Imagine a neuroscientist who has only ever seen black and white things, but she is an expert in color vision and knows everything about its physics and biology. If, one day, she sees color, does she learn anything new? Is there anything...

TED Fellow Alicia Eggert takes us on a visual tour of her work -- from a giant sculpture on an uninhabited island in Maine to an installation that inflates only when people hold hands to complete an electric current. Her work explores...

Imagine being by yourself in the dead center of a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without a rope to catch you if you fall. For professional rock climber Alex Honnold, this dizzying scene marked the culmination of a decade-long dream. In a...

As America becomes more and more multicultural, Rich Benjamin noticed a phenomenon: Some communities were actually getting less diverse. So he got out a map, found the whitest towns in the USA -- and moved in. In this funny, honest,...

Frustrated by not being able to sing two notes at the same time, musical inventor Beardyman built a machine to allow him to create loops and layers from just the sounds he makes with his voice. Given that he can effortlessly conjure the...

John Legend is on a mission to transform America's criminal justice system. Through his Free America campaign, he's encouraging rehabilitation and healing in our prisons, jails and detention centers -- and giving hope to those who want...

The earliest time measurements were observations of cycles of the natural world, using patterns of changes from day to night and season to season to build calendars. More precise time-keeping eventually came along to put time in more...

From sauna pants to fat jigglers, people used to try to lose weight in some rather unconventional ways. They really did not work.

In this video Paul Andersen explains how an object with mass placed in a gravitational field experiences a gravitational force. On the Earth this gravitational force is known as weight. The gravitational force is equal to the product...

Every day, we meet people and process our interactions--making inferences and developing beliefs about the world around us. In this lesson, Trevor Maber introduces us to the idea of a 'ladder of inference' and a process for rethinking...

The world needs clean water, and more and more, we're pulling it from the oceans, desalinating it, and drinking it. But what to do with the salty brine left behind? In this intriguing short talk, TED Fellow Damian Palin proposes an idea:...

I believe that losing my hearing was one of the greatest gifts I've ever received, says elise Roy. As a disability rights lawyer and design thinker, she knows that being Deaf gives her a unique way of experiencing and reframing the world...

Almost a billion people worldwide live in informal communities and slums, often without basic infrastructure like clean water, toilets or adequate roads. Urban planner Smruti Jukur Johari breaks down myths about these communities and...

What if you could search the surface of the Earth the same way you search the internet? Will Marshall and his team at Planet use the world's largest fleet of satellites to image the entire Earth every day. Now they're moving on to a new...

Just how small are atoms? And what's inside them? The answers turn out to be astounding, even for those who think they know. This fast-paced animation uses spectacular metaphors (imagine a blueberry the size of a football stadium!) to...

Air pollution knows no borders -- even in your own body, says public health expert María Neira. In this startling talk, she describes how the microscopic particles and chemicals you breathe affect all your major organs (including your...

If we hope to one day leave Earth and explore the universe, our bodies are going to have to get a lot better at surviving the harsh conditions of space. Using synthetic biology, Lisa Nip hopes to harness special powers from microbes on...

In a 1990's study, participants recalled getting lost in a shopping mall as children. Some shared these memories in vivid detail, but there was one problem: none of these people had actually gotten lost in a mall. They produced these...

Current medical treatment boils down to six words: Have disease, take pill, kill something. But physician Siddhartha Mukherjee points to a future of medicine that will transform the way we heal.

Thunder is not something you normally associate with a winter storm. However, if the conditions are right, you might experience thundersnow.

Other worlds don't seem very welcoming to us Earthlings, and it can be hard to practice our off-world explorations from millions of kilometers away. But Earth also has its fair share of hostile places that we can use to prepare for those...

What’s with all the "G"s and why do we keep having to develop new ones to use our phones in this technology.

When a piece of cryptography is described as having "256-bit security", what exactly does that mean? Just how big is the number 2^256?

Forget stitches -- there's a better way to close wounds. In this talk, TED Fellow Joe Landolina talks about his invention -- a medical gel that can instantly stop traumatic bleeding without the need to apply pressure. (Contains medical...