Josh Luber is a "sneakerhead," a collector of rare or limited sneakers. With their insatiable appetite for exclusive sneakers, these tastemakers drive marketing and create hype for the brands they love, specifically Nike, which...

Nootropics are a group of chemicals that supposedly make you “smarter” without any side-effects. But don’t rush into it yet! It might be still too experimental to test it out.

One potential avenue for cancer treatment uses electricity not from any outside machine, but from within our own bodies.

Patenting a new drug helps finance its immense cost to develop -- but that same patent can put advanced treatments out of reach for sick people in developing nations, at deadly cost. Ellen 't Hoen talks about an elegant, working solution...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. What do Tourette syndrome, heroin addiction and social media obsession all have in common? They converge in an area...

Could you enter a flow state with the people around you? Also we've found a promising drug for treating mental illness, and it might not come from where you expect.

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Is the War on Drugs doing more harm than good? In a bold talk, drug policy reformist Ethan Nadelmann makes an...

The freedom journey doesn't end when someone is released from prison. In many ways, it begins. Attorney and entrepreneur Brittany K. Barnett fights to free people from prison and champions restoring and nurturing the creative ingenuity...

Fiorenzo Omenetto shares 20+ astonishing new uses for silk, one of nature's most elegant materials -- in transmitting light, improving sustainability, adding strength and making medical leaps and bounds. On stage, he shows a few...

The brain is incredibly complex and things just go wrong sometimes, but scientists have managed to create effective medications... with the help of a few happy accidents.

There is an epidemic of HIV, and with it an epidemic of bad laws -- laws that effectively criminalize being HIV positive. At the TEDxSummit in Doha, TED Fellow Shereen El-Feki gives a forceful argument that these laws, based in stigma,...

A lot of our videos include the disclaimer "Mice aren't people." But why do we keep saying this, and if rodent studies aren't effective, why do we keep using them?

A bit of good news on the COVID-19 front this week: New research reveals a drug that might actually help save severely ill patients, and data suggests that distancing policies may have saved millions of lives over the last few months.

SciShow News shares new research into how music festivals can lead to high levels of drugs in your drinking water, and celebrates the man who created the world’s first geological map.

Chemotherapy can make patients much more forgetful than normal, but pinning down the cause of and solution to this phenomenon is an ongoing process.

Jimmy Lin is developing technologies to catch cancer months to years before current methods. He shares a breakthrough technique that looks for small signals of cancer's presence via a simple blood test, detecting the recurrence of some...

How do your pupils work and why do some substances make them dilate?

Humans have been processing plants for their narcotic effects for at least 5000 years, historically for ceremonial purposes, to deal with harsh environmental conditions or difficult situations, and sometimes even to supplement...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences.



"Freakonomics" author Steven Levitt presents new data on the finances of drug dealing. Contrary to...

Penicillin changed everything. Infections that had previously killed were suddenly quickly curable. Yet as Maryn McKenna shares in this sobering talk, we've squandered the advantages afforded us by that and later antibiotics....

While antibiotics have saved millions of lives, misusing them can speed up how fast bacteria evolve to resist them. And it turns out that one of the biggest hotspots for these antibiotic-resistant bacteria…is hospitals.

If you’re getting restless from social distancing and wishing you could do more to help fight the global pandemic, here are some ways that you can help scientists fight COVID-19—all from the comfort of your home.

Throughout her career in banking Ilona Szabó de Carvalho never imagined she'd someday start a social movement. But living in her native Brazil, which leads the world in homicidal violence, she realized she couldn't just stand by and...

A condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome can cause blind patients to hallucinate scenes in vivid color. fMRI studies show that these hallucinations activate the same brain areas as sight - areas that are not activated by imagination....