explains the power of this and other simple questions in the context of medical treatment and surgery -- and shares how...

Different hospitals produce different results on different procedures. Only, patients don’t know that data, making choosing a surgeon a high-stakes guessing game. Stefan Larsson looks at what happens when doctors measure and share their...

Depression is a common disorder, and though it might seem like we’ve got it figured out, what it is and how to treat it is actually way more complicated than we think.

Today's AI algorithms require tens of thousands of expensive medical images to detect a patient's disease. What if we could drastically reduce the amount of data needed to train an AI, making diagnoses low-cost and more effective? TED...

Can we, as adults, grow new neurons? Neuroscientist Sandrine Thuret says that we can, and she offers research and practical advice on how we can help our brains better perform neurogenesis—improving mood, increasing memory formation and...

You may remember neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis — he built the brain-controlled exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup. What’s he working on now? Building ways for two minds (rats and...

Think we're winning the battle against HIV? Maybe not, as the next wave of drug-resistant viruses arrives. In an eye-opening talk, TED Fellow Edsel Salvana describes the aggressive HIV subtype AE that's currently plaguing his home of the...

What if you're in surgery and the power goes out? No lights, no oxygen -- and your anesthesia stops flowing. It happens constantly in hospitals throughout the world, turning routine procedures into tragedies. Erica Frenkel demos one...

Whether we're rushing a child to the emergency room after a fall or making chicken soup for a feverish spouse, love inspires us to act when a family member gets sick. Global health activists Edith Elliott and Shahed Alam believe we can...

Through treating everything from strokes to car accident traumas, neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch knows the brain's inability to repair itself all too well. But now, she suggests, she and her colleagues may have found the key to neural...

Health headlines are published every day, sometimes making opposite claims from each other. There can be a disconnect between broad, attention-grabbing headlines and the often specific, incremental results of the medical research they...

Tourette Syndrome in popular culture is often simplified to a poorly timed foul mouth, but that’s only a small part of the story—or sometimes not part of the story at all.

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.

Dealing with depression is not easy, and the most common treatments don’t work for everyone. Could biomarkers be the key to finding more treatment options?

It can be a wonderful feeling to give your tired eyes a good rub. And rubbing your eyes can help keep them moist, but it turns out it also can affect your heart rate.

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...

Cancer is a very clever, adaptable disease. To defeat it, says medical researcher and educator Paula Hammond, we need a new and powerful mode of attack. With her colleagues at MIT, Hammond engineered a nanoparticle one-hundredth the size...

What exactly are Personality Disorders? How can they be diagnosed? Can we prevent some of them? In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank gives us the down low on things like Ego-Dystonic and Ego-Syntonic Disorders,...

The brain is what makes us function, yet we understand so little about how it works. We are learning more about the brain by using new technology to monitor epilepsy patients during surgery. Moran Cerf explains the process doctors use to...

In 1984, Dr. Barry Marshall had a theory about ulcers that he couldn't convince the science community of. So, he took matters into his own hands... or stomach, and infected himself with a potentially deadly bacterium.

You've just been injured, and you're on the way home from an hour of physical therapy. The last thing you want to do on your own is confusing exercises that take too long to show results. TED Fellow Cosmin Mihaiu demos a fun, cheap...

The medical industry has developed countless methods and tools for diagnosing the myriad of illnesses that can befall us. This, as you might guess, includes cancer. But it took a research team five months to diagnose this specific cancer...

About 150 years ago, scientists found the two main areas that are responsible for language production and comprehension in the brain. But it turns out they might have over-exaggerated what these parts actually do.