Join John Hardy on a tour of the Green School, his off-the-grid school in Bali that teaches kids how to build, garden, create (and get into college). The centerpiece of campus is the spiraling Heart of School, perhaps the world's largest...

The Romans developed a lot of infrastructure like roads and aqueducts to both help their cities flourish and to... you know... be better at war. But the interesting thing about Roman Engineering is how it was almost all focused on Techne...

"We will start inhabiting outer space," says Angelo Vermeulen, crew commander of a NASA-funded Mars simulation. "It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years, but it's going to happen." In this charming talk, the TED Senior Fellow...

It was the dawn of 1863, and London's not-yet-opened subway system - the first of its kind in the world - had the city in an uproar. Most people thought the project, which cost more than 100 million dollars in today's money, would never...

What would it take to reimagine the limits of architecture? Débora Mesa Molina offers some answers in this breathtaking, visual tour of her work, showing how structures can be made with overlooked materials and unconventional methods --...

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and...

New information has helped us understand where domestic horses came from. And by counting some tree rings, researchers were able to find evidence of Norse presence in the Americas in 1021 CE.

You might consider humans or beavers to be the best engineers on the planet, but these 5 other animals go to great lengths to put our houses and dams to shame. Chapters SOCIABLE WEAVER 0:38 GREAT BOWERBIRD 2:13 PUFFERFISH 3:39 4 ORIENTAL...

In a talk that's part history lesson, part love letter to graphics, information designer Tommy McCall traces the centuries-long evolution of charts and diagrams -- and shows how complex data can be sculpted into beautiful shapes....

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Writer and artist James Bridle uncovers a dark, strange corner of the internet, where unknown people or groups on...

Modern technology can make us forget how cruel the ocean once was to seafarers. Even with these new technologies, some parts of the sea are still just plain dangerous. Here are a few places on Earth where ships have met the briny depths.

He was born in the 1330s in the Chaghatayid Khanate, formerly the Mongol Empire. On the steppe, he rose from a lowly sheep thief to become one of history's greatest conquerors, uniting nearly all of Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran...

When presented with the problem of hoards of illiterate commoners, English clergymen in the 11th century created plays to spread word about the Bible. Eventually, the plays moved out of the church and into the streets. Mindy Ploeckelmann...

The United States has a lot more power outages than other countries do, and fixing this problem will be a massive undertaking.

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Across the United States, the average customer loses...

"The computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression," says designer and TED Fellow James Patten. But right now, we interact with computers, mainly, by typing and tapping. In this nifty talk and demo, Patten imagines a...

Artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn create community art by painting entire neighborhoods, and involving those who live there -- from the favelas of Rio to the streets of North Philadelphia. What's made their projects succeed? In this...

Very few of us hold jobs that line up directly with our past experiences or what we studied in college. Take TED Resident Jason Shen; he studied biology but later became a product manager at a tech company. In this quick, insightful talk...

Robert Neuwirth, author of "Shadow Cities," finds the world's squatter sites -- where a billion people now make their homes -- to be thriving centers of ingenuity and innovation. He takes us on a tour.

Long before there were strip malls, skyscrapers, and combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bells, nature had its own architects: all kinds of creatures create all kinds of structures for living, raising offspring, or maybe just the occasional...

Computer skills aren't what's stopping people from breaking into the tech industry, says social entrepreneur Irma L. Olguin Jr. More often, the biggest hurdles are things like access to childcare, transportation and financial stability....

The telescopes of tomorrow will see in infrared and ultraviolet. They will peer through space and scan across time. They will allow us to find new supernovae, spot potentially hazardous asteroids, better understand dark energy and peer...

Could someone hack your pacemaker? Avi Rubin shows how hackers are compromising cars, smartphones and medical devices, and warns us about the dangers of an increasingly hack-able world.

Tech communities are booming all over Africa, says Nairobi-based Juliana Rotich, cofounder of the open-source software Ushahidi. But it remains challenging to get and stay connected in a region with frequent blackouts and spotty Internet...

Underneath every shiny new megacity, there's often a story of communities displaced. In this moving, poetic talk, OluTimehin Adegbeye details how government land grabs are destroying the lives of thousands who live in the coastal...