Jedidah Isler first fell in love with the night sky as a little girl. Now she's an astrophysicist who studies supermassive hyperactive black holes. In a charming talk, she takes us trillions of kilometers from Earth to introduce us to...

Hank explains why EVERYONE is capable of hallucinating.

It's not the happiest subject, but when someone dies in space, or on another planet, what will happen to the body?

It may produce creepy images with way too many dogs and eyeballs, but Google’s DeepDream program is actually a valuable window into artificial intelligence.

So last episode we talked about some basic file formats, but what we didn’t talk about is compression. Often files are way too large to be easily stored on hard drives or transferred over the Internet - the solution, unsurprisingly, is...

Do you have a favorite T-shirt or pair of jeans that transforms you and makes you feel confident -- makes you feel like you? That's because what you wear can affect your mood, your health and your self-esteem, says fashion designer Mindy...

When asked to build housing for 100 families in Chile ten years ago, Alejandro Aravena looked to an unusual inspiration: the wisdom of favelas and slums. Rather than building a large building with small units, he built flexible...

You work at the college library. You're in the middle of a quiet afternoon when suddenly, a shipment of 1,280 books arrives. The books are in a straight line, but they're all out of order, and the automatic sorting system is broken. How...

In this episode of SciShow Talk Show Hank chats with Chad Larrabee of Montgomery Distillery about the science of distilling alcohol. Special guest is Jessi Knudsen Castañeda of Animal Wonders with Groucho the hedgehog.

Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens -- and the environment.

Once the powerhouse of America's industrial might, Detroit is more recently known in the popular imagination as a fabulous ruin, crumbling and bankrupt. But city planner Toni Griffin asks us to look again -- and to imagine an...

MU69 seems to be much flatter than we thought and the Gaia space telescope can tell us where galaxies have been and, maybe, where they're going.

There's a lot we don't know about how and when dogs were first domesticated. But we do know that the process made dogs very different from their wild cousins, in some unexpected ways.

Engineering, like life, could really use a lot more cheese. This week we are looking at a cheese factory in Toronto and what it can teach us about process control systems. We’ll explore feedforward and feedback systems, and see how...

Stewart Brand works on the Clock of the Long Now, a timepiece that counts down the next 10,000 years. It's a beautiful project that asks us to think about the far, far future. Here, he discusses a tricky side problem with the Clock:...

India's revolutionary Aravind Eye Care System has given sight to millions. Thulasiraj Ravilla looks at the ingenious approach that drives its treatment costs down and quality up, and why its methods should trigger a re-think of all human...

The earth is a big place to keep clean. With Litterati -- an app for users to identify, collect and geotag the world's litter -- TED Resident Jeff Kirschner has created a community that's crowdsource-cleaning the planet. After tracking...

In October 2017, astrobiologist Karen J. Meech got the call every astronomer waits for: NASA had spotted the very first visitor from another star system. The interstellar comet -- a half-mile-long object eventually named `Oumuamua, from...

Variables: What are they? In the case of engineering, variables are a condition or value that can change. Sometimes we control a variable, sometimes we don't. In this episode of Crash Course Kids, Sabrina chats to us about how variables...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. TED's Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated...

Bill Stone, a maverick cave explorer who has plumbed Earth's deepest abysses, discusses his efforts to mine lunar ice for space fuel and to build an autonomous robot for studying Jupiter's moon Europa.

We can't control if we'll die, but we can "occupy death," in the words of Peter Saul, an emergency doctor. He asks us to think about the end of our lives -- and to question the modern model of slow, intubated death in hospital. Two big...

Some tidally-locked exoplanets might actually be more habitable than astronomers initially thought, and we have some ideas about how Peter Pan disks can last so much longer than other protoplanetary disks.

One year to eighteen months might seem like a while to wait for a COVID-19 vaccine, but there's a good reason finding and approving a candidate takes a whole lot of time.