This week Craig talks about police searches and seizures. Now, the fourth amendment says that you have the right to be protected against "unreasonable searches and seizures" but what exactly does this mean? Well, it's complicated. The...

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?

Bees don’t just flit randomly from flower to flower. Research has taught us that bees are more complicated than that. And they may actually have a grasp of some pretty abstract concepts, like... time!

Esha Alwani began writing songs when she was six years old, shortly after being diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. And she noticed something amazing: whenever she played music, her involuntary tics suddenly went away. Listen along as...

Antartica is a cold and isolated place, but intrepid scientists have found ways to make use of its environment, and turn it into one of the ideal places to study our skies.

Ecologist Deborah Gordon studies ants wherever she can find them -- in the desert, in the tropics, in her kitchen ... In this fascinating talk, she explains her obsession with insects most of us would happily swat away without a second...

Hank talks about astrobiology - the study of and search for life in the universe off Earth. Right now, the field has more questions than answers, but all they all seek to answer that one fundamental query: are we alone in the universe?

It’s not easy to find active plate tectonics on other worlds, but doing so may bring us one step closer to finding a planet that can support life.

Love is a complicated combination of brain chemicals and behavior that scientists are only just beginning to figure out. And it's remarkable that in every society that we have looked at on Earth, romantic love exists. So if love is so...

Life on Earth depends on the steady nature of our star, and an international team of scientists searched thousands of other stars to try to find out if the sun has always been as consistent as it is now. And According to a study...

Are you there Dark Matter? It's me, a billion pendulums.

Over the course of history, we've discovered hundreds of thousands of asteroids. But how do astronomers discover these bits of rock and metal? How many have they found? And how do they tell asteroids apart? Carrie Nugent shares the story...

Very few of us hold jobs that line up directly with our past experiences or what we studied in college. Take TED Resident Jason Shen; he studied biology but later became a product manager at a tech company. In this quick, insightful talk...

Raccoons are famous for "washing" their food, but this behavior, called dousing, isn't really about cleanliness.

At TED@Cannes, Gary Wolf gives a 5-min intro to an intriguing new pastime: using mobile apps and always-on gadgets to track and analyze your body, mood, diet, spending -- just about everything in daily life you can measure -- in...

Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library -- every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history ... It's all free to the public -- unless someone else gets to it first.

Have you ever wondered what dinosaur meat might have tasted like? Chances are you've eaten dinosaur more recently than you might expect.

All the stars in a spiral galaxy rotate around a center -- but to astronomers, the speed that each star travels wasn't making sense. Why didn't stars slow down toward the edges as expected? Don Lincoln explains how a mysterious force...

Singer Rhiannon Giddens joins international music collective Silk Road ensemble to perform "St. James Infirmary Blues," spiking the American folk song that Louis Armstrong popularized in the 1920s with Romani influence and mischievous...

Astronomers have some insights into the mysterious disappearance of the luminous blue variable star in the Kinman Dwarf Galaxy, and we're digging up more clues about how our friend the Moon may have formed.

Rovers like Curiosity search for life on Mars using rock and soil samples, but why don't they examine liquid or frozen water?

At some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken. Imagine how different things would be if we paid more attention to this unique emotional pain. Psychologist Guy Winch reveals how recovering from heartbreak...

SciShow Space shares the latest news from space research, including the first definitive detection of water on an exoplanet, and a new theory for how we should search for alien civilizations.

Thirty-nine million people in the world are blind, and the majority lost their sight due to curable and preventable diseases. But how do you test and treat people who live in remote areas, where expensive, bulky eye equipment is hard to...