To solve the climate crisis, we need to make tropical forests worth more alive than dead, says environmental economist Nat Keohane. Highlighting the urgent need to stop deforestation and the carbon pollution it brings, he details the...

We know the negative images of Africa -- famine and disease, conflict and corruption. But, says Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, there's another, less-told story happening in many African nations: one of reform, economic growth and business...

Designer Emily Pilloton moved to rural Bertie County, in North Carolina, to engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation. She's teaching a design-build class called Studio H that engages high schoolers' minds and...

This week, John i s talking about one of his least favorite novels, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Lord of the Flies is a novel of ideas, and John doesn't agree with the central idea of the novel, which diminished his...

Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist: He studies the sleep cycles of the brain. And he asks: What do we know about sleep? Not a lot, it turns out, for something we do with one-third of our lives. In this talk, Foster shares three...

Neuroscientist Kay M. Tye investigates how your brain gives rise to complex emotional states like depression, anxiety or loneliness. From the cutting edge of science, she shares her latest findings -- including the development of a tool...

The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the...

Today, Craig is going to talk about the most important part of the Constitution - the Fourteenth Amendment. In particular, we're going to discuss the "equal protection" clause and how it relates to our civil rights. So we've spent the...

Plenty of people need jobs with very flexible hours -- but it's difficult for those people to connect with the employers who need them. Wingham Rowan is working on that. He explains how the same technology that powers modern financial...

3D printing has grown in sophistication since the late 1970s; TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits is shaping the next development, which he calls 4D printing, where the fourth dimension is time. This emerging technology will allow us to print...

To get out of the mess we're in, we need a new story that explains the present and guides the future, says author George Monbiot. Drawing on findings from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, he offers a new vision for...

For the first time, we are forced to consider the real risk of destabilizing the entire planet, says climate impact scholar Johan Rockström. In a talk backed by vivid animations of the climate crisis, he shows how nine out of the 15 big...

What if you never had to fill out paperwork again? In Estonia, this is a reality: citizens conduct nearly all public services online, from starting a business to voting from their laptops, thanks to the nation's ambitious post-Soviet...

Tour the deep dark world of the East German state security agency known as Stasi. Uniquely powerful at spying on its citizens, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the Stasi masterminded a system of surveillance and psychological...

Born in 1731 to freed slaves on a farm in Baltimore, Benjamin Banneker was obsessed with math and science. And his appetite for knowledge only grew as he taught himself astronomy, mathematics, engineering, and the study of the natural...

When you think about Einstein and physics, E=mc^2 is probably the first thing that comes to mind. But one of his greatest contributions to the field actually came in the form of an odd philosophical footnote in a 1935 paper he co-wrote...

Former Republican member of the u.S. Congress Bob Inglis shares an optimistic message about how conservatives can lead on climate change and other pressing problems -- and how free enterprise (and working together across ideologies) hold...

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...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Ghanaian economist George Ayittey unleashes a torrent of controlled anger toward corrupt leaders in Africa -- and...

Do you ever feel so tired that you want to sleep for a few months? Scientists are searching for ways to cause human hibernation.

Parallel Universes - Many Worlds

If you've watched the news or followed politics, chances are you've heard the term Orwellian thrown around in one context or another. But have you ever stopped to think about what it really means, or why it's used so often? Noah Tavlin...

Despite all the hardship of being a Black person in Colonial America, some Black people were able to defy the harsh conditions and create art. Today we're learning about a teenager who attained literacy and wrote poems that reached a...

When Julius Maada Bio first seized political power in Sierra Leone in 1996, he did so to improve the lives of its citizens. But he soon realized that for democracy to flourish, its foundation needs to be built on the will of the people....