Hank explores different ways of understanding identity – including the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and essential and accidental properties. In what ways does affect identity? In what ways does it not? What does it mean for a thing to...

Craft curator Nora Atkinson takes us on a trip to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to see the beautifully designed and participatory art of Burning Man, revealing how she discovered there what's often missing from museums: curiosity and...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, war photographer James Nachtwey shows his life's work and asks TED to help him...

Welcome to Crash Course Games! In this series our host Andre Meadows is going to discuss the history and science of games. We're going to talk about video games of course, but also board games, role playing games, card games, even...

In which John Green examines Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare. John delves into the world of Bill Shakespeare's famous star-crossed lovers and examines what the play is about, its structure, and the context in which it was written....

As climate change accelerates, finding clean alternatives to fossil fuels is more urgent than ever. Social entrepreneur Vaitea Cowan believes green hydrogen is the answer. Watch as she shares her team's work mass producing electrolyzers...

The world-changing promise of synthetic biology and gene editing has a dark side. In this far-seeing talk, author and entrepreneur Rob Reid reviews the risks of a world where more and more people have access to the tools and tech needed...

You might have heard about the debut of Hologram Tupac at the music festival Coachella earlier this year. But with Queen's recent announcement of a Hologram Freddie Mercury and TLC's plans for a Hologram Lisa Left Eye Lopes, it looks...

We all know that when we make decisions in groups, they don't always go right -- and sometimes they go very wrong. How can groups make good decisions? With his colleague Dan Ariely, neuroscientist Mariano Sigman has been inquiring into...

There are labs so silent that most people can't stand being inside them, but that stillness lets us run some of our most sensitive experiments.

The financial sector often talks of decarbonizing investment portfolios as a way to fight climate change. But portfolios can be "cleaned" without having any real impact on the problem, says investment expert Nili Gilbert. Bringing...

Optical illusions are images that seem to trick our minds into seeing something different from what they actually are. But how do they work? Nathan S. Jacobs walks us through a few common optical illusions and explains what these tricks...

The deadliest severe weather phenomenon is something you might not realize: extreme heat. Eleni Myrivili, chief heat officer of the city of Athens, Greece, explains that extreme heat and heat waves are often overlooked because they're...

During the Soviet Union era, therapy was often used as a tool of political oppression. Since then, Russia has seen major reforms in mental health care -- but stigmas and distrust for the practice still live on. Psychologist and TED...

Under the sea, untold wonders await in the form of untapped medicinal potential. Chemist Sam Afoullouss dives into the science behind natural remedies, explaining why the ocean's great (and still largely unexplored) biodiversity is ideal...

Well, they're not really "magic." Maybe "illusion" is a better way to say it. As we begin this journey of the history of cinema, we need to understand how movies trick our brains into even understanding that a movie is a movie. In this...

The path that products take to get onto store shelves doesn’t always leave the best impact on the environment. But with green chemistry, chemists have found ways to make the production of some items safer for both people and the planet.

Today, we're FINALLY going to talk about PC Gaming. So the personal computer is the precursor to the console, but it's not quite accurate to say that it just led to the console. PCs and the video games created on them have and continue...

The Protestant Reformation didn't exactly begin with Martin Luther, and it didn't end with him either. Reformers and monarchs changed the ways that religious and state power were organized throughout the 16th and early 17th centuries....

Can we create new life out of our digital universe? Craig Venter asks. His answer is "yes" -- and pretty soon. He walks through his latest research and promises that we'll soon be able to build and boot up a synthetic chromosome. NOTE:...

In which John Green teaches you about the life and death of one of history's great explorers, Captain James Cook of the British Navy. He charted large swaths of the Pacific ocean, laid claim to Australia and New Zealand, and died a...

In 1925, Frida Kahlo was on her way home from school in Mexico City when the bus she was riding collided with a streetcar. She suffered near-fatal injuries and her disability became a major theme in her paintings. Over the course of her...

On this Crash Course in World Mythology, Mike Rugnetta is teaching you about floods and deluges, specifically in China. In Chinese myth, flood stories pretty much all revolve around a guy named Yu the Great, or Yu the Engineer. In the...

Today, we're going to talk about board games, but instead of trying to trace their histories, which we've already covered a bit of in ep2 on ancient games, we're going to look really closely at just two board games - Monopoly and The...