It's been estimated that 1 in 10 works of fine art are forged or misattributed. The truth is, no one really knows how much fake art is out there, because many art counterfeiters are so skilled that their paintings are almost...

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, talks about his quest to make all knowledge computational -- able to be searched, processed and manipulated. His new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has no lesser goal than to model and explain the...

When it comes to big problems like climate change, we tend to focus on big solutions -- but many of the best ideas come from people on the ground, facing day-to-day conservation battles. Sharing her effort to protect the Leseur ecosystem...

TED curator Chris Anderson shares his obsession with questions that no one (yet) knows the answers to. A short intro leads into two questions: Why can't we see evidence of alien life? And how many universes are there?

In which Stan Muller talks about some of the problems in Intellectual Property law as it exists today. He'll also teach you a little about how IP law applies to everyone's favorite media platform, YouTube. Lastly, he'll do a little...

This week on CC Myth, Mike Rugnetta is teaching you about mythical trees. There are lots of trees in myth, and we've touched on some of them before, but today we're going to focus on three trees from three different traditions. We'll...

Until roughly 1100, there were relatively few places of knowledge-making. Monasteries and abbeys had special rooms called scriptoria where monks copied manuscripts by hand. But the biggest places where knowledge was made were the Gothic...

Some people don’t have or use visual imagination, or the “mind’s eye.” Many with this condition, called aphantasia, might not even realize that they’re experiencing the world differently, but this difference offers a new window into how...

TED Fellow Nighat Dad studies online harassment, especially as it relates to patriarchal cultures like the one in her small village in Pakistan. She tells the story of how she set up Pakistan's first cyber harassment helpline, offering...

"Confidence is the necessary spark before everything that follows," says educator and activist Brittany Packnett. In an inspiring talk, she shares three ways to crack the code of confidence -- and her dream for a world where...

For the first time, we are forced to consider the real risk of destabilizing the entire planet, says climate impact scholar Johan Rockström. In a talk backed by vivid animations of the climate crisis, he shows how nine out of the 15 big...

"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 --...

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato recounted the legend of the Ring of Gyges in "Republic." The story of the ring surfaces as the philosopher, Socrates, and his student discuss why people act justly: is it because...

Ink that conducts electricity; a window that turns from clear to opaque at the flip of a switch; a jelly that makes music. All this stuff exists, and Catarina Mota says: It's time to play with it. Mota leads us on a tour of surprising...

The Romans developed a lot of infrastructure like roads and aqueducts to both help their cities flourish and to... you know... be better at war. But the interesting thing about Roman Engineering is how it was almost all focused on Techne...

Teachers emotionally support our kids -- but who's supporting our teachers? In this eye-opening talk, educator Sydney Jensen explores how teachers are at risk of "secondary trauma" -- the idea that they absorb the emotional weight of...

Scientists have developed a new AI that can teach itself how to be the master of an ancient board game.

Deep inside Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lies a 240 page tome. Recently carbon dated to around 1420, its pages feature looping handwriting and hand drawn images seemingly stolen from a dream. It is called the Voynich...

When General Stanley McChrystal started fighting al Qaeda in 2003, information and secrets were the lifeblood of his operations. But as the unconventional battle waged on, he began to think that the culture of keeping important...

As the sun rises in 55 BCE, Camma lays two pigeons on the altar at the center of her village. She wrings the birds' necks and cuts them open to examine their entrails for divine messages. Camma is a druid. She conducts religious rites,...

Poet and policymaker Aaron Maniam describes how the language we use to explain COVID-19 shapes the way we think about it -- whether it's as a "war," a "journey" or, as he suggests, an "ecology." He encourages us to explore a range of...

From the very large to the very small, the universe is an amazing place. Here's my favorite ways to explore its scale.

In 2006, open-learning visionary Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions (now called OpenStax), an open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials...

At TED@Cannes, Gary Wolf gives a 5-min intro to an intriguing new pastime: using mobile apps and always-on gadgets to track and analyze your body, mood, diet, spending -- just about everything in daily life you can measure -- in...