At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets...

SciShow describes the fascinating science of Darwin's little darlings: meat-eating plants. Learn about their many different types, how they catch and eat their prey, and how scientists think they evolved.

SciShow News explains an ominous record that Homo sapiens just broke: the highest levels of carbon dioxide emissions, the leading factor in global warming. Hank explains what it means, and what we can do.

From taking your files ransom to foiling uranium enrichment, here are five more computer viruses that you really want to avoid.

What drove David Sengeh to create a more comfortable prosthetic limb? He grew up in Sierra Leone, and too many of the people he loves are missing limbs after the brutal civil war there. When he noticed that people who had prosthetics...

Sometimes, small things make a huge impact. After studying how bees in urban environments can survive by navigating small land patches, ecologist Amanda Schochet was inspired to build MICRO, a network of portable science museums the size...

The good news is it's now clearly cheaper to save the planet than to ruin it, says engineer and investor John Doerr. "The bad news is: we are fast running out of time." In this conversation with climate policy expert Hal Harvey, the two...

We don’t know what happens to stuff when it gets sucked into a black hole, but in the same instance, we don’t know what happens to the black hole. There’s a possibility that sucked up stuff might actually give the black hole “quantum hair”.

The traditional approach to work needs a redesign, says economist Juliet Schor. She's leading four-day work week trials in countries like the US and Ireland, and the results so far have been overwhelmingly positive: from increased...

How could the most abundant bird in North America go extinct so quickly? Short answer: us.

This week, scientists turned to an unlikely source to try to solve the problem of antibiotic resistance, and got a peek at the lifestyle of some of the very first mammals... by studying their teeth.

In 2019, Google announced that they had achieved quantum supremacy - but what does that mean? And does it even matter?

As of 2020, the world's biggest lithium-ion battery is hooked up to the Southern California power grid and can provide enough power for about 250,000 homes. But it's actually not the biggest battery in the world: a pair of lakes are. How...

In some parts of the world, girls are as likely to be married off or trafficked as they are to be educated. Photojournalist and TED Fellow Smita Sharma thoughtfully depicts overlooked girls and young women, while making sure not to...

The so-called Mayan long count calendar predication of the apocalypse is based a fundamental MISUNDERSTANDING of Mayan calendars and society. It's so far off base that scientific and anthropological experts can dismiss it with laugh....

The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world. In a talk filled with glorious images, he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories.

Until recently, many teachers only got one word of feedback a year: "satisfactory." And with no feedback, no coaching, there's just no way to improve. Bill Gates suggests that even great teachers can get better with smart feedback -- and...

In 1969, Buzz Aldrin’s historical step onto the moon leapt mankind into an era of technological possibility. The awesome power of technology was to be used to solve all of our big problems. Fast forward to present day, and what's...

Chris Milk uses innovative technologies to make personal, interactive, human stories. Accompanied by Joshua Roman on cello and McKenzie Stubbert on piano, Milk traces his relationship to music and art -- from the first moment he...

The Internet has transformed the front lines of war, and it's leaving governments behind. As security analyst Rodrigo Bijou shows, modern conflict is being waged online between non-state groups, activists and private corporations, and...

In the early days of the Cold War, it was difficult to send and receive messages across the globe. Before the US launched its first satellite in January 1958, the military tried a creative solution: bouncing radio waves off the Moon.

Today we're going to talk about LARPs or live action role-playing games. Larping tends to conjure up the image of a bunch of nerds hitting each other with foam weapons but it's much more than that. LARPs merge performance, community, and...

To fight climate change, we need to clean up the global electricity system by replacing fossil fuel power plants with clean generation -- right? Climate author Solomon Goldstein-Rose thinks we need to do much more than that. Replacement...

Thousands of languages thrive across the globe, yet modern speech technology -- with all of its benefits -- supports just over a hundred. Computational linguist Kalika Bali dreams of a day when technology acts as a bridge instead of a...