TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Gerrymandering: How drawing jagged lines can impact an election - Christina Greer
District lines, and the groups of voters within them, may seem arbitrary, but a lot of thought (and political bickering) is put into these carefully drawn lines. From "packing" a district to "cracking" a district--learn how the shape of...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why you procrastinate even when it feels bad | TED-Ed
The report you've been putting off is due tomorrow. It's time to buckle down, open your computer ... and check your phone. Maybe watch your favorite YouTube channel? Or maybe you should just start in the morning? This is the cycle of...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Joshua W. Pate: The mysterious science of pain
In 1995, the British Medical Journal published a report about a builder who accidentally jumped onto a nail, which pierced straight through his steel-toed boot. He was in such agonizing pain that any movement was unbearable. But when the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you outsmart the fallacy that started a witch hunt? | Elizabeth Cox
It's 1950. Anti-communist sentiment in the United States is at an all-time high. Senator Joseph McCarthy claims he has a list of communists who are influencing government policy. He makes his first accusation without providing any...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Group theory 101: How to play a Rubik's Cube like a piano - Michael Staff
Mathematics explains the workings of the universe, from particle physics to engineering and economics. Math is even closely related to music, and their common ground has something to do with a Rubik's Cube puzzle. Michael Staff explains...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Valentin Hammoudi: How tall can a tree grow?
Reaching heights of over 100 meters, Californian sequoias tower over Earth's other 60,000 tree species. But even these behemoths seem to have their limits: no sequoia on record has been able to grow taller than 130 meters. So what...
TED-Ed
How does ultrasound work? | Jacques S. Abramowicz
In a dark cave, bats can't see much. But even with their eyes shut, they can navigate rocky topography at incredible speeds. This is because bats aren't just guided by their eyes, but rather, by their ears. It may seem impossible to see...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How to get better at video games, according to babies | Brian Christian
In 2013, a group of researchers wanted to create an AI system that could beat every Atari game. They developed a system called Deep Q Networks (DQN) and less than two years later, it was superhuman. But there was one notable exception....
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Would you pass the wallet test? | TED-Ed
Picture this: you're working a shift in a hotel lobby when someone approaches the front desk. They found a lost wallet around the corner, but they're in a rush and don't have time to follow up. Looking at the wallet you see it contains a...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Cicadas: The dormant army beneath your feet - Rose Eveleth
Every 13 or 17 years, billions of cicadas emerge from the ground to molt, mate and die. Adult cicadas only live a few weeks above ground, but you'd be hard pressed to ignore them -- they are extremely loud! Rose Eveleth explains...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The Myth of Hercules: 12 labors in 8-bits - Alex Gendler
Hercules - son of Zeus and champion of humankind - stricken with a temporary curse of madness, has just committed the most unspeakable crime imaginable. Seeking to atone for the deaths of his family, Hercules must complete twelve...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The loathsome, lethal mosquito - Rose Eveleth
Everyone hates mosquitos. Besides the annoying buzzing and biting, mosquito-borne diseases like malaria kill over a million people each year (plus horses, dogs and cats). And over the past 100 million years, they've gotten good at their...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How do you know you exist? - James Zucker
How do you know you're real? Is existence all just a big dream? Has some mad scientist duped us into simply believing that we exist? James Zucker investigates all of these questions (and more) in this mind-boggling tribute to Rene...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why should you read "Moby Dick"? | Sascha Morrell
A mountain separating two lakes. A room papered floor to ceiling with bridal satins. The lid of an immense snuffbox. These seemingly unrelated images take us on a tour of a sperm whale's head in Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." Though the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What’s a squillo, and why do opera singers need it?
An orchestra fills an opera house with music, but a singer’s voice soars above the instruments. Its melody rings out across thousands of patrons— all without any assistance from a microphone. How is it possible that a single voice can be...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Oxygen's surprisingly complex journey through your body - Enda Butler
Oxygen forms about 21% of the air around us. In your body, oxygen forms a vital role in the production of energy in most cells. But if gases can only efficiently diffuse across tiny distances, how does oxygen reach the cells deep inside...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The invisible motion of still objects - Ran Tivony
Many of the inanimate objects around you probably seem perfectly still. But look deep into the atomic structure of any of them, and you'll see a world in constant flux - with stretching, contracting, springing, jittering, drifting atoms...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Harvey Milk's radical vision of equality - Lillian Faderman
Learn about the life and tragic death of gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay public official. -- By 1973, Harvey Milk had already been many things: naval officer, high school teacher, bit-part actor and...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: How do we study living brains? - John Borghi and Elizabeth Waters
As far as we know, there's only one thing in our solar system sophisticated enough to study itself: the human brain. But this self-investigation is challenging because a living brain is shielded by skull, swaddled in tissue, and made up...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How corn conquered the world | Chris A. Kniesly
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...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Diagnosing a zombie: Brain and body - Tim Verstynen & Bradley Voytek
Zombies eat brains. They are also, like all of us, driven by brain functions. What is happening in their brains to make them act as they do? In this intriguing dialogue, Tim Verstynen & Bradley Voytek apply the various human medical...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Mysteries of vernacular: Earwig - Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel
An earwig is neither an ear nor a wig; it is an insect. Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel explain how folklore gave this bug its name, combining entomology with etymology.
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Mysteries of vernacular: Lady - Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel
Why do we call women ladies? Well, etymologically-speaking, the word comes from the Old English words for hlaf (bread) and daege (maid), which, combined, mean the female head of the household and eventually indicated high social...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The myth of Sisyphus - Alex Gendler
Sisyphus was both a clever ruler who made his city prosperous, and a devious tyrant who seduced his niece and killed visitors to show off his power. While his violation of the sacred hospitality tradition greatly angered the gods, it was...