Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan developed a curriculum for their students to build a computer, piece by piece. When they put the course online -- giving away the tools, simulators, chip specifications and other building blocks -- they...

In elections, your vote may be influenced by design of the ballot itself, especially when you don’t have strong feelings about which candidate to elect.

There is an epidemic of HIV, and with it an epidemic of bad laws -- laws that effectively criminalize being HIV positive. At the TEDxSummit in Doha, TED Fellow Shereen El-Feki gives a forceful argument that these laws, based in stigma,...

Two SciShow hosts go head-to-head in a battle to figure out who will be the reigning champion for this era of SciShow Quiz Show!

Taking lessons from a historical pattern called "Thucydides's Trap," political scientist Graham Allison shows why a rising China and a dominant United States could be headed towards a violent collision no one wants -- and how we can...

How counting in Ternary can solve a variant of the Tower's of Hanoi puzzle, and how this gives rise to a beautiful connection to Sierpinski's triangle.

Art history is far from set in stone. Engineer Maurizio Seracini spent 30 years searching for Leonardo da Vinci's lost fresco "The Battle of Anghiari," and in the process discovered that many paintings have layers of history hidden...

Restaurants have a whole bucket-load of tricks up their sleeves to get you to spend more money.

Venice is sinking. To save it, Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and, well, make architecture that grows itself. She proposes a not-quite-alive material that does its own repairs and sequesters...

Ah, romantic love; beautiful and intoxicating, heart-breaking and soul-crushing... often all at the same time! If romantic love has a purpose, neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet _ but over the course of history, some of...

Over the last two decades, the wind power industry has grown at a dizzying pace. (Fun fact: a single rotation from one of the world's most powerful wind turbines can generate enough electricity to charge more than 1,400 cell phones.)...

Google can find something for you on the other side of the world in less than a second. Why does your personal computer take so much longer?

What if manipulating body mass wasn't just the stuff of epic comic book stories? Is it scientifically possible to manipulate your body mass? In this series, Joy Lin tackles six superpowers and reveals just how scientifically realistic...

Within each of us are two selves, suggests David Brooks in this meditative short talk: the self who craves success, who builds a r_sum_, and the self who seeks connection, community, love -- the values that make for a great eulogy....

More than half of the world's population already lives in cities, and another 2.5 billion people are projected to move to urban areas by 2050. The way we build new cities will be at the heart of so much that matters, from climate change...

In ancient Greece, violent internal conflict between border neighbors and war with foreign invaders was a way of life, and Greeks were considered premier warriors. Sparta, specifically, had an army of the most feared warriors in the...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. As a black woman from a tough part of the Bronx who grew up to attain all the markers of academic prestige, Dena...

Taxonomy is a powerful tool, and one that modern biology wouldn't be able to function without. But trying to shoehorn the messy, complicated web of interrelationships that is biology into neat boxes has resulted in a pretty messy tree of...

This video is about how life arose and what its main function or purpose in the universe seems to be. Thanks to Sean Carroll for collaborating on it!



This video is about how life arose and...

Will artificial intelligence ever surpass human intelligence? And if that happens, will AI be good or bad? Is evil AI like we see in Avengers: Age of Ultron inevitable?

The land of the free has become a legal minefield, says Philip K. Howard -- especially for teachers and doctors, whose work has been paralyzed by fear of suits. What's the answer? A lawyer himself, Howard has four propositions for...

Every minute, 20 people are newly displaced by climate change, economic crisis and political instability, according to the UNHCR. How can we help them overcome the barriers to starting new lives? TED Resident Muhammed Idris is leading a...

What if diseases could be treated with a patient's own cells, precisely and on demand? Biotech entrepreneur Nabiha Saklayen explains how we could harness advances in biology, machine learning and lasers to create personalized stem cell...

There is a mind-boggling amount of data floating around our society. Physicists at CERN have been pondering how to store and share their ever more massive data for decades - stimulating globalization of the internet along the way, whilst...