When ebola broke out in March 2014, Pardis Sabeti and her team got to work sequencing the virus's genome, learning how it mutated and spread. Sabeti immediately released her research online, so virus trackers and scientists from around...

The end of the Napoleonic Wars left the great powers of Europe shaken. Judging from the destruction that had been wrought across the continent, it seemed to the powers that be that the Enlightenment had liberated the people, and led to...

Business in Africa is booming -- but international companies are missing out, says emerging markets expert Nomava Zanazo. Rushing in without knowing their customers, businesses underestimate Africans and make costly assumptions about...

One day a pair of brothers working together as shoemakers had an explosive fight that split the family business in two. Over the coming years, this disagreement divided their town— residents and businesses chose sides. Could such a...

A white, puffy dress. Eternal love. A joint tax return. Marriage means something different to everyone and has changed over time and across cultures. Alex Gendler traces the history of getting hitched, providing insights on polygamy,...

Talent is universal, but opportunity isn't, says TED Fellow Christopher Ategeka. In this charming, hopeful talk, Ategeka tells his story of being orphaned at a young age -- and how being adopted gave him the chance to experience a new...

Can global capital markets become catalysts for social change? According to investment expert Audrey Choi, individuals own almost half of all global capital, giving them (us!) the power to make a difference by investing in companies that...

Not all animals have a mouth, or even need one to eat! These different feeding strategies can teach us a lot about our ancestors and how they went from not needing a mouth at all to only eating with one.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo says happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future. He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives.

As a novelist, Daniel Suarez spins dystopian tales of the future. But on the TEDGlobal stage, he talks us through a real-life scenario we all need to know more about: the rise of autonomous robotic weapons of war. Advanced drones,...

Today, Andre is going to talk about the rise of Atari and with it the rise of the video game industry. So if you remember from last episode, we mentioned that the first arcade machine, Galaxy Game, happened to have a coin slot, but this...

Ancient skeletons can tell us a great deal about the past, including the age, gender and even the social status of its former owner. But how can we know all of these details simply by examining some old, soil-caked bones? Farnaz Khatibi...

How do the groups that you're part of affect you? How do you, in turn, affect those groups? Today we are talking about how people in society come together with a look at social groups. We’ll look at what social groups are, the different...

We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in...

Paul Andersen defines microevolution as any change in the frequency of the allele pool. He then explains the five mechanisms of evolution; small sample size, non-random mating, mutations, gene flow and natural selection.

In order to truly understand differences among animal lifespans, we need to stop thinking about a specific number and start thinking about a distribution.

There's a common misconception that if you like to meticulously organize your things, keep your hands clean, or plan out your weekend to the last detail, you might be OCD. In fact, OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) is a serious...

Paul Andersen explains how populations interact in an ecosystem. The symbiosis of several populations is based on effects that may be neutral, positive, or negative. Interactions like mutualism, commensalism and parasitism are...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how immune individuals in a population give the entire group a herd immunity. Concepts of immunity, vaccines, basic reproduction number, and herd immunity threshold are discussed.

Building a pandemic-free future won't be easy, but Bill Gates believes that we have the tools and strategies to make it possible -- now we just have to fund them. In this forward-looking talk, he proposes a multi-specialty Global...

How could you dispose of your cooking oil when you're done cooking? The easiest thing to do might be to pour it down your drain -- but if you save it up and send it to a processing plant, it can gain useful new life as biodiesel, a...

When he learned of the threat that rising sea levels posed to his coastal hometown of Miami, Florida, eco-artist Xavier Cortada founded a movement around beautifully designed elevation markers highlighting the risk of flood damage. The...

Paul Andersen shows you how to solve simple Hardy-Weinberg problems. He starts with a brief description of a gene pool and shows you how the formula is derived. He then shows you how to solve a couple of sample problems.

A samurai is found dead in a quiet bamboo grove. One by one, the crime's only known witnesses recount their version of the events. But as they each tell their tale, it becomes clear that every testimony is plausible yet different. And...