Could we use the energy from light and sound to detect disease? TED Fellow Lei Li shares the exciting promise of photoacoustic imaging: an affordable, painless and accurate method of converting light into sound in order to create...

Whether you're a Beyonce fan or faithfully following Phish- your personal taste in music is probably all linked to your memories.

T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, founders of the health nonprofit GirlTrek, are on a mission to reduce the leading causes of preventable death among Black women -- and build communities in the process. How? By getting one million...

Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity -- and offers some stirring encouragement to make it...

Hank explores the science behind the topics of the day, including a look at the current "pandemic" of concussions in professional sports and new insights into what really caused the worst plagues in human history, and what it portends...

We need to eat food to fuel our bodies, but this special slug, called emerald elysia, can make food using sunlight - just like plants do!



All organisms have external parts. Different animals use their body parts in...

If you give them any thought at all, you probably associate them with sewers, cargo ships and maybe animated movies about animals that want to become French chefs. But for almost 200 years, tens of millions of rats have played a central...

Our mood is influenced in many ways by our environment, and researchers have discovered a possible connection between the pollen in our air and a rise in suicide.

Our descendants own the future, but the decisions and actions we make now will tremendously impact generations to come, says philosopher Roman Krznaric. From a global campaign to grant legal personhood to nature to a groundbreaking...

What if your hour-long commute was reduced to just minutes? That's the promise of the hyperloop: a transit system designed around a pod that zooms through a vacuum-sealed space (roughly the size of a subway tunnel) at hyper-speed,...

In 4 minutes, atmospheric chemist Rachel Pike provides a glimpse of the massive scientific effort behind the bold headlines on climate change, with her team -- one of thousands who contributed -- taking a risky flight over the rainforest...

Legendary hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz is on a mission to revolutionize the way artists do business. In this glorious talk, he shares some of the ways he's helping fellow creatives thrive, including a roving art fair that gives artists...

Chris Anderson, then the editor of Wired, explores the four key stages of any viable technology: setting the right price, gaining market share, displacing an established technology and, finally, becoming ubiquitous.

A liberal arts education is critical to forming true leaders, says university head Patrick Awuah -- because it builds decision-making skills, an ethical framework and a broad vision. Awuah himself left a career at Microsoft in the US to...

Our first video ever! Agriculture, hula hoops, SARS, and THIS video: how long did they take to get around the earth?

Chris Anderson gave this talk in 2002, prior to taking over leadership of TED. Co-founder Richard Saul Wurman was leaving, and TED's future was in the balance. He seeks to persuade TEDsters that what was then a for-profit conference had...

Kevin Allocca is YouTube's Head of Culture & Trends, and he has deep thoughts about silly web video. In this talk from TEDYouth, he shares the 4 reasons a video goes viral.

Starfish can regrow lost arms, and salamanders can sprout new limbs. So why can't we? Sci Show explains the science of regeneration, and explores the limitations the humans face -- and are trying to go beyond.

As the line between the physical and digital worlds blur, so does the line between real-world and virtual sports. Reframing our understanding of competition, data-driven technologist James Hodge explains how far esports (like virtual...

Food already in cupboards, supermarkets, & warehouses could feed humanity for 4 months, but potential food - berries, termites & krill - could extend that by another...

In a few decades, scientists predict that a widespread, severe drought will sweep across western North America -- and it'll last for decades.

Hank profiles this year's Nobel laureates in science, whose achievements have helped us understand questions as small as how our cells transport materials, and as big as why matter exists at all.

Massive amounts of dust manage to travel all the way across the ocean, creating some powerful and surprising global effects!

Michael Aranda sits in for Hank to talk about the forces of nature that conspired to form Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest tropical cyclone ever measured. Plus, what's neutrino astronomy? You're about to find out, because it's a thing now,...