What makes us giggle and guffaw? The inability to define comedy is its very appeal; it is defined by its defiance of definition. Addison Anderson riffs on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Aristotle to elucidate how a definition draws...

For musician Teitur, singing is about giving away a piece of yourself to others. "If your intentions are to impress people or to get the big applause at the end," he says, "then you are taking, not giving." Listen as he plays on stage at...

Neurons often get all the credit for running the brain, but the work done by Ben Barres at Stanford University proved that glial cells are far more crucial to brain functioning than we had previously realized.

Hank brings the answer into focus.

Call it "fuel without fossils": Jonathan Trent is working on a plan to grow new biofuel by farming micro-algae in floating offshore pods that eat wastewater from cities. Hear his team's bold vision for Project OMEGA (Offshore Membrane...

Do you remember what you did a week before today? And are you sure you actually did that instead of dreaming it up? Our memory can be tricked easily. But how? Hank explains how your memories can be tricked.

The glass cliff: an experience of taking on a leadership role only to find that your chances of success have been limited before you've even begun. Equality activist Sophie Williams explores the research-backed reasons behind this...

Even the most skilled athletes, musicians, and performers can make mistakes on relatively simple tasks, so what’s happening in our brains when we choke, and is there something we can do to overcome these moments?

Paul MacCready -- aircraft designer, environmentalist, and lifelong lover of flight -- talks about his long career.

We all use our body on a daily basis, and yet few of us think about our physicality the way Wayne McGregor does. He demonstrates how a choreographer communicates ideas to an audience, working with two dancers to build phrases of dance,...

Five years ago, Roz Savage quit her high-powered London job to become an ocean rower. She's crossed the Atlantic solo, and just started the third leg of a Pacific solo row, the first for a woman. Why does she do it? Hear her reasons,...

Emily Graslie of The Brain Scoop is back again to stump Hank and to tell us about some fascinating new research in the field of rat telepathy (NO JOKE). Then Jessi from Animal Wonders shares Zoe the Red-lored Amazon parrot.

Emily Graslie of the Brain Scoop is back again with some more skulls to stump Hank, and Jessi from Animal Wonders brings in Blueberry the blue-tongued skink.

Like all of us, economist Tyler Cowen loves a good story. But in this intriguing talk, he asks us to step away from thinking of our lives -- and our messy, complicated irrational world -- in terms of a simple narrative.

Nagin Cox is a first-generation Martian. As a spacecraft engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cox works on the team that manages the united States' rovers on Mars. But working a 9-to-5 on another planet -- whose day is 40...

We increasingly make decisions based on short-term goals and gains -- an approach that makes the future more uncertain and less safe. How can we learn to think about and plan for a better future in the long term ... like,...

To design the Baha' Temple of South America, architect Siamak Hariri focused on illumination -- from the temple's form, which captures the movement of the sun throughout the day, to the iridescent, luminous stone and glass used to...

As we move through the world, we have an innate sense of how things feel -- the sensations they produce on our skin and how our bodies orient to them. Can technology leverage this? In this fun, fascinating TED-Ed lesson, learn about the...

In this video Paul Andersen shows conceptual thinking in a mini-lesson on energy and energy transfer.


TERMS
Energy - the ability to ca
use change
Object - a material thing that can be s
een and touched
Transfer -...

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long,...

Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes -- concepts that are literally alive.

Al Seckel, an expert on illusions, explores the perceptual illusions that fool our brains. He shares loads of cool tricks to prove that not only are we easily fooled, we kind of like it.

Musical innovator Andrew Bird winds together his trademark violin technique with xylophone, vocals and sophisticated electronic looping. Add in his uncanny ability to whistle anything, and he becomes a riveting one-man orchestra.

In which John Green teaches you about Kurt Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut wrote the book in the Vietnam era, and it closely mirrors his personal experiences in World War II, as long as you throw out the time...