Phil Plait was on a Hubble Space Telescope team of astronomers who thought they may have captured the first direct photo of an exoplanet ever taken. But did the evidence actually support that? Follow along as Plait shows how science...

What happens when the way we buy, sell and pay for things changes, perhaps even removing the need for banks or currency exchange bureaus? That's the radical promise of a world powered by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and ethereum. We're...

What's the best way to get over heartbreak? Rapper and writer Dessa came up with an unconventional approach after a chance viewing of Helen Fisher's TED Talk about the brains of the lovestruck. In a wryly funny talk, she describes how...

New tech spawns new anxieties, says scientist and philosopher Grady Booch, but we don't need to be afraid an all-powerful, unfeeling AI. Booch allays our worst (sci-fi induced) fears about superintelligent computers by explaining how...

We’ve already learned a bit about substitution reactions in organic chemistry and the two different paths they can follow: SN1 and SN2. In order to better predict the products of a substitution reaction and understand how they work, we...

After he ended up on a watch list by accident, Hasan Elahi was advised by his local FBI agents to let them know when he was traveling. He did that and more ... much more.

The idea that the Moon is a blown-off chunk of the Earth is known as the giant impact hypothesis - but the presence of carbon on the Moon throws this hypothesis into question.

The Philae lander is awake! And it's sending us data straight from Comet 67P!

A small correction for the integer multiplication algorithm mentioned at the end. A “straightforward” application of FFT results in a runtime of O(N * log(n) log(log(n)) ). That log(log(n)) term is tiny, but it is only...

Are you having trouble with kidney stones? Well, the scientists might have found a fun way to help you. And here's some updates for our Earth's climate change!

Your dog might seem like a bit of a goof, but they might be capable of more tricks than you think. A new study from researchers in Hungary investigated whether dogs can distinguish between new and familiar languages.

Our Milky Way Galaxy once dined on the Sausage Galaxy, and Jupiter's auroras seem to be heavily influenced by one of its moons. It's a galaxy-eat-galaxy kind of universe out there!

What if we treated the risk of pandemics the same way we treat the risk of fires? In this eye-opening talk, infectious disease epidemiologist Jennifer B. Nuzzo unpacks how the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 sparked a cultural shift in how...

Self-driving cars were just the start. What's the future of big data-driven technology and design? In a thrilling science talk, Kenneth Cukier looks at what's next for machine learning -- and human knowledge.

Every day, we meet people and process our interactions--making inferences and developing beliefs about the world around us. In this lesson, Trevor Maber introduces us to the idea of a 'ladder of inference' and a process for rethinking...

In our tech-driven, interconnected world, we've developed new ways and rules to court each other, but the fundamental principles of love have stayed the same, says anthropologist Helen Fisher. Our faster connections, she suggests, are...

Onstage at TED2013, Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other -- using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Collecting global health data is an imperfect science: Workers tramp through villages to knock on doors and ask...

Today, we're going to discuss how numbers, like statistics, and visual representations like charts and infographics can be used to help us better understand the world or profoundly deceive. Data is a really powerful form of evidence...

We've talked a lot about modeling data and making inferences about it, but today we're going to look towards the future at how machine learning is being used to build models to predict future outcomes. We'll discuss three popular types...

Since the advent of genetic engineering, a lot of weird questions have cropped up, particularly with regard to what information a company can patent. Individual genes, as they are discovered, are now immediately patented and can be...

A mini-lesson about patterns in data.

Significant pieces of the globe are literally not on the map: they're missing from the most widely used mapping platforms, like Google Street View, leaving communities neglected of vital services and humanitarian aid. In this...

Trust: How do you earn it? Banks use credit scores to determine if you're trustworthy, but there are about 2.5 billion people around the world who don't have one to begin with -- and who can't get a loan to start a business, buy a home...