Earth's orbit has a bit of a litter problem. Hank outlines a few ways scientists have thought of to help clean things up.

OSIRIS-REx is launching soon and it will become the first American spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid!

How to think of 3x3 matrices as transforming 3d space

Without realizing it, we're fluent in the language of pictures, says illustrator Christoph Niemann. In a charming talk packed with witty, whimsical drawings, Niemann takes us on a hilarious visual tour that shows how artists tap into our...

Stand by for an animated exploration of the famous Fermi Paradox. Given the vast number of planets in the universe, many much older than Earth, why haven't we yet seen obvious signs of alien life? The potential answers to this question...

It's time to heat things up! LITERALLY! It's time for Hank to talk about the history of Thermodynamics!!! It's messy and there are a lot of people who came up with some ideas that worked and other that didn't and then some ideas that...

Working in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, he began his career as a neurologist before pioneering the discipline of psychoanalysis, and his influence towers above that of all other psychologists in the public eye. But was Sigmund...

Why do fingers become pruney when they get wet? Likely, for the same reasons that tires have treads. Mark Changizi examines the evolutionary reasons for pruney fingers, while exploring natural and manmade phenomena, like river networks,...

No one has ever conclusively seen a proton turn into other, lighter particles, but fifty million liters of water in Japan might change that and our ideas about subatomic particles forever.

International aid groups make the same mistakes over and over again. David Damberger analyzes his own engineering failure in India -- and calls for his friends in the development sector to publicly admit, scrutinize and learn from their...

Paul Andersen explains the importance of argumentation in improving both understanding and design. This video begins with a discussion of the heliocentric and geocentric model of the Universe that eventually lead to the Copernican...

History is written by the victors, as the saying goes -- but what would it look like if it was written by everyone? Journalist and TED Fellow Mikhail Zygar is on a mission to show us with Project1917, a "social network for dead people"...

Today, we’re going to talk about how HUGE programs with millions of lines of code like Microsoft Office are built. Programs like these are way too complicated for a single person, but instead require teams of programmers using the tools...

You might think your grandma who wakes up at 4am just needs less sleep than younger people. Not so! Studies suggest there are some bizarre reasons older people rise at the crack of dawn, including something called brain sand!

Everyone knows the name Charles Darwin, but his lesser known frenemy, Alfred Russel Wallace, was developing a lot of the same ideas around the same time.

Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase's investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. He's made some unexpected discoveries along the way.

Melissa Marshall brings a message to all scientists (from non-scientists): We're fascinated by what you're doing. So tell us about it -- in a way we can understand. In just 4 minutes, she shares powerful tips on presenting complex...

Business management in China is changing, says consultant Fang Ruan. Learn how Chinese entrepreneurs -- long guided by Confucianism's emphasis on authority and regulation -- are now looking to Taoist philosophy for a new, dynamic...

Rocks are more than just rocks, they're the key to Earth's history!

Climate change is happening we all need to get serious about limiting our carbon dioxide emissions! At the same time, scientists are looking for plan B because we might need it.

We're always learning more about far away galaxies and exoplanets, but we still have some pretty big mysteries hanging out here in the solar system, like why Venus spins the way it does.

Hank talks about population genetics, which helps to explain the evolution of populations over time by combing the principles of Mendel and Darwin, and by means of the Hardy-Weinberg equation.

Exoplanets have taught us a lot more about planets than our solar system could ever teach us, from what happens when they’re born, to what happens when their stars die.

What do 24,000 ideas look like? Ecologist Eric Berlow and physicist Sean Gourley apply algorithms to the entire archive of TEDx Talks, taking us on a stimulating visual tour to show how ideas connect globally.