Here's a stat worth knowing: In the UK, 63% of men who finish short-term prison sentences are back inside within a year for another crime. Helping them stay outside involves job training, classes, therapy. And it would pay off handsomely...

Corn currently accounts for more than one tenth of our global crop production. And over 99% of cultivated corn is the exact same type: Yellow Dent #2. This means that humans grow more Yellow Dent #2 than any other plant on the planet. So...

Hank tells us three things we probably didn't know about the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

In the pitch-black night, stung by jellyfish, choking on salt water, singing to herself, hallucinating … Diana Nyad just kept on swimming. And that's how she finally achieved her lifetime goal as an athlete: an extreme 100-mile swim from...

In this touching talk, Ash Beckham offers a fresh approach to empathy and openness. It starts with understanding that everyone, at some point in their life, has experienced hardship. The only way out, says Beckham, is to open the door...

Thanks to strontium, oxygen, and rings in a tusk, scientists now have evidence that extinct mastodons may have participated in yearly migrations.

Gamma-ray bursts are one of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy, but the mystery began on accident, thanks to the Cold War!

At TED2012, filmmaker Karen Bass shares some of the astonishing nature footage she's shot for the BBC and National Geographic -- including brand-new, previously unseen footage of the tube-lipped nectar bat, who feeds in a rather unusual...

Could the same mechanism used to accelerate vaccine development work for spurring solutions to the climate crisis? Sustainability innovator Stacy Kauk introduces the billion-dollar fund to supercharge the carbon removal market, which...

It's getting really cold where Jessi and Squeaks live, and that has her thinking about a super cool animal that's always ready for super cold weather: Reindeer!

What’s irrational and never ends? Pi! Hank explains how we need pi to explain some of the most basic but most important principles of the universe, in honor of Pi Day.

Alzheimer’s isn’t contagious -- at least, in the sense that you can’t catch it from being around somebody who has it. But, it turns out, it is transmissible, just not directly.

Last week, an asteroid impact drill was conducted, which demonstrated what might happen if an asteroid hit us within the decade. It didn't go quite as well as we would like.

Using simple, delightful illustrations, designer Stefan Sagmeister shares his latest thinking on happiness -- both the conscious and unconscious kind. His seven rules for life and design happiness can (with some customizations) apply to...

When Joshua Prager was 19, a devastating bus accident left him a hemiplegic. He returned to Israel twenty years later to find the driver who turned his world upside down. In this mesmerizing tale of their meeting, Prager probes deep...

Hank Green brings in 2016 with some space missions to look forward to!

SpaceX is spearheading space travel for consumers and one day hopes to take people to the moon!

As the popularity of remote working continues to spread, workers today can collaborate across cities, countries and even multiple time zones. How does this change office dynamics? And how can we make sure that all employees, both at...

As oil and gas companies continue to make record profits off of the same forces driving climate chaos, war and soaring energy bills, it's become clear that boom times for the fossil fuel industry are bad times for the rest of us, says...

Decades ago, few pediatricians had heard of autism. In 1975, 1 in 5,000 kids was estimated to have it. Today, 1 in 68 is on the autism spectrum. What caused this steep rise? Steve Silberman points to “a perfect storm of autism awareness”...

Imagine a group of people. How big do you think the group would have to be before there's more than a 50% chance that two people in the group have the same birthday? The answer is - probably lower than you think. David Knuffke explains...

Hank talks about the scary new drug that's led to some recent incidences of goat stabbing, as well as other tragedies - bath salts. We learn how it works and ask the important question: why?

Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor,...

Scott Dinsmore quit a job that made him miserable, and spent the next four years wondering how to find work that was joyful and meaningful. He shares what he learned in this deceptively simple talk about finding out what matters to you —...