In this ode to design renegades, Alice Rawsthorn highlights the work of unlikely heroes, from Blackbeard to Florence Nightingale. Drawing a line from these bold thinkers to some early modern visionaries like Buckminster Fuller, Rawsthorn...

"Confidence is the necessary spark before everything that follows," says educator and activist Brittany Packnett. In an inspiring talk, she shares three ways to crack the code of confidence -- and her dream for a world where...

Want to navigate the solar system without having to buy a spacecraft? Jon Nguyen demos NASA JPL's "Eyes on the Solar System" -- free-to-use software for exploring the planets, moons, asteroids, and spacecraft that rotate around our sun...

Jessi had the weirdest dream last night and wants to share with you why our brains make dreams.

Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, physicist Neil Turok speaks out for talented young Africans starved of opportunity: by unlocking and nurturing the continent's creative potential, we can create a change in Africa's future.

It’s easy to look at a sleeping dog’s leg twitching and imagine that it’s having a wonderful rabbit-chasing dream. But can animals with brains that are very different from ours have dreams?

Deep inside Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lies a 240 page tome. Recently carbon dated to around 1420, its pages feature looping handwriting and hand drawn images seemingly stolen from a dream. It is called the Voynich...

It’s hard to study dreams because it’s not like you can communicate back and forth with someone while they’re asleep...at least you couldn’t, until now!

You might have experienced those bizarre and emotionally intense dreams when you have a fever, but what are those?

Dreaming is one of the weirdest things we do & in this SciShow infusion Hank talks about how science is helping us understand why we dream, what our brains are up to when they're doing it, and why dreaming may be critically important to...

In which John Green continues to explore F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby. In this installment, John looks into the titular Gatsby's purported Greatness. Gatsby's single-minded pursuit of Daisy, his checkered past, and his...

Artist Neil Harbisson was born completely color blind, but these days a device attached to his head turns color into audible frequencies. Instead of seeing a world in grayscale, Harbisson can hear a symphony of color -- and yes, even...

In a small town, a proud mother showed off her newborn son. Upon noticing his lucky birthmark, townsfolk predicted he would marry a princess. But soon, these rumors reached the wicked king. Enraged, the king stole the child away, and...

Jacqueline Novogratz tells a moving story of an encounter in a Nairobi slum with Jane, a former prostitute, whose dreams of escaping poverty, of becoming a doctor and of getting married were fulfilled in an unexpected way.

The former prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd is also a longtime student of China, with a unique vantage point to watch its power rise in the past few decades. He asks whether the growing ambition of China will inevitably lead to...

BAHHHHHH! Did I scare you? What exactly happens when we get scared? How does our brain make our body react? Just what are Neurotransmitters? In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank takes us to the simplest part of the complex...

Great dreams aren't just visions, says Astro Teller, "They're visions coupled to strategies for making them real." The head of X (formerly Google X), Teller takes us inside the "moonshot factory," as it's called, where his team seeks to...

As a young girl, photojournalist and TED Fellow Kitra Cahana dreamed about running away from home to live freely on the road. Now as an adult and self-proclaimed vagabond, she follows modern nomads into their homes -- boxcars, bus stops,...

every three years, more than 30 million Hindu worshippers gather for the Kumbh Mela in India, the world's largest religious gathering, in order to wash away their sins. With massive crowds descending on small cities and towns, stampedes...

In the 3rd millennium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted their dreams on wax tablets. In the years since, we haven't paused in our quest to understand why we dream. And while we still don't have any definitive answers, we...

At the online University of the People, anyone with a high school diploma can take classes toward a degree in business administration or computer science — without standard tuition fees (though exams cost money). Founder Shai Reshef...

Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs "childish" thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids' big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups' willingness to learn from children as...

To those who feel like they don't belong: there is beauty in being a misfit. Author Lidia Yuknavitch shares her own wayward journey in an intimate recollection of patchwork stories about loss, shame and the slow process of...

Artist Uldus Bakhtiozina uses photographs to poke fun at societal norms in her native Russia. A glimpse into Russian youth culture and a short, fun reminder not to take ourselves too seriously.