Maps have long helped us understand the world — now, they can help us shape it. Digital cartographer Peter Wilczynski introduces the Living Globe: a real-time, data-rich digital twin of Earth that fuses satellite imagery, sensor data and...

AI won’t replace storytellers — it will give them superpowers, says film director Jason Zada. Showing how new technology allows creators to turn wild ideas into cinematic worlds at warp speed, Zada and the TED audience dream up the...

It’s not enough to do important work — we need to know it truly matters, says journalist Jennifer Wallace. Drawing on her research into firefighters, caregivers and more, she shows how simple acts of acknowledgment and connection can...

In a moment that stunned the world in 2019, the famed Notre-Dame in Paris went up in flames, threatening the future of the centuries-old Gothic treasure. Philippe Villeneuve, the chief architect of the cathedral’s restoration, recounts...

On this Crash Course in World Mythology, Mike Rugnetta is teaching you about floods and deluges, specifically in China. In Chinese myth, flood stories pretty much all revolve around a guy named Yu the Great, or Yu the Engineer. In the...

In which Mike Rugnetta sits you down for a little talk about myth as a way to construct or reinforce social orders. Specifically, we're going to look today at stories from around the world that establish or amplify the idea that the...

The holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. But what if this theory is as mythical as the grail of legend? What if gravity isn’t weirdly quantum at all, but rather … just a bit messy? Or...

Quantum mechanics is our best theory of the fundamental nature of reality, but it's usually only distinguishable from familiar classical mechanics on the smallest scales. But it’s also possible that our entire galaxy is filled with a...

We have no idea what dark matter is, other than it’s some source of gravity that is completely invisible but exerts way more pull that all of the regular matter. More than all of the stars, all of the gas, all of the black holes…unless...

Spacetime on its smallest scales is a seething ocean of black holes and wormholes flickering into and out of existence—or so many physicists think has to be the case. But why should we take this spacetime foam seriously if we’ve never...

In order to see the faint light from objects in deepest space, astronomers go to the darkest places on the planet. In order to listen to their quite radio signals, they head as far from any radio-noisy humans as possible. But there’s...

It’s hard to interpret the strange results of quantum mechanics, though many have tried. Interpretations range from the outlandish—like the multiple universes of Many Worlds, to the almost mundane, like the very mechanical Pilot Wave...

Whenever we open a new window on the universe we discover something new. Whether it's figuring out how to see to greater distances like with telescopes, or down to smaller size-scales like with microscopes, or perhaps expanding our...

A fun nightmare sci-fi scenario is the sun being consumed by a black hole. Fortunately the chance of a black hole randomly wandering into our solar system is pretty tiny. That’s good news. But what if it’s already here, hiding in the...

It's not too often that a giant of physics threatens to overturn an idea held to be self-evident by generations of physicists. Well, that may be the fate of the famous Penrose Singularity Theorem if we're to believe a recent paper by Roy...

EMPs aren’t science fiction. Real militaries are experimenting on real EMP generators, and as Starfish Prime showed us, space nukes can send powerful EMPs to the surface. So what exactly is an EMP, and how dangerous are they?

In 1974 we sent the Arecibo radio message towards Messier 13, a globular cluster near the edge of the Milky Way, made up of a few hundred thousand stars. The message was mostly symbolic; we weren’t really expecting a reply. Yet surely...

Space seems fundamental. To build a universe, surely you need something to build it on or in. Many, maybe most physicists now think that the fabric of space emerges from something deeper. And perhaps the most existentially disturbing...

There are four fundamental forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Except maybe gravity is no more fundamental than the force of a stretched elastic band. Maybe gravity is just an entropic byproduct—an...

Of all the astronomical phenomena you can witness, the total solar eclipse has to be the most visceral--the most in-your-face reminder that our reality consists of giant balls of rock spinning around stars. It's also the eclipse and...

The deaths of massive stars results in one of the most beautiful and violent events in the universe: the supernova. But if these explosions occur too close to Earth their radiation can impact life and even trigger mass extinctions.

The humble proton may seem simple enough, and they’re certainly common. And protons are each made of three up or down quarks. Simple stuff, right? All except for that last part. Protons are actually made of many, many quarks that happen...

One of the most fundamental physics facts is that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all observers. But can we really be sure that the speed of light wasn’t different in the past, or perhaps in other parts of the universe? In...

To understand where we came from—how earth, the solar system, the galaxy became what they are today—we need to understand the beginning of time. For example, how did the first galaxies pull themselves together from the dark...