Thanks to the wonders of physics, astronomers can map a timeline of the universe’s history. Today, Phil’s going to give you an overview of those first few minutes (yes, MINUTES) of the universe’s life. It started with a Big Bang, when...

By 2050, it will take 100 billion land animals to provide the world's population with meat, dairy, eggs and leather goods. Maintaining this herd will take a huge, potentially unsustainable toll on the planet. What if there were a...

When molecules collide, chemical reactions can occur -- causing major structural changes akin to getting a new arm on your face! George Zaidan and Charles Morton playfully imagine chemical systems as busy city streets, and the colliding...

Once the powerhouse of America's industrial might, Detroit is more recently known in the popular imagination as a fabulous ruin, crumbling and bankrupt. But city planner Toni Griffin asks us to look again -- and to imagine an...

How do you deal with a bully without becoming a thug? In this wise and soulful talk, peace activist Scilla Elworthy maps out the skills we need -- as nations and individuals -- to fight extreme force without using force in return. To...

Around the world, hundreds of thousands of lost ancient sites lie buried and hidden from view. Satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak is determined to find them before looters do. With the 2016 TED Prize, Parcak is building an online...

We've all heard the theories on why the dinosaurs died -- but how did they come to dominate the earth for so long in the first place? (Hint: it has nothing to do with their size, speed, spikes or fantastic feathers.) Travel back in time...

Graham Hawkes takes us aboard his graceful, winged submarines to the depths of planet Ocean (a.k.a. "Earth"). It's a deep blue world we landlubbers rarely see in 3D.

Speaking as both an astronomer and "a concerned member of the human race," Sir Martin Rees examines our planet and its future from a cosmic perspective. He urges action to prevent dark consequences from our scientific and technological...

The sun is beginning a new weather cycle, causing debate among scientists about how intense things are going to get, and elsewhere, scientists are looking into just how fluid our early universe was.

From the Archean Eon to the Holocene Epoch, check out this SciShow mini-series for a primer about life on earth.

During the age of dinosaurs, a massive asteroid slammed into the Earth, bringing an end to most life at the time. And thanks to new fossil evidence, we've been able to pinpoint a time of year for this event that happened millions of...

Computer science professor Shimon Schocken is also an avid mountain biker. To share the life lessons he learned while riding, he began an outdoor program with Israel's juvenile inmates and was touched by both their intense difficulties...

The ocean has degraded within our lifetimes, as shown in the decreasing average size of fish. And yet, as Daniel Pauly shows us onstage at Mission Blue, each time the baseline drops, we call it the new "normal." At what point do we stop...

You're a biologist on a mission to keep the rare honeybee Apis Trifecta from going extinct. The last 60 bees of the species are in your terrarium. You've already constructed wire frames of the appropriate size and shape. Now you need to...

Before every launch, there's a crawl.

Although much of the Big Bang Theory is widely accepted to be true, it only gets us part of the way there. Observable truths such as the CMB and the flatness of our universe reveal that there is no way the universe has been expanding at...

You’re on the internet, so you probably know that people sometimes claim to have been abducted by aliens. When researchers start to look closely at these stories and where they come from, they begin to realize that there might be...

Kurt Vonnegut found the tidy, satisfying arcs of many stories at odds with reality, and he set out to explore the ambiguity between good and bad fortune in his own novels. He tried to make sense of human behavior by studying the shapes...

Part 1 of 3 in my series about why our bodies are shaped the way they are.

How did the universe begin -- and how is it expanding? CERN physicist Tom Whyntie shows how cosmologists and particle physicists explore these questions by replicating the heat, energy, and activity of the first few seconds of our...

The universe started with a bang -- but how will it end? With astonishing visuals, cosmologist and TED Fellow Katie Mack takes us to the theoretical end of everything, some trillions of years in the future, in a profound meditation on...

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says...

The average 20-year-old knows between 27,000 and 52,000 different words. Spoken out loud, most of these words last less than a second. With every word, the brain has a quick decision to make: which of those thousands of options matches...