In the 70 years that plastic has been around, humans have created 9 billion tons of it -- most of which still exists. Are the existing strategies for tackling plastic pollution -- namely reusing and recycling -- really making any...

The work of women artists makes up only 3 to 5 percent of major museums' permanent collections in the U.S. and Europe. Many of these artists struggle financially -- but Susan Unterberg is trying to change that. For decades, the artist...

What if we could "grow" clothes from microbes, furniture from living organisms and buildings with exteriors like tree bark? TED Fellow Suzanne Lee shares exciting developments from the field of biofabrication and shows how it could help...

Can Batteries Power Everything? This video is about the physical and chemical limitations to electrolytic batteries, and how we might surpass the energy density and specific energy of lithium-ion...

Concrete is the second most-used substance on Earth (behind water), and it's responsible for eight percent of the world's carbon footprint. Cement researcher Karen Scrivener shares the research behind a pioneering new kind of cement...

This Nobel Prize season, dive into the world of the super small for physics and chemistry. It's where the nanocars roam and phase transitions get really weird.

Throughout history humans have come up with lots of different ways to build shelters for themselves. But sometimes, inspiration for better construction materials comes from nature, in structures you might not expect — like the scales on a

Hank brings us another simple experiment that demonstrates the important biochemical process of osmosis by turning a chicken egg into a frightening alien-looking thing.

Stretching over roughly nine million square kilometers and with sands reaching temperatures of up to 80° Celsius, the Sahara Desert receives about 22 million terawatt hours of energy from the Sun every year. That's well over 100 times...

What we think of as 3D printing, says Joseph DeSimone, is really just 2D printing over and over ... slowly. Onstage at TED2015, he unveils a bold new technique -- inspired, yes, by Terminator 2 -- that's 25 to 100 times faster, and...

Natsai Audrey Chieza is a designer on a mission -- to reduce pollution in the fashion industry while creating amazing new things to wear. In her lab, she noticed that the bacteria Streptomyces coelicolor makes a striking red-purple...

Researchers created a "super jelly" that can survive being run over with a car, and its weird properties take advantage of some novel chemistry.

This week we’re exploring aerospace engineering and its two main fields: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. We’ll explore life & buoyancy, propulsion systems, and the challenges of managing the human body in space.

Some might call sand coarse, rough and irritating, but there’s no denying that it’s used everywhere: from glass to asphalt, sand is a key ingredient for all sorts of materials in construction and technology. But this heavy reliance on...

In this intimate talk filmed at TED's offices, energy innovator Amory Lovins shows how to get the US off oil and coal by 2050, $5 trillion cheaper, with no Act of Congress, led by business for profit. The key is integrating all four...

MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld talks about his Fab Lab -- a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools. It's a simple idea with powerful results.

Designer and architect Neri Oxman is leading the search for ways in which digital fabrication technologies can interact with the biological world. Working at the intersection of computational design, additive manufacturing, materials...

Towering 85 meters above the Norwegian countryside, Mjøstårnet is the world's tallest wooden building, made almost entirely from the trees of neighboring forests. But as recently as the end of the 20th century, engineers thought it was...

Alan Russell studies regenerative medicine -- a breakthrough way of thinking about disease and injury, using a process that can signal the body to rebuild itself.

Venice is sinking. To save it, Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and, well, make architecture that grows itself. She proposes a not-quite-alive material that does its own repairs and sequesters...

3D printing has grown in sophistication since the late 1970s; TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits is shaping the next development, which he calls 4D printing, where the fourth dimension is time. This emerging technology will allow us to print...

It was one of the strangest trials in Dutch history. The defendant in a 1947 case was an art forger who had counterfeited millions of dollars worth of paintings. But he wasn’t arguing his innocence— in fact, his life depended on proving...

Downloadable, printable clothing may be coming to a closet near you. What started as designer Danit Peleg's fashion school project turned into a collection of 3D-printed designs that have the strength and flexibility for everyday wear....

Artist Sarah Sze takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through her work: immersive installations as tall as buildings, splashed across walls, orbiting through galleries -- blurring the lines between time, memory and space. Explore how we...