It’s not like anyone thought head injuries were good for people, but the long term effects of concussions has researchers, coaches, and doctors concerned about the extra risks of some popular sports.

What would a city designed for the blind be like? Chris Downey is an architect who went suddenly blind in 2008; he contrasts life in his beloved San Francisco before and after -- and shows how the thoughtful designs that enhance his life...

What if you're in surgery and the power goes out? No lights, no oxygen -- and your anesthesia stops flowing. It happens constantly in hospitals throughout the world, turning routine procedures into tragedies. Erica Frenkel demos one...

Surgeons are required every day to puncture human skin before procedures — with the risk of damaging what's on the other side. In a fascinating talk, find out how mechanical engineer Nikolai Begg is using physics to update an important...

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...

Rodney Mullen is the godfather of street skating, and in this exuberant talk he shares his love of the open skateboarding community. He shows how the unique environments skaters play in drive the creation of new tricks -- fostering...

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...

As a young scientist, Catherine Mohr was on her dream scuba trip -- when she put her hand right down on a spiny sea urchin. While a school of sharks circled above. What happened next? More than you can possibly imagine. Settle in for...

How does memory work? And how does.... un-memory work? Our brain does a lot of remembering and forgetting every day, so you should probably make room for som info on how it works. You'll also get to meet some people who can't make...

In high school biology, we learn that humans are born with either XX or XY chromosomes, and that a person’s internal and external sex organs match those chromosomes. It turns out, however, that sex isn’t that straightforward.

In 1948, Spanish ophthalmologist Jose Ignacio Barraquer Moner was fed up with glasses. He wanted a solution for blurry vision that fixed the eye itself, without relying on external aids. The surgery he eventually devised was called...

Fun Fact: people can donate over half of their liver, and the tissue will grow back within a year! Knowing that, it seems pretty logical to assume that we could just keep donating and regrowing our livers over and over again, but is that...

When under anesthesia, you can't move, form memories, or -- hopefully -- feel pain. And while it might just seem like you are asleep for that time, you actually aren't. What's going on? Steven Zheng explains what we know about the...

What if you couldn’t remember anything past 30 seconds? Let us introduce you to a man named Henry Molaison who was diagnosed with anterograde amnesia. He couldn’t form new memories.

Today we are talking about 3 scientists who, through their collective inventions and discoveries, have saved millions of lives.

Night blindness is real, and it can be caused by any number of things that affect the complicated mechanics of your vision.

Your heart beats more than 100,000 times a day. In just a minute, it pumps over five liters of blood throughout your body. But unlike skin and bones, the heart has a limited ability to repair itself. So if this organ is severely damaged,...

When fashion model Geena Rocero first saw a photo of herself in a bikini, "I thought ... you have arrived!" As she reveals, that's because she was born with the gender assignment "boy." In this moving talk, Rocero tells the story of...

Even though doctors have been using general anesthesia for nearly 200 years, they haven’t really understood the details of how it temporarily shuts down your brain — until now.

Brain damage is usually a bad thing, but sometimes the best option is actually to damage the brain in very specific ways.

It's a common misconception that stomach ulcers are caused by emotional upset, psychological distress, or spicy food. Yet no convincing study has ever demonstrated that these factors directly cause ulcer disease. So what does cause...

An estimated 20 million cases of blindness worldwide are caused by cataracts, a curable condition affecting the lens that focuses images onto the eye's retina. But how are cataracts formed, and how can we prevent them? Andrew Bastawrous...

How do cancer cells grow? How does chemotherapy fight cancer (and cause negative side effects)? The answers lie in cell division. George Zaidan explains how rapid cell division is cancer's "strength" -- and also its weakness.

Gender should be the least remarkable thing about someone, but transgender people are still too often misunderstood. To help those who are scared to ask questions or nervous about saying the wrong thing, Jackson Bird shares a few ways to...