Most people are taught that dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago when a giant meteor crashed into the Yucatan peninsula. I'm here to tell you that's wrong. Dinosaurs are alive and well today, and you don't have to go to Jurassic...

It's true: talking about menstruation makes many people uncomfortable. And that taboo has consequences: in India, three out of every 10 girls don't even know what menstruation is at the time of their first period, and restrictive customs...

Nature’s beauty can be fleeting -- but not through Louie Schwartzberg’s lens. His stunning time-lapse photography, accompanied by powerful words from Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, serves as a meditation on being grateful...

Have you ever actually read the terms and conditions for the apps you use? Finn Lutzow-Holm Myrstad and his team at the Norwegian Consumer Council have, and it took them nearly a day and a half to read the terms of all the apps on an...

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch...

Be the hit of your party and learn how to pour the perfect beer-- (with the additional party trick of knowing the chemistry behind why, of course!)

Taryn Simon captures the essence of vast, generation-spanning stories by photographing the descendants of people at the center of the narrative. In this riveting talk she shows a stream of these stories from all over the world,...

What if your car could drop you off and then find parking by itself? According to electric vehicle entrepreneur Freeman H. Shen, this technology already exists. He shares his vision for a future where AI-powered electric vehicles will...

It's 427 BCE and the worst internal conflict ever to occur in the ancient Greek world is in its fourth year. Athens is facing a big decision: what to do with the people of Mytilene, a city on the island of Lesbos where a revolt against...

Hank talks about some of the structures in our bodies that are "leftover" from previous evolutionary phases of humanity.

RNA, the genetic messenger, makes sure the DNA recipe gives your cells exactly what they ordered. But sometimes that means inhibiting some other RNA that got the recipe wrong. This process is called RNA interference (RNAi), and it acts...

Hybrid animals are infertile because of the way their sex cells form. But sometimes, life finds a way.



FYI: We try to leave jargon out of our videos, but if you want to learn more about this topic, here are some...

There have been remarkable advances in understanding the brain, but how do you actually study the neurons inside it? Using gorgeous imagery, neuroscientist and TED Fellow Carl Schoonover shows the tools that let us see inside our brains.

The way we rate national economies is all wrong, says rating agency reformer Annette Heuser. With mysterious and obscure methods, three private US-based credit rating agencies wield immense power over national economies across the globe,...

Hank explores a vexing question asked at picnics and beach parties everywhere: Why do bug bites itch? To help you understand the answer, he takes you into the blow by blow of a bug bite which, we warn you, is pretty horrifying.

Millions of images and videos are uploaded to the internet each day, yet we rarely see shocking and disturbing content in our social media feeds. Who's keeping the internet "clean" for us? In this eye-opening talk, documentarians Hans...

Hank briefs us on a fascinating project that aims to map the anatomical and functional pathways of the brain - a neural network called the human connectome.

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...

Space physicist Miho Janvier studies solar storms: giant clouds of particles that escape from the Sun and can disrupt life on Earth (while also producing amazing auroras). How do you study the atmosphere on the Sun, which burns at...

Explore the lytic and lysogenic viral replication cycles with the Amoeba Sisters! This video also discusses virus structures and why a host is critical for viral reproduction. Expand details for table of contents and further reading...

Where rivers meet the ocean, coastlines tend to bend either inward or outward, creating estuaries and deltas. But how do they get those shapes? Want to learn more about the topic in this week's video? Here are some keywords/phrases to...

At her first museum job, art historian Sarah Lewis noticed something important about an artist she was studying: Not every artwork was a total masterpiece. She asks us to consider the role of the almost-failure, the near win, in our own...

What do you do with an outdated encyclopedia in the information age? With X-Acto knives and an eye for a good remix, artist Brian Dettmer makes beautiful, unexpected sculptures that breathe new life into old books.

When TED Senior Fellow Cesar Harada heard about the devastating effects of the BP Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, he quit his dream job and moved to New Orleans to develop a more efficient way to soak up the oil. He designed a...