Here's a shocking statistic: 50 to 80 percent of people in the criminal justice system in the US have had a traumatic brain injury. In the general public, that number is less than five percent. Neuropsychologist Kim Gorgens shares her...

A few weeks before his release from prison, Jarrell Daniels took a class where incarcerated men learned alongside prosecutors. By simply sitting together and talking, they uncovered surprising truths about the criminal justice system and...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Our fingerprints are what make us unique -- but they're also home to a world of information hidden in molecules...

The event that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago might be the most famous mass extinction ever, but it's not the only one in Earth’s history, nor is it the worst... not by a long shot.

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. The world is becoming increasingly open, and that has implications both bright and dangerous. Marc Goodman paints a...

What drives someone to kill in cold blood? What goes through the murderer's mind? And what kind of a society breeds such people? Over 150 years ago Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky took these questions up in what would become one of the...

In the United States, the agencies that govern prisons are often called 'Department of Corrections.' And yet, their focus is on containing and controlling inmates. Dan Pacholke, Deputy Secretary for the Washington State Department of...

For most jobs, it's understood that you can be fired _ whether for crime, incompetence, or just poor performance. But what if your job happens to be the most powerful position in the country _ or the world? That's where impeachment comes...

What's the harm in buying a knock-off purse or a fake designer watch? According to counterfeit investigator Alastair Gray, fakes like these fund terrorism and organized crime. Learn more about the trillion-dollar underground economy of...

Psychopathic killers are the basis for some must-watch TV, but what really makes them tick? Neuroscientist Jim Fallon talks about brain scans and genetic analysis that may uncover the rotten wiring in the nature (and nurture) of...

In the late 1950s and the early to mid-1960s, a Muslim minister named Malcolm X rose to prominence in the United States during the struggle for Civil Rights. Malcolm X was a member of and spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, and he was...

In 1991, Shaka Senghor shot and killed a man. He was, he says, "a drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol." Jailed for second degree murder, that could very well have been the end of the story. But it wasn't. Instead,...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Here's a TED first: an animated Socratic dialog! In a time when irrationality seems to rule both politics and...

Nalini Nadkarni challenges our perspective on trees and prisons -- she says both can be more dynamic than we think. Through a partnership with the state of Washington, she brings science classes and conservation programs to inmates, with...

Damon Horowitz teaches philosophy through the Prison University Project, bringing college-level classes to inmates of San Quentin State Prison. In this powerful short talk, he tells the story of an encounter with right and wrong that...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. In an engaging and personal talk -- with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks -- human rights...

The beauty of hackers, says cybersecurity expert Keren Elazari, is that they force us to evolve and improve. Yes, some hackers are bad guys, but many are working to fight government corruption and advocate for our rights. By exposing...

When she became the attorney general of New Jersey in 2007, Anne Milgram quickly discovered a few startling facts: not only did her team not really know who they were putting in jail, but they had no way of understanding if their...

In the United States today, juries decide less than 4% of criminal cases and less than 1% of civil cases filed in court. At the same time, jury systems in other countries are growing. So what happened in the US? And could the...

So today Craig is going to talk about where our political opinions come from. Of course, most people’s politics are grounded in their ideologies, but there are also other external influences such as the government itself, interest...

With almost 100 mystery novels, each one a cleverly constructed puzzle box of clues, misdirection, and human drama, Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her eccentric detectives, clever clues, and simplified suspects...

In which John Green continues discussing George Orwell's 1984. Today we're talking about what the novel 1984 has to say about what some have called today's surveillance society. We'll also look at the idea that language can be used as a...

Daniel Reisel studies the brains of criminal psychopaths (and mice). And he asks a big question: Instead of warehousing these criminals, shouldn't we be using what we know about the brain to help them rehabilitate? Put another way: If...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography -- to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise....