TED Talks
Carson Bruns: Could a tattoo help you stay healthy?
Can we make tattoos both beautiful and functional? Nanotechnologist Carson Bruns shares his work creating high-tech tattoos that react to their environment -- like color-changing ink that can tell you when you're getting a sunburn -- and...
TED Talks
TED: The secrets of spider venom | Michel Dugon
Spider venom can stop your heart within minutes, cause unimaginable pain -- and potentially save your life, says zoologist Michel Dugon. As a tarantula crawls up and down his arm, Dugon explains the medical properties of this potent...
TED Talks
Roger Stein: A bold new way to fund drug research
Believe it or not, about 20 years' worth of potentially life-saving drugs are sitting in labs right now, untested. Why? Because they can't get the funding to go to trials; the financial risk is too high. Roger Stein is a finance guy, and...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: 3 ways to end a virus | TED-Ed
Viruses are wildly successful organisms. There are about 100 million times as many virus particles on Earth as there are stars in the observable universe. Even so, viruses can and do go extinct. So, what is the possibility of the virus...
TED Talks
TED: How reliable is your memory? | Elizabeth Loftus
* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Jeff Leek and Lucy McGowan: This one weird trick will help you spot clickbait
Health headlines are published every day, sometimes making opposite claims from each other. There can be a disconnect between broad, attention-grabbing headlines and the often specific, incremental results of the medical research they...
TED Talks
TED: The brain may be able to repair itself -- with help | Jocelyne Bloch
Through treating everything from strokes to car accident traumas, neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch knows the brain's inability to repair itself all too well. But now, she suggests, she and her colleagues may have found the key to neural...
TED Talks
TED: We can start winning the war against cancer | Adam de la Zerda
Learn about the latest advances in the war against cancer from Stanford researcher Adam de la Zerda, who's working on some cutting-edge techniques of his own. using a remarkable imaging technology that illuminates cancer-seeking gold...
TED Talks
TED: Why helmets don't prevent concussions -- and what might | David Camarillo
What is a concussion? Probably not what you think it is. In this talk from the cutting edge of research, bioengineer (and former football player) David Camarillo shows what really happens during a concussion -- and why standard sports...
TED Talks
TED: A new superweapon in the fight against cancer | Paula Hammond
Cancer is a very clever, adaptable disease. To defeat it, says medical researcher and educator Paula Hammond, we need a new and powerful mode of attack. With her colleagues at MIT, Hammond engineered a nanoparticle one-hundredth the size...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Could one vaccine protect against everything? | TED-Ed
There's a vaccine being developed now that would protect you against every strain of the flu— even ones that don't exist yet. But influenza is constantly mutating, so is a universal vaccine even possible? And how do you design a vaccine...
TED Talks
Iain Hutchison: Saving faces: A facial surgeon's craft
Maxillofacial surgeon Iain Hutchison works with people whose faces have been severely disfigured. By pushing to improve surgical techniques, he helps to improve their lives; and by commissioning their portraits, he celebrates their...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How do ventilators work?
In the 16th century, physician Andreas Vesalius described how a suffocating animal could be kept alive by inserting a tube into its trachea and blowing air to inflate its lungs. Today, Vesalius’s treatise is recognized as the first...
TED Talks
Richard Weller: Could the sun be good for your heart?
Our bodies get Vitamin D from the sun, but as dermatologist Richard Weller suggests, sunlight may confer another surprising benefit too. New research by his team shows that nitric oxide, a chemical transmitter stored in huge reserves in...
TED Talks
Sara-Jane Dunn: The next software revolution: programming biological cells
The cells in your body are like computer software: they're "programmed" to carry out specific functions at specific times. If we can better understand this process, we could unlock the ability to reprogram cells ourselves, says...
TED Talks
Dan Ariely: Beware conflicts of interest
In this short talk, psychologist Dan Ariely tells two personal stories that explore scientific conflict of interest: How the pursuit of knowledge and insight can be affected, consciously or not, by shortsighted personal goals. When we're...
TED Talks
TED: This tiny particle could roam your body to find tumors | Sangeeta Bhatia
What if we could find cancerous tumors years before they can harm us -- without expensive screening facilities or even steady electricity? Physician, bioengineer and entrepreneur Sangeeta Bhatia leads a multidisciplinary lab that...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How do we determine the value of a life? | Rebecca L. Walker
To protect against a possible resurgence of smallpox, the US government is funding research to improve treatments and vaccines. And since it's unethical to expose people to a highly lethal virus, labs are using monkeys as research...
TED Talks
TED: How we'll fight the next deadly virus | Pardis Sabeti
When ebola broke out in March 2014, Pardis Sabeti and her team got to work sequencing the virus's genome, learning how it mutated and spread. Sabeti immediately released her research online, so virus trackers and scientists from around...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why is it so hard to cure the common cold? | TED-Ed
On average, adults catch more than 150 colds throughout their lives. Even with similar symptoms, the cause could be different each time. Common colds are caused by at least 8 different families of virus, each of which can have its own...
TED Talks
Siddharthan Chandran: Can the damaged brain repair itself?
After a traumatic brain injury, it sometimes happens that the brain can repair itself, building new brain cells to replace damaged ones. But the repair doesn't happen quickly enough to allow recovery from degenerative conditions like...
TED Talks
Patience Mthunzi: Could we cure HIV with lasers?
Swallowing pills to get medication is a quick, painless and often not entirely effective way of treating disease. A potentially better way? Lasers. In this passionate talk, TED Fellow Patience Mthunzi explains her idea to use lasers to...
TED Talks
TED: How we could teach our bodies to heal faster | Kaitlyn Sadtler
What if we could help our bodies heal faster and without scars, like Wolverine in X-Men? TED Fellow Kaitlyn Sadtler is working to make this dream a reality by developing new biomaterials that could change how our immune system responds...
SciShow
Genomics Has a Diversity Problem
Someday, the information in our genome could transform healthcare as we know it, but one major hurdle we have to get over is the lack of diversity in our studies.