It's easy to tell when someone's not paying attention, but it can be surprisingly tricky to know what good listening looks like. Good listening is one of the most important things we can do to improve our relationships, develop our...

Andy Hobsbawm shares a fresh ad campaign about going green -- and some of the fringe benefits.

Humanity's fine-tuned sense of fear served us well as a young species, giving us laser focus to avoid being eaten by competing beasts. But it's less wonderful when that same visceral, body-hijacking sense of fear kicks in in front of 20...

SciShow News explores new research in the world of food, including insights into what causes food addiction, and how a certain flavor might be good for your health.

When he was young, artist Shih Chieh Huang loved taking toys apart and perusing the aisles of night markets in Taiwan for unexpected objects. Today, this TED Fellow creates madcap sculptures that seem to have a life of their own—with...

The constant motion of our oceans represents a vast and complicated system involving many different drivers. Sasha Wright explains the physics behind one of those drivers -- the concentration gradient -- and illustrates how our oceans...

Virtuoso Pamelia Kurstin performs and discusses her theremin, the not-just-for-sci-fi electronic instrument that is played without being touched. Songs include "Autumn Leaves," "Lush Life" and David Mash’s "Listen, Words Are Gone."

In the 1600s, an expansive autonomous settlement called Palmares reached its height in Brazil. It was founded and led by people escaping from slavery, also called maroons. It was one of the world's largest maroon communities, its...

One day a pair of brothers working together as shoemakers had an explosive fight that split the family business in two. Over the coming years, this disagreement divided their town— residents and businesses chose sides. Could such a...

In 2011, journalist Bruno Torturra covered a protest in São Paulo which turned ugly. His experience of being teargassed had a profound effect on the way he thought about his work, and he quit his job to focus on broadcasting raw,...

Self-driving cars have been “coming soon” for years. What’s so hard about making a machine that drives itself!?

The biggest challenge in a parasite's life is to move from one host to another. Intriguingly, many parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate the behavior of their hosts to improve their own survival -- sometimes even by direct...

Europe was in transition politically and culturally at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, we're looking at the dawn of modern science, and the rise of Modernism in the arts, especially in music, dance, and visual arts. We'll look...

Hank introduces us to oxygen - the element that makes it possible for most animals to live, but which is simultaneously responsible for a lot of bad things going on in our bodies.

SciShow graphics guy Louey Winkler discusses LED contact lenses and the implications of enhancing and assisting human beings with technology, and then attempts to stump Hank with a physics riddle. Jessi from Animal Wonders shares Stumpy...

Pet trackers, and lots of other electronics, have little cylinders inside them called ferrite beads. If they didn't, they'd probably be picking up the local traffic report instead.

After a long day working on the particle accelerator, you and your friends head to the arcade to unwind. The lights go out for a second, and when they come back, there before you gleams a foosball table. Always game, you insert your...

Economist Eleni Gabre-Madhin outlines her ambitious vision to found the first commodities market in Ethiopia. Her plan would create wealth, minimize risk for farmers and turn the world's largest recipient of food aid into a regional food...

Mister Brown and Squeaks open Valentines from a bunch of their animal pals!

By dissecting a cockroach ... yes, live on stage ... TED Fellow and neuroscientist Greg Gage shows how brains receive and deliver electric impulses -- and how legs can respond. (Launching a series on Awesome Nature) "The Cockroach...

Fun Fact: people can donate over half of their liver, and the tissue will grow back within a year! Knowing that, it seems pretty logical to assume that we could just keep donating and regrowing our livers over and over again, but is that...

Professor Fukan_, the famous scientist, has embarked on a new challenge - piloting around the world in a plane of his own design. There's just one problem: there's not enough fuel to complete the journey. Luckily, there are two other...

Neuroengineer ed Boyden wants to know how the tiny biomolecules in our brains generate emotions, thoughts and feelings -- and he wants to find the molecular changes that lead to disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer's. Rather than...

One of the most commonly googled questions in the world is why feces can be green. Well, Quick Questions has the answer!