Townspeople are demanding that a corrupt merchant's collection of 30 rubies be confiscated to reimburse the victims of his schemes. The king announces that the fine will be determined through a game of wits between the merchant and the...

Fossils found around the world suggest that multi-cellular life was not only present before the Cambrian Explosion, it was much more elaborate and diverse than anyone thought. This is the story of the sudden burst of diversity that...

TED Fellow and urban designer Mitchell Joachim presents his vision for sustainable, organic architecture: eco-friendly abodes grown from plants and -- wait for it -- meat.

Fast food was invented to help us keep up with our fast-paced world. But it’s also had some unintended psychological consequences and can influence our choices in situations that don’t have anything to do with food.

As a global community, we all want to end poverty. Mia Birdsong suggests a great place to start: Let's honor the skills, drive and initiative that poor people bring to the struggle every day. She asks us to look again at people in...

How do we know what the air is like on planets we haven't visited? This video explains how to see air from 150 light years away. Thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope project at the Space Telescope Science Institute for supporting...

What should a community do with its unused land? Plant food, of course. With energy and humor, Pam Warhurst tells at the TEDSalon the story of how she and a growing team of volunteers came together to turn plots of unused land into...

Learn all about teeth! What kinds we have, how they help us, and how human teeth are different from other animals!

Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor leads a thoughtful and history-backed examination of one of the most divisive words in the English language: the N-word. Drawing from personal experience, she explains how reflecting on our points of...

How does a nation reconcile when its identity is at odds with its policies? Ali Noorani traces the arc of the US immigration debate to show a safer and more compassionate way forward, highlighting why centering human dignity creates...

From London to Tokyo, climate change is causing cities to sink -- and our modern concrete infrastructure is making us even more vulnerable to severe flooding, says landscape architect and TED Fellow Kotchakorn Voraakhom. But what if we...

We've been making particle accelerators for more than a century and have accelerated particles to more than 99.9999% the speed of light. But our accelerators are nothing compared to some of the ones we've found in nature!

Koalas are pretty darn cute, but...they aren’t the brightest bulb on the continent. They will only eat eucalyptus leaves off the branch. On a plate, a koala won’t recognize their one and only food. Yet, somehow, koalas are still alive....

On the weekend of April 29th and 30th this year, a series of thunderstorms slammed the southern and midwestern US. SciShow News takes a look at those deadly storms using the latest, high-resolution data from the NOAA's GOES-16 weather...

Ah, romantic love; beautiful and intoxicating, heart-breaking and soul-crushing... often all at the same time! If romantic love has a purpose, neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet _ but over the course of history, some of...

Tesla's Autopilot system is the most advanced available right now, but it has limitations, and some of those limitations might be us.

In your brain the right side controls the left half of your body and vice versa. We still aren't sure why this is, but some scientists have come up with a pretty bizarre explanation: that some ancient vertebrate ancestor was born with...

"Life comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it." In this funny, enlightening talk, educational psychologist Peter Doolittle details the importance --...

Only four species in the cat family can roar: lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars. And zoologists are pretty sure those four species can't purr. But why?

Whether it's a car in the background of Braveheart or the inconsistent cliff in Jurassic Park, movies tend to have mistakes. Why don't we notice them more often?

Having feelings isn't a sign of weakness -- they mean we're human, says producer and activist Nikki Webber Allen. Even after being diagnosed with anxiety and depression, Webber Allen felt too ashamed to tell anybody, keeping her...

How can cities help save the future? Alex Steffen shows some cool neighborhood-based green projects that expand our access to things we want and need -- while reducing the time we spend in cars.

Bladeless fans can look like magic. How does all that air come out of that empty ring?! Well, it turns out that bladeless fans are more like a conventional fan than you might think, but that doesn't mean there isn't some really cool...

Scientists have worked out how likely it is that distant planets can see earth, and we are learning new ways to study the magnetic fields of galaxies.