TED Talks
Baratunde Thurston: How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time
Baratunde Thurston explores the phenomenon of white Americans calling the police on black Americans who have committed the crimes of ... eating, walking or generally "living while black." In this profound, thought-provoking and often...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: What makes something "Kafkaesque"? - Noah Tavlin
The term Kafkaesque has entered the vernacular to describe unnecessarily complicated and frustrating experiences, especially with bureaucracy. But does standing in a long line to fill out confusing paperwork really capture the richness...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The deadly irony of gunpowder - Eric Rosado
In the mid-ninth century, Chinese chemists, hard at work on an immortality potion, instead invented gunpowder. They soon found that this highly inflammable powder was far from an elixir of life -- they put it to use in bombs against...
MinuteEarth
How Do Some Waves Get SO Big?
All over the world, giant wave breaks appear because of underwater geology that supercharges their wave energy.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Ethical dilemma: The burger murders | George Siedel and Christine Ladwig
You founded a company that manufactures meatless burgers that are sold in stores worldwide. But you've recently received awful news: three people in one city died after eating your burgers. A criminal has injected poison into your...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Real life sunken cities - Peter Campbell
Though people are most familiar with Plato's fictional Atlantis, many real underwater cities actually exist. Peter Campbell explains how sunken cities are studied by scientists to help us understand the lives of our ancestors, the...
TED Talks
Tom Wujec: Learn to use the 13th-century astrolabe
Rather than demo another new technology, Tom Wujec reaches back to one of our earliest but most ingenious devices -- the astrolabe. With thousands of uses, from telling time to mapping the night sky, this old tech reminds us that the...
TED Talks
Michael Tubbs: The political power of being a good neighbor
Michael Tubbs is the youngest mayor in American history to represent a city with more than 100,000 people -- and his policies are sparking national conversations. In this rousing talk, he shares how growing up amid poverty and violence...
TED Talks
John Graham-Cumming: The greatest machine that never was
Computer science began in the '30s ... the 1830s. John Graham-Cumming tells the story of Charles Babbage's mechanical, steam-powered "analytical engine" and how Ada Lovelace, mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron, saw beyond its...
TED Talks
Sasa Vucinic: Why we should invest in a free press
A free press -- papers, magazines, radio, TV, blogs -- is the backbone of any true democracy (and a vital watchdog on business). Sasa Vucinic, a journalist from Belgrade, talks about his new fund, which supports media by selling "free...
TED Talks
Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China
Speaking at a TED Salon in London, Martin Jacques asks: How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise? The author of "When China Rules the World," he examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the...
MinuteEarth
Unintended Consequences | MinuteEarth Explains
In this collection of classic MinuteEarth videos, we learn that for pretty much every action we humans take, there’s an unintended consequence we didn’t see coming.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The greatest mathematician that never lived | Pratik Aghor
When Nicolas Bourbaki applied to the American Mathematical Society in the 1950s, he was already one of the most influential mathematicians of his time. He'd published articles in international journals and his textbooks were required...
TED Talks
Bina Venkataraman: The power to think ahead in a reckless age
In a forward-looking talk, author Bina Venkataraman answers a pivotal question of our time: How can we secure our future and do right by future generations? She parses the mistakes we make when imagining the future of our lives,...
TED Talks
Pico Iyer: What ping-pong taught me about life
Growing up in England, Pico Iyer was taught that the point of a game was to win. Now, some 50 years later, he's realized that competition can be "more like an act of love." In this charming, subtly profound talk, he explores what regular...
TED Talks
Bran Ferren: To create for the ages, let's combine art and engineering
When Bran Ferren was just 9, his parents took him to see the Pantheon in Rome — and it changed everything. In that moment, he began to understand how the tools of science and engineering become more powerful when combined with art, with...
TED Talks
TED: How we explore unanswered questions in physics | James Beacham
James Beacham looks for answers to the most important open questions of physics using the biggest science experiment ever mounted, CeRN's Large Hadron Collider. In this fun and accessible talk about how science happens, Beacham takes us...
TED Talks
David Hoffman: Sputnik mania
Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race -- and jump-started science and math...
TED Talks
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Lessons from past presidents
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about what we can learn from American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. Then she shares a moving memory of her own father, and of their shared love of baseball.
Crash Course
Russia, the Kievan Rus, and the Mongols Crash Course World History
In which John Green teaches you how Russia evolved from a loose amalgamation of medieval principalities known as the Kievan Rus into the thriving democracy we know today. As you can imagine, there were a few bumps along the road. It...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The myth of Gawain and the Green Knight | Dan Kwartler
It was Christmas in Camelot and King Arthur was throwing a party. In the midst of the revelry, a towering knight proposed a game. He challenged the warriors present to attack him with his own axe. If they could strike him down, they...
SciShow
Distant Volcanoes Collapsed Dozens of Empires
Volcanoes, climate change, and Chinese history may seem like three phrases spit out of a random word generator, but the three things are more inherently linked than one may assume.
TED Talks
TED: A creator-led internet, built on blockchain | Adam Mosseri
As digital assets like cryptocurrency and NFTs become more mainstream, design thinker and head of Instagram Adam Mosseri believes that creators are uniquely positioned to benefit. These blockchain-enabled technologies could remove the...
TED Talks
TED: Stand with Ukraine in the fight against evil | Garry Kasparov
Ukraine is on the front line of a war between freedom and tyranny, says chess grandmaster and human rights advocate Garry Kasparov. In this blistering call to action, he traces Vladimir Putin's rise to power and details his own path from...