This week Craig Benzine discuses bureaucracies. Bureaucracies tend to be associated with unintelligible rules and time-wasting procedures, but they play an important, though controversial, role in governing. From the FDA to the EPA,...

Humanity is on its way to creating a "black ball": a technological breakthrough that could destroy us all, says philosopher Nick Bostrom. In this incisive, surprisingly light-hearted conversation with Head of TED Chris Anderson, Bostrom...

Daniel Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia -- meaning that his perception of words, numbers and colors are woven together into a new way of perceiving and understanding the world. The author of "Born on a Blue Day,"...

Solving a discrete math puzzle, namely the stolen necklace problem, using topology, namely the Borsuk Ulam theorem

Let’s try to help John Green Bot sound a bit more like the real John Green using Natural Language Processing. Today, we're going to code a program that takes a one word prompt and then completes the sentence that sounds like something...

Proteins are remarkable molecular machines: they digest your food, fire your neurons, power your immune system and so much more. What if we could design new ones, with functions never before seen in nature? In this remarkable glimpse of...

2013 was a year of hype for MOOCs (massive open online courses). Great big numbers and great big hopes were followed by some disappointing first results. But the head of edX, Anant Agarwal, makes the case that MOOCs still matter -- as a...

Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold, and Earth is just right, says planetary scientist Dave Brain. But why? In this pleasantly humorous talk, Brain explores the fascinating science behind what it takes for a planet to host life -- and why...

Paul Andersen describes his philosophy for group size. One is for learning, active and private. Two is for teaching, it goes both ways. Three is for working, the jobs divided. Four is for nothing but wasting the days.

We will get out of this pandemic, says Maria Van Kerkhove, the COVID-19 Technical Lead of the World Health Organization (WHO). The question is how fast -- and if we'll take what we've learned from the past two years and apply it to the...

Backed by mathematical analysis, network theorist Albert-László Barabási explores the hidden mechanisms that drive success -- no matter your field -- and uncovers an intriguing connection between your age and your chance of making it big.

Aliens! Could humans really be alone in this expansive universe? And if we're not, how come we've never made contact with other intelligent life? Everyone's thought about it; especially members of the scientific community. Join Gabe as...

Every once in a while, all the oaks or spruces or other plants in a region suddenly produce a tremendous bounty of seeds – up to 100 times more than usual. But why do they do it, and how do they all manage to sync up?...

When a piece of cryptography is described as having "256-bit security", what exactly does that mean? Just how big is the number 2^256?

Today's wildfires burn, on average, twice the amount of land they did in 1970. The reason? We've been working too hard to put them out. Want to learn more about the topic in this week's video? Here's a keyword/phrase to get your googling...

How do you navigate life's growing number of transitions with meaning, purpose and skill? Writer Bruce Feiler offers a powerful way to handle uncertain, painful and confusing times -- or "lifequakes", as he calls them. Learn how to equip...

A while back, we were tasked with answering some of the world's most asked questions. So here, in one convenient location, are some of those questions and their answers.

Ever feel like there's a international team of bad guys changing all of the easily remembered chemical names and turning them into test-failing, number-infused, pain in the neck names? Well... you're not wrong. IUPAC exists but try to...

Join the Amoeba Sisters in discovering how to use a dichotomous key to identify organisms. This video also touches on the importance of scientific names. Table of Contents: Intro 00:00 What is a Dichotomous Key? 0:29 Scientific Names vs....

At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what's coming in the next 5,000 days?

What do you think of people in poverty? Maybe what Jessica Jackley once did: "they" need "our" help, in the form of a few coins in a jar. The co-founder of Kiva.org talks about how her attitude changed -- and how her work with microloans...

When two people are trying to make a deal -- whether they’re competing or cooperating -- what’s really going on inside their brains? Behavioral economist Colin Camerer shows research that reveals how badly we predict what others are...

Matthew O’Reilly is a veteran emergency medical technician on Long Island, New York. In this talk, O’Reilly describes what happens next when a gravely hurt patient asks him: “Am I going to die?”

When molecules collide, chemical reactions can occur -- causing major structural changes akin to getting a new arm on your face! George Zaidan and Charles Morton playfully imagine chemical systems as busy city streets, and the colliding...