In 1815, Lord Byron proposed a challenge to a few literary guests he had gathered in his house on Lake Geneva: Who could write the most chilling ghost story? This question sparked an idea in eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley who, over the...

We’ve talked a lot in this series about how often you see data and statistics in the news and on social media - which is ALL THE TIME! But how do you know who and what you can trust? Today, we’re going to talk about how we, as consumers,...

Pollination: it's vital to life on Earth, but largely unseen by the human eye. Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg shows us the intricate world of pollen and pollinators with gorgeous high-speed images from his film "Wings of Life," inspired by...

We've all been told that we should recycle plastic bottles and containers. But what actually happens to the plastic if we just throw it away? Emma Bryce traces the life cycles of three different plastic bottles, shedding light on the...

Today on Crash Course Economics, Adriene and Jacob talk about the 2008 financial crisis and the US Goverment's response to the troubles. So, all this starts with home mortgages, and the use of mortgages as an investment instrument. For...

TED Fellow Zahra Al-Mahdi was raised by screens -- "storytelling machines" like TV and the internet that shaped her sense of self and reality. Now a multimedia artist and filmmaker, she challenges common historical narratives and...

Ever wonder what all those names on the periodic table actually mean? There's a whole lot of fascinating history on Mendeleev's table. Some carry names from antiquity, some are named for people, some are named for places, and some are...

All mammals have hair at some point in their lives, but none of them wear it quite like humans. Why does our hair grow where it does, and not grow where it doesn't? How does our hair get its color? And why does it go gray and often fall...

There's one crater that may be older than any that we know of. Except there's a snag, it might not actually be a crater at all.

In 1980, Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon bet $1,000 on a question with stakes that couldn't be higher: would the earth run out of resources to sustain a growing human population? They bet $200 on the price of five metals. If the price of a...

If you want to make a movie, generally you're going to want to start with a script. In this episode of Crash Course Film Production, Lily Gladstone talks about the basics of screenplays and how to get started thinking about and actually...

At age 14, in poverty and famine, a Malawian boy built a windmill to power his family's home. Now at 22, William Kamkwamba, who speaks at TED, here, for the second time, shares in his own words the moving tale of invention that changed...

Inside our cells, each of us has a second set of genes completely separate from our 23 pairs of chromosomes. And this isn't just true for humans— it's true of every animal, plant, and fungus on Earth. This second genome belongs to our...

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...

You might feel like your thinking has been getting a bit slower and foggier as you get older, and that eventually happens to everybody. But how can we keep our minds young?

Have you ever watched a film or read a novel, wishing that you could change the narrative to save your favorite character? Game designer David Cage allows you do just that in his video games, where players make decisions that shape an...

How much does the presence of other people affect our willingness to step in when someone needs help?

In the Yukon First Nations, women lead; generations of matriarchs have guided and directed the community by forging trade agreements, creating marriage alliances and ensuring business for all. Yukon Regional Chief Kluane Adamek urges...

Film has the power to change the way we think about ourselves and our culture. Documentarian and TED Fellow Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy uses it to fight violence against women, turning her camera on the tradition of honor killings in Pakistan....

Meet Lucy. She was a math major in college, and aced all her courses in probability and statistics. Which do you think is more likely: that Lucy is a portrait artist, or that Lucy is a portrait artist who also plays poker? How do we know...

With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how light can be treated as both a particle and a wave. Physicists use scale to determine which model to use when studying light. When the wavelength of light is equivalent to the size of the object...

Biology textbooks are full of drawings of DNA, but none of those show what DNA actually looks like. Sure, they're good models for understanding how DNA works, but inside of real cells, it's a whole lot more interesting. Learn why we...

Our facial expressions convey a lot about our emotions, but why? Hank explores how our evolution has helped form how we communicate with our faces.