Air travel opens our eyes to the world, but it also comes at a high cost to the environment. Piloting us into a future of green aviation, innovator Ryah Whalen shares three ways to lower the industry's carbon footprint through smarter...

Jessi and Squeaks are getting ready to go on a big trip to a different state... but that mean they're going to have to leave the Fort for a long time! Join them one last time and learn why it can be so sad to say goodbye, and why it can...

Olympic National Park is temporarily closed as Washington, the US, and the world work to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus. We filmed this series in early January and are currently at home practicing social distancing. We hope...

A long time ago in New York City, Steve Addis stood on a corner holding his 1-year-old daughter in his arms; his wife snapped a photo. The image has inspired an annual father-daughter ritual, where Addis and his daughter pose for the...

Sometimes your body won't let you forget that spicy burrito you had yesterday!

If wormholes aren't just convenient plot devices for science fiction writers, they're still much weirder than anything we could make up.

In the deep, dark ocean, many sea creatures make their own light for hunting, mating and self-defense. Bioluminescence expert Edith Widder was one of the first to film this glimmering world. At TED2011, she brings some of her glowing...

Mister Brown gets a video message from his friend, Ariel Waldman, a real scientist who went all the way to Antarctica to study life that lives under the ice!

Robin Chase founded Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business. That was one of her smaller ideas. Here she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a mesh network vast as...

Road trips can be fun, but have you ever gotten sick from riding in a car? That's called motion sickness, and it turns out that it's a really common problem!

The answer to why wasabi is such a nose burner has to do with a compound that researchers are trying to use in a creative way!

Hank talks about James Cameron's visit to the very deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger deep of the Mariana Trench.

Creating a Mars colony is a dream for many people, but it comes with some unique and challenging problems.

Anything that is worth pursuing is going to require us to suffer, just a little bit, says surf photographer Chris Burkard, as he explains his obsession with the coldest, choppiest, most isolated beaches on earth. With jawdropping photos...

We’re having a birthday party for one of the world’s most famous scientists, Charles Darwin!!!

SpaceX is spearheading space travel for consumers and one day hopes to take people to the moon!

TEDmakes a documentary films that explore trauma

Aziz Abu Sarah is a Palestinian activist with an unusual approach to peace-keeping: Be a tourist. The TED Fellow shows how simple interactions with people in different cultures can erode decades of hate. He starts with Palestinians...

Scientists sent the ingredients to brew beer and age whisky into space. What they got back was surprising.

Professor Fukan_, the famous scientist, has embarked on a new challenge - piloting around the world in a plane of his own design. There's just one problem: there's not enough fuel to complete the journey. Luckily, there are two other...

It's been one (tropical/sidereal/anomalous) year since I uploaded the very first It's Okay To Be Smart. Here's everything that's happened since!

You like space exploration, and we like space exploration. So why aren't we investigating our closest to galactic neighbor, the triple star system Alpha Centauri? Is it time to give interstellar travel a shot? How would we do it? Hank...

Nearly 200 species of songbirds migrate south for winter, some traveling up to 7,000 miles. No easy task, the annual journey is dangerous to birds due to landscape change -- so much so, that only half the birds that migrate south will...

NASA just announced the five finalists for the next Discovery missions. It looks like we’ll be sending probes to Venus, studying asteroids, or both!