Towering 85 meters above the Norwegian countryside, Mjøstårnet is the world's tallest wooden building, made almost entirely from the trees of neighboring forests. But as recently as the end of the 20th century, engineers thought it was...

This video is about how I designed and made my own custom mute guitar pedal for my clip-on mic and piezo pickup on my violin (fiddle). The mic is an AT Pro35 phantom powered XLR condensor microphone, and the pickup is a Fishman V200...

What's cooler: A vaccine for one of the deadliest bacterial infections around or a holodeck? Well, this week we got a step closer to BOTH!

Danielle Wood leads the Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab, where she works to tear down the barriers that limit the benefits of space exploration to only the few, the rich or the elite. She identifies six technologies...

So how can a game teach us about engineering? Pretty easily! When you're trying to solve a game, or a puzzle, or whatever, you will have a bunch of variables. The trick is knowing how to change one variable at a time to see what changes....

Natalie Jeremijenko's unusual lab puts art to work, and addresses environmental woes by combining engineering know-how with public art and a team of volunteers. These real-life experiments include: Walking tadpoles, texting "fish,"...

The creation of tiny robots could enable the exploration of new frontiers, from the tightest spaces in the human body to the most remote ecosystems. Here are 5 little bots that draw inspiration from nature to get the job done.

Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility...

How can animation convey complex, intangible concepts? A visual metaphor, or an idea represented through imagery, can take an idea as massive as Big Data and tie it to the familiar depiction of a growing tree. TED-Ed animators explain...

Simpson's Paradox Part 2. This video is about how to tell whether or not university admissions are biased using statistics: aka, it's about Simpson's Paradox again! REFERENCES: Original Berkeley Grad Admissions Paper:...

Is teleportation possible? Could a baseball transform into something like a radio wave, travel through buildings, bounce around corners, and change back into a baseball? Oddly enough, thanks to quantum mechanics, the answer might...

Chemical plants create many of the materials found in everyday items, from the shoes you wear to the car you drive to the cell phone in your pocket. But the massive carbon footprint from chemical manufacturing is leading to climate...

As the Roman Empire flourished, Scandinavians had small settlements and no central government. Yet by the 11th century, they had spread far from Scandinavia, gaining control of trade routes throughout Europe, conquering kingdoms as far...

The Romans developed a lot of infrastructure like roads and aqueducts to both help their cities flourish and to... you know... be better at war. But the interesting thing about Roman Engineering is how it was almost all focused on Techne...

This is episode 8 of our animated series "Think Like A Coder." This 10-episode narrative follows a girl, Ethic, and her robot companion, Hedge, as they attempt to save the world. The two embark on a quest to collect three artifacts and...

We have personal computing -- why not personal biotech? That's the question biologist Ellen Jorgensen and her colleagues asked themselves before opening Genspace, a nonprofit DIY bio lab in Brooklyn devoted to citizen science, where...

Born in 1731 to freed slaves on a farm in Baltimore, Benjamin Banneker was obsessed with math and science. And his appetite for knowledge only grew as he taught himself astronomy, mathematics, engineering, and the study of the natural...

Flanked by two powerful nations, the English Channel has long been one of the world’s most important maritime passages. Yet for most of its history, crossing was a dangerous prospect. Engineers proposed numerous plans for spanning the...

Bridges need to be functional, safe and durable, but they should also be elegant and beautiful, says structural engineer Ian Firth. In this mesmerizing tour of bridges old and new, Firth explores the potential for innovation and variety...

Algae plus salt water equals ... fuel? At TEDxNASA@SiliconValley, Bilal Bomani reveals a self-sustaining ecosystem that produces biofuels -- without wasting arable land or fresh water.

"We will start inhabiting outer space," says Angelo Vermeulen, crew commander of a NASA-funded Mars simulation. "It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years, but it's going to happen." In this charming talk, the TED Senior Fellow...

It was the dawn of 1863, and London's not-yet-opened subway system - the first of its kind in the world - had the city in an uproar. Most people thought the project, which cost more than 100 million dollars in today's money, would never...

Is it better to walk or run when it's cold out? If you run, then you have to deal with wind, wind chill, etc, but your body generates more heat. If you stay still, standing or walking slowly, you don't generate as much heat, but don't...

Researcher Kwabena Boahen is looking for ways to mimic the brain's supercomputing powers in silicon -- because the messy, redundant processes inside our heads actually make for a small, light, superfast computer.