Between 1485 and 1551, England was hit by at least five epidemics of sweating sickness. But after that, the disease supposedly vanished off the face of the Earth. With fatality rates as high as 90% according to some sources (perhaps...

Where do you draw the line between work and life? Writer Simone Stolzoff explores the problem with defining yourself by your job — and shows what it takes to reclaim your time and sense of meaning beyond the office.

In which John Green teaches you WHY World War I started. Or tries to anyway. With this kind of thing, it's kind of hard to assign blame to any one of the nations involved. Did the fault lie with Austria-Hungary? Germany? Russia? Julius...

Why Do We Have More Boys Than Girls

Meet MethaneSAT: the satellite circling Earth right now to track global emissions from methane: a highly potent, short-term greenhouse gas. Environmental advocate Millie Chu Baird details the heat-trapping side effects of a planet full...

When it comes to a beverage menu, I don't usually want to see "tears" on the list. But these three animals do, including bees whose favorite drink is human tears!

More than a decade after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, its operators are dumping once-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean. Is that OK?<br/>

While there's still a lot that astrophysicists don't know about the Big Bang, there are some things we do know. So today, let's get caught up on the Big Bang basics.

Fifteen years ago, Uruguay was experiencing an energy crisis brought on by its reliance on fossil fuels; today, the nation produces 98 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (and even exports extra energy to neighboring...

Conservation champion and TED Fellow Adjany Costa is on a mission to empower Indigenous communities. Instead of imposing pre-designed policy and plans on local people, she says, conservation efforts should center those who know the land...

In which John Green teaches you about Sub-Saharan Africa! So, what exactly was going on there? It turns out, it was a lot of trade, converting to Islam, visits from Ibn Battuta, trade, beautiful women, trade, some impressive...

Greenhouse gases are colorless, scentless and invisible, making them exceptionally hard to measure. Fortunately, some tools and techniques can help -- one of the most powerful being artificial intelligence, says green technologist...

What if we could build a global waste disposal service for carbon? In this forward-thinking talk, carbon capture advisor Bas Sudmeijer proposes building CO2 networks: partnerships between cities around the world that would share the cost...

All around the world, millions of people are flipping a switch, plugging in, and pressing an 'on' button every second. So how much electricity does humanity use? And how much will we need in the future? Discover how much energy it takes...

Here's something to think about the next time you clean your windshield.

We didn't understand how our bodies processed pain until recently. From hot peppers to slamming your hand in a drawer, recent research suggests that pain from various sources can be processed in a surprisingly similar way.

In the uS, the press has a right to publish secret information the public needs to know, protected by the First Amendment. Government surveillance has made it increasingly more dangerous for whistleblowers, the source of virtually every...

Published scientific studies can motivate research, inspire products, and inform policy. However, recent studies that examined dozens of published pharmaceutical papers managed to replicate the results of less than 25% of them - and...

Hank clarifies, corrects, and generally straightens out the origins of the terrific heat inside the Earth. It's not only from the collisions and pressure that date back to Earth's formation, it also involves the transport of heavier...

Energy is neither created nor destroyed - and yet the global demand for it continues to increase. But where does energy come from, and where does it go? Joshua M. Sneideman examines the many ways in which energy cycles through our...

Scott Fraser studies how humans remember crimes -- and bear witness to them. In this powerful talk, which focuses on a deadly shooting at sunset, he suggests that even close-up eyewitnesses to a crime can create "memories" they could not...

In which John Green teaches you WHY World War I started. Or tries to anyway. With this kind of thing, it's kind of hard to assign blame to any one of the nations involved. Did the fault lie with Austria-Hungary? Germany? Russia? Julius...

About 1200 years ago, Earth may have experienced one of the rarest and most powerful cosmic events a planet can be exposed to: a gamma-ray burst. If it did, well, let's just say that we, as living things on Earth, are lucky it wasn't worse.

The architecture of the social internet itself tells us not to be patient - to load more tweets, to hit refresh for new posts, and to click the top search results. But just because information is new, or algorithmically determined to be...