TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why doesn't anything stick to Teflon? - Ashwini Bharathula
Teflon was in the spacesuits the Apollo crew wore for the moon landing, in pipes and valves used in the Manhattan project, and it may be in your kitchen, as the nonstick coating on frying pans and cookie sheets. So what is this slippery...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The 2,400-year search for the atom - Theresa Doud
How do we know what matter is made of? The quest for the atom has been a long one, beginning 2,400 years ago with the work of a Greek philosopher and later continued by a Quaker and a few Nobel Prize-winning scientists. Theresa Doud...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Activation energy: Kickstarting chemical reactions - Vance Kite
Chemical reactions are constantly happening in your body -- even at this very moment. But what catalyzes these important reactions? Vance Kite explains how enzymes assist the process, while providing a light-hearted way to remember how...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? - Chad Orzel
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you can never simultaneously know the exact position and the exact speed of an object. Why not? Because everything in the universe behaves like both a particle and a wave at the same time....
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How polarity makes water behave strangely - Christina Kleinberg
Water is both essential and unique. Many of its particular qualities stem from the fact that it consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen, therefore creating an unequal sharing of electrons. From fish in frozen lakes to ice floating...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Magical metals, how shape memory alloys work - Ainissa Ramirez
From robots to braces to the Mars Rover, see how a special kind of metal called shape memory alloys advance technology in everyday ways that we don't always realize.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: If superpowers were real: Invisibility - Joy Lin
What if invisibility wasn't just the stuff of epic comic book stories? Is it scientifically possible to be invisible? In this series, Joy Lin tackles six superpowers and reveals just how scientifically realistic they can be to us mere...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The chemistry of cold packs - John Pollard
If you stick water in the freezer, it will take a few hours to freeze into ice. How is it, then, that cold packs go from room temperature to near freezing in mere seconds? John Pollard details the chemistry of the cold pack, shedding...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: An athlete uses physics to shatter world records - Asaf Bar-Yosef
When Dick Fosbury couldn't compete against the skilled high jumpers at his college, he tried jumping in a different way -- backwards. Fosbury improved his record immediately and continued to amaze the world with his new technique all the...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Could we create dark matter? - Rolf Landua
Eighty-five percent of the matter in our universe is dark matter. We don't know what dark matter is made of, and we've yet to directly observe it, but scientists theorize that we may actually be able to create it in the Large Hadron...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The math behind Michael Jordan's legendary hang time - Andy Peterson and Zack Patterson
Michael Jordan's legendary slam dunk from the free throw line has been calculated at 0.92 seconds of pure hang time. But how many seconds could Jordan have gotten were he doing the same jump on Mars? Or Jupiter? Andy Peterson and Zack...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Is light a particle or a wave? - Colm Kelleher
Can we accurately describe light as exclusively a wave or just a particle? Are the two mutually exclusive? In this third part of his series on light and color, Colm Kelleher discusses wave-particle duality and its relationship to how we...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The science of static electricity - Anuradha Bhagwat
We've all had the experience: you're walking across a soft carpet, you reach for the doorknob and - ZAP. But what causes this trademark jolt of static electricity? Anuradha Bhagwat sheds light on the phenomenon by examining the nature of...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: How to grow a bone - Nina Tandon
Can you grow a human bone outside the human body? The answer may soon be yes. Nina Tandon explores the possibility by examining how bones naturally grow inside the body, and illuminating how scientists are hoping to replicate that...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Is math discovered or invented? - Jeff Dekofsky
Would mathematics exist if people didn't? Did we create mathematical concepts to help us understand the world around us, or is math the native language of the universe itself? Jeff Dekofsky traces some famous arguments in this ancient...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How do nuclear power plants work? - M. V. Ramana and Sajan Saini
Our ability to mine great amounts of energy from uranium nuclei has led some to bill nuclear power as a plentiful, utopian source of electricity. But rather than dominate the global electricity market, nuclear power has declined from a...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: How fast are you moving right now? - Tucker Hiatt
"How fast are you moving?" seems like an easy question, but it's actually quite complicated -- and perhaps best answered by another question: "Relative to what?" Even when you think you're standing still, the Earth is moving relative to...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: How do we separate the seemingly inseparable? - Iddo Magen
Your cell phone is mainly made of plastics and metals. It's easy to appreciate the process by which those elements add up to something so useful. But there's another story we don't hear about -- how did we get our raw ingredients in the...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The genius of Mendeleev's periodic table - Lou Serico
The elements had been listed and carefully arranged before Dmitri Mendeleev. They had even been organized by similar properties before. So why is Mendeelev's periodic table the one that has endured? Lou Serico explains via Ekaaluminium,...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: What is chirality and how did it get in my molecules? - Michael Evans
Improve your understanding of molecular properties with this lesson on the fascinating property of chirality. Your hands are the secret to understanding the strange similarity between two molecules that look almost exactly alike, but are...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The race to sequence the human genome - Tien Nguyen
In 1990, The Human Genome Project proposed to sequence the entire human genome over 15 years with $3 billion of public funds. Then, seven years before its scheduled completion, a private company called Celera announced that they could...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: How bones make blood - Melody Smith
Bones might seem rock-solid, but they’re actually quite porous inside. Most of the large bones of your skeleton have a hollow core filled with soft bone marrow. Marrow's most essential elements are blood stem cells and for patients with...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Free falling in outer space - Matt J. Carlson
If you were to orbit the Earth, you'd experience the feeling of free fall, not unlike what your stomach feels before a big dive on a roller coaster. With a little help from Sir Isaac Newton, Matt J. Carlson explains the basic forces...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why do our bodies age? - Monica Menesini
Human bodies aren't built for extreme aging: our capacity is set at about 90 years. But what does aging really mean, and how does it counteract the body's efforts to stay alive? Monica Menesini details the nine physiological traits that...