There are over 170,000 words currently in use in the English language. Yet every year, about a thousand new words are added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Where do they come from, and how do they make it into our everyday lives?...

Today we’re going to talk about search engines, which are just AI systems that try to help us find what we’re looking for. Search engines can be the sort that serve up a list of results, like during a Google or Bing search, using web...

Nearly twenty years after the dot-com bubble burst, the internet is an essential piece of the modern world, with the public side mostly commanded by a few powerful companies.

People send 100 billion WhatsApp messages every day -- and they're all encrypted to protect them from potentially curious entities like companies, governments and even WhatsApp itself. With our increased reliance on digital communication...

You've probably heard this one before: Plastic is made from oil, and oil is made from dinosaurs, so a plastic dinosaur is made out of real dinosaur. It sounds pretty profound... but it's not that simple.

View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-hidden-network-that-makes-the-internet-possible-sajan-saini↵↵In 2012, a team of researchers set a world record, transmitting 1 petabit of data— that’s 10,000 hours of high-def video— over...

Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to differ. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.

We’ve talked a lot about advances in biotech. But none of those could have happened without advances in computing. It’s time to get back to data and explore the unlikely birth, strange life, and potential futures of the Internet. In this...

We love the internet! It's a wealth of information where we can learn about just about anything, but it's also kind of a pit of information that can be false or misleading. So, we're partnering with Mediawise and the Stanford History...

You're being watched. That sounded more sinister than I intended, but online, it's true. Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Netflix... the list goes on and on. They're watching what you do, what you shop for, what you watch... all of it. And...

We need a more considered approach to using social media for social justice, says writer and activist Ione Wells. After she was the victim of an assault in London, Wells published a letter to her attacker in a student newspaper that went...

The more we read and watch online, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake. It's as if we know more but understand less, says philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch. In this talk, he dares us to take...

Loneliness isn’t much fun, but it might also be harmful to your heart—not just in a metaphorical sense, but your actual physical heart, as well as some of your body's other functions.

What does farming have to do with invention and innovation? Permanent residences, division of labor, central government, and complex technologies--all essential for advancing civilizations--could not have been developed without the move...

John Maeda, former President of the Rhode Island School of Design, delivers a funny and charming talk that spans a lifetime of work in art, design and technology, concluding with a picture of creative leadership in the future. Watch for...

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to get distracted while studying - even when you know you really don't have time for Facebook, Snapchat, Cookie Clicker, or whatever else is calling you? This week we're going to help you get a better...

Email is one of the most essential things to our life. But do you actually know what happens when you click the "send" button, and how it's sent to your friends?

Doubling human life expectancy in a century is our greatest achievement, says author Steven Johnson. How did we make it happen -- and can we keep it going? Backed by fascinating historical anecdotes, he shares some life-lengthening...

Plants have their own interconnected networks that allow them to communicate with each other, sometimes over considerable distances!

If you want to improve your wireless internet signal, we've got a few things to keep in mind.

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. "The free, online, mainstream pornography that teenagers are most likely to see is a completely terrible form of...

Social media has become our new home. Can we build it better? Taking design cues from urban planners and social scientists, technologist Eli Pariser shows how the problems we're encountering on digital platforms aren't all that new --...

Today, we're going to talk about how the Internet works. Specifically, how that stream of characters you punch into your browser's address bar, like "youtube.com", return this very website. Just to clarify we're talking in a broader...

Today we start a three episode arc on the rise of a global telecommunications network that changed the world forever. We’re going to begin with computer networks, and how they grew from small groups of connected computers on LAN networks...