This is the story of how our planet rescued itself from extreme conditions in the Cretaceous Period, at the cost of essentially suffocating the oceans for half-a-million years.

400 Parts in a Million - The World's Biggest Experiment

Hundreds of millions of migrant workers travel within their countries to seek out means of survival — often leaving behind all they know for months or even years. Many face poverty and exploitation, and they need a robust social safety...

The nara melon is as juicy as any other, so how is it able to grow in the hyper-arid Namib desert?

Plants make oxygen using photosynthesis, but what happens to the air when those trees drop their leaves in winter?

Plants make oxygen using photosynthesis, but what happens to the air when those trees drop their leaves in winter?

The James Webb Space Telescope has launched! But it was a very long road to get to this point, and we’ve been following the progress for a decade!

T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, founders of the health nonprofit GirlTrek, are on a mission to reduce the leading causes of preventable death among Black women -- and build communities in the process. How? By getting one million...

Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In...

Some believe that increased carbon emissions could produce faster growing plants, but some scientists worry that it could mean more toxic and invasive species.

T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, founders of the health nonprofit GirlTrek, are on a mission to reduce the leading causes of preventable death among Black women -- and build communities in the process. How? By getting one million...

News about climate change is often full of doom, guilt, and anxiety. This can make many people reluctant to pay attention to or discuss it. We asked former Vice President Al Gore to help us find a different way to talk about climate change.

If insects suddenly morphed into large beings and decided to wage war on us, there's no doubt that humans would lose. There are an estimated 10 quintillion individual insects on earth, outnumbering humans by more than a billion to one....

The nara melon is as juicy as any other, so how is it able to grow in the hyper-arid Namib desert?

Biochemist Gregory Petsko makes a convincing argument that, in the next 50 years, we'll see an epidemic of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's, as the world population ages. His solution: more research into the brain and its...

For some reason, says educator Al Vernacchio, the metaphors for talking about sex in the US all come from baseball -- scoring, getting to first base, etc. The problem is, this frames sex as a competition, with a winner and a loser....

With its ability to make boring cellphone photos look "vintage" and "artsy", the mobile application Instagram has exploded worldwide. Derided by its detractors as a tool for making bad photos worse, we take an alternate view and argue...

5 Sci-Fi Futures We Actually Have to Worry About

A million dollars is a ton of money. But how much does it weigh?

In the developing world, access to incubators is limited by cost and distance, and millions of premature babies die each year. TED Fellow Jane Chen shows an invention that could keep millions of these infants warm -- a design that's...

SciShow Space News tells you about NASA's latest launch -- the first mission dedicated to measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- and gives you a primer on what the June solstice really is!

If you had to walk a mile for a jug of water every day, as millions of people do, it's unlikely you'd use that precious water to bathe. Young entrepreneur Ludwick Marishane tells the amazing, funny story of how he invented a cheap, clean...

Josh Silver delivers his brilliantly simple solution for correcting vision at the lowest cost possible -- adjustable, liquid-filled lenses. At TEDGlobal 2009, he demos his affordable eyeglasses and reveals his global plan to distribute...

The universe is incredibly old, astoundingly vast and populated by trillions of planets -- so where are all the aliens? Astronomer Stephen Webb has an explanation: we're alone in the universe. In a mind-expanding talk, he spells out the...