This week, scientists revealed a sample of amber containing an extinct tick that fed on dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we can't take a blood sample from it and make Jurassic Park a reality, but it can still tell us a lot about how dinosaurs...

If you want to make a better hip replacement, who better to turn to than… a snake? While these hip-less creatures might seem like a weird choice for help with this particular issue, a major part of creating comfortable, long-lasting...

Is the beloved paper dictionary doomed to extinction? In this infectiously exuberant talk, leading lexicographer Erin McKean looks at the many ways today's print dictionary is poised for transformation.

Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. In this short talk from TEDU, he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big...

Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnet syndrome -- when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us...

Have you ever found yourself seeing images right before falling asleep? You might be experiencing hypnagogia.

The Juno spacecraft has been making close flybys of Jupiter and its measurements have revealed some new things about Jupiter’s interior. And astronomers were surprised after putting together the most complete atmospheric profile that’s...

Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and...

How is it that you can be looking at a distinct object in front of you, yet picture something entirely different in your mind? The inner workings of what’s happening in our brains to allow this is a puzzle that scientists are now...

Hank introduces us to the framework of our bodies, our skeleton, which apart from being the support and protection for all our fleshy parts, is involved in many other vital processes that help our bodies to function properly.

How do you build a wheelchair ready to blaze through mud and sand, all for under $200? MIT engineer Amos Winter guides us through the mechanics of an all-terrain wheelchair that's cheap and easy to build -- for true accessibility -- and...

The new year is off to a great start for space exploration! New Horizons has passed the farthest object ever visited by a spacecraft, and China put a lander on the dark side of the Moon!

In this video Paul Andersen explains how an overall chemical reaction is made up of several elementary steps. The stoichiometry of this equation can be predicted but the rate law must be measured. If the elementary steps of the...

This video is about the definition of a day, and how it applies (or not) on the sun. Solar day, sidereal day, universal coordinated time (UTC) day, etc. Length of a day.

Reed Kroloff gives us a new lens for judging new architecture: is it modern, or is it romantic? Look for glorious images from two leading practices -- and a blistering critique of the 9/11 planning process.

Artist Aaron Koblin takes vast amounts of data -- and at times vast numbers of people -- and weaves them into stunning visualizations. From elegant lines tracing airline flights to landscapes of cell phone data, from a Johnny Cash video...

Conflict and cultural clashes are a part of our global reality, but so is the universal desire for peace. From Bangladesh to Myanmar to Lesotho, discover this inspiring common sentiment in traditional greetings of peace.

Unless you saw the spider bite you, that swollen, bite-looking lesion on your arm is probably something else, and blaming it on an innocent 8-legged critter might do more harm than good.

Hank eases our minds about the alleged bacon shortage, and informs us of some actual meat shortages we may see the effects of in the coming years.

We've been sending people to space since the '60s, and we're just now starting to learn what that does to their brains.

A new paper that borrows old astrological data from the Voyager 2 probe has used brand-new computer simulations to find some new weird data about Uranus’s magnetic field. Another paper has new information about our galaxy’s fastest...

More detailed brain scans reveal that the brain is more complicated than we thought! And cloned sheep might be healthier than we thought!

Do you know anyone with freckles? Maybe you have freckles yourself! Jessi has them, and she's been wondering what they are, where they come from, and why some people have them and some people don't!

You’re peeing when, suddenly, you’re shivering! What gives!?