What's it like to discover a galaxy -- and have it named after you? Astrophysicist and TED Fellow Burcin Mutlu-Pakdil lets us know in this quick talk about her team's surprising discovery of a mysterious new galaxy type.

FEED ME! In this episode of Crash Course Kids, Sabrina has a chat with us about what living things eat to get energy. What makes something an omnivore, or a carnivore, or an herbivore? And how do plants fit in to all of this? This first...

Globalization is on its deathbed, says economist Mike O'Sullivan. The question now is: What's next? Tracing the historical successes and failures of globalization, O'Sullivan forecasts a new world order where countries come together over...

We've talked a lot about modeling data and making inferences about it, but today we're going to look towards the future at how machine learning is being used to build models to predict future outcomes. We'll discuss three popular types...

In a robot lab at TEDGlobal, Raffaello D'Andrea demos his flying quadcopters: robots that think like athletes, solving physical problems with algorithms that help them learn. In a series of nifty demos, D'Andrea show drones that play...

In this video Paul Andersen shows conceptual thinking in a mini-lesson on quantifying and modeling change. Two examples are included in the video and two additional examples are included in the linked thinking slides. ...

In this video Paul Andersen shows conceptual thinking in a mini-lesson on the conservation of energy. Two examples are included in the video and two additional examples are included in the linked thinking slides. ...

It’s probably not a surprise that many ancient texts are a bit worn out and tattered, and that makes deciphering what they say quite a task. But with new computer tech and artificial intelligence, we are getting much clearer glimpses of...

economic growth has been slowing for the past 50 years, but relief might come from an unexpected place -- a new form of manufacturing that is neither what you thought it was nor where you thought it was. Industrial systems thinker...

It’s been a great week for space explosions! Astronomers learned more about the mechanism that causes novas by looking at the nova V906 Carinae, and the brightest supernova ever recorded shed some new light on pulsation pair-instability.

An oblate spheroid is a special case of an ellipsoid where two of the semi-principal axes are the same size.

This week on Crash Course: History of the Scientific Revolution—astronomical anomalies accrued. Meanwhile, in Denmark—an eccentric rich dude constructed not one but two science castles! And his humble German assistant synthesized a lot...

Africa's youth is coming of age rapidly, but job growth on the continent isn't keeping up. The result: financial insecurity and, in some cases, a turn towards insurgent groups. In a passionate talk, agricultural entrepreneur Kola Masha...

Astronomer Aomawa Shields searches for clues that life might exist elsewhere in the universe by examining the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. When she isn't exploring the heavens, the classically trained actor (and TED Fellow) looks...

On earth it rains water, on the exoplanet WASP-76b, it rains liquid iron, but no matter what planet you're on, the rain drops there have a lot more in common than you might think.

In this video Paul Andersen explains how you can use Lewis Diagrams and VSEPR Models to make predictions about molecules. The Lewis diagrams are a two-dimensional representations of covalent bonds and the VSEPR models show how the...

You're on an airplane when you feel a sudden jolt. Outside your window nothing seems to be happening, yet the plane continues to rattle you and your fellow passengers as it passes through turbulent air in the atmosphere. What exactly is...

Great ideas are like electricity -- they snap into sharp focus and sprint from place to place. What's the best way to capture them? Bozoma Saint John, Chief Marketing Officer at Netflix, makes a compelling case to move away from an...

You may have heard about the Six Degrees of Separation phenomenon, but it isn't just a fun celebrity game, it helps scientists understand the spread of epidemics, the structure of the internet, and even the neural networks in your brain

Do you think a red minivan would be more expensive than a beige one? Now what if the car was something sportier like a corvette? Last week we introduced the ANOVA model which allows us to compare measurements of more than two groups, and...

Hank talks to some VIPs from CERN about the question on everyone's mind: does the Higgs Boson particle exist? And describes how CERN is going about finding the answer.

Hank interviewed Sergio Bertolucci on October 11, 2011 and Rolf...

Two new studies challenge what we thought we knew about the first humans in the Americas, sending the archaeology community buzzing. Could people have been on these continents 10 to 15 thousand years earlier than archaeologists...

Why do we argue? To out-reason our opponents, prove them wrong, and, most of all, to win! Right? Philosopher Daniel H. Cohen shows how our most common form of argument -- a war in which one person must win and the other must lose --...

Researchers found water in the atmosphere of an exoplanet about 110 light-years away, and there's another rock from interstellar space flying through our solar system!