Nearly 200 species of songbirds migrate south for winter, some traveling up to 7,000 miles. No easy task, the annual journey is dangerous to birds due to landscape change -- so much so, that only half the birds that migrate south will...

To feed everyone in the future, we may need to disrupt 10,000 years of farming practices and turn agriculture into a closed system.

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You use paper towels to dry your hands every day, but chances are, you're doing it wrong. In this enlightening and funny short talk, Joe Smith reveals the trick to perfect paper towel technique.

The constellation of Orion has one shoulder marked by a bright red star called Betelgeuse, but over the last year it's dimmed enough to notice with the naked eye! and mission scientists are shedding some light on how Arrokoth and other...

Social entrepreneur Bernhard Kowatsch shares real-life examples of how a business approach focused on accelerating tech (like a blockchain-supported way to bring food to refugees or a machine that fortifies flour at small mills in...

Hank has good news about NASA.

They say mom's never far away, but I don't think this is what they had in mind. In this episode, learn about the mind-blowing connection you share with your mom. A little bit of you never leaves the other!

On February 10, 2015, Suzanne Barakat's brother Deah, her sister-in-law Yusor and Yusor's sister Razan were murdered by their neighbor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The perpetrator's story, that he killed them over a traffic dispute,...

Organ transplants aren’t new, but scientists are still making breakthroughs in transplant success rates and the sources of the organs.

In 1925, 20 teams of sled dogs braved the harsh Alaskan winter to carry a package of diphtheria antitoxin over 1000 km to save a small town from a deadly outbreak!

Your brain relies a lot on context to tell you what sounds are bouncing around in your ears, and without enough of that context it can get a little confused.

It’s wintertime in the Northern Hemisphere, which means cold weather, shorter days, and… new relationships? It’s known as cuffing season, and there are actual psychological reasons you may be more inclined to settle down with a romantic...

Jeff Smith spent a year in prison. But what he discovered inside wasn't what he expected -- he saw in his fellow inmates boundless ingenuity and business savvy. He asks: Why don't we tap this entrepreneurial potential to help...

The world's population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years -- and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth. This is the paradoxical answer that Hans Rosling unveils at TED@Cannes using...

We've worked as a team - remotely - for seven years, and we're sharing some of our favorite tips for making it work.

Imagine the hottest day you've ever experienced. Now imagine it's six, 10 or 12 degrees hotter. According to climate researcher Alice Bows-Larkin, that's the type of future in store for us if we don't significantly cut our greenhouse gas...

What if tiny microparticles could help us solve the world's biggest problems in a matter of minutes? That's the promise -- and magic -- of quantum computers, says Matt Langione. Speaking next to an actual IBM quantum computer, he...

Fire seasons can be bad enough on their own, but it turns out sometimes forest fires that appeared to be dead, turn out to have just been lying in wait.

It's spring where Jessi and Squeaks live, and with the spring comes a really cool part of our planet's journey around the sun: the spring equinox!

At age 16, journalist and filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas found out he was in the United States illegally. Since then, he's been thinking deeply about immigration and what it means to be a US citizen -- whether it's by birth, law or...

In the early 19th century, a young Agaidika teenager named Sacajawea was enlisted by explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to aid her husband Toussaint Charbonneau as a guide to the Western United States. Karen Mensing debunks...

Hank gets to the bottom of two studies reporting high sea ice coverage and snowmass in Antarctica in the same year that the Arctic has reported a record low of sea ice. What is going on here?

Airplanes use a lot of fuel, which means a lot of CO2 emissions. So, to help reduce the impact of aviation, engineers are looking to animals (like sharks) for some ways they can make airliners more efficient.

By analyzing survivorship curves over the centuries, we can learn what’s changed about how - and when - humans die.