Lies are more engaging online than truth, says former CIA analyst, diplomat and Facebook employee Yaël Eisenstat. "As long as [social media] algorithms' goals are to keep us engaged, they will feed us the poison that plays to our worst...

SPOILERS: It doesn't end well.

What can a young woman with an idea, an Internet connection and a bit of creativity achieve? That's all Siyanda Mohutsiwa needed to unite young African voices in a new way. Hear how Mohutsiwa and other young people across the continent...

There are all kinds of ways that a spider can catch its prey, but few species are as extreme as the slingshot spider!

As the sun rises over Delphi in 500 BCE, Aristonike hurries to the temple of Apollo where a single oracle known as the Pythia communicates Apollo's will. Reserved only for women, this is the most important job in the city— and one that...

Botanical artist Nirupa Rao captures the spirit and beauty of nature in watercolor. With a portfolio of enchanting, scientifically accurate illustrations, she aims to reignite our emotional connection to the environment -- and open our...

Why can we find geometric shapes in the night sky? How can we know that at least two people in London have exactly the same number of hairs on their head? And why can patterns be found in just about any text - even Vanilla Ice lyrics?...

What is the dot product? What does it represent? Why does it have the formula that it does? All this is explained visually.

When asked to build housing for 100 families in Chile ten years ago, Alejandro Aravena looked to an unusual inspiration: the wisdom of favelas and slums. Rather than building a large building with small units, he built flexible...

You work at the college library. You're in the middle of a quiet afternoon when suddenly, a shipment of 1,280 books arrives. The books are in a straight line, but they're all out of order, and the automatic sorting system is broken. How...

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

You might think something is so "icky" that you try avoid it, and scientists think there's a reason humans, and even some other animals, do this.

Woody Norris shows off two of his inventions that use sound in new ways, including the Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD. He talks about his untraditional approach to inventing and education, because, as he puts it: "Almost nothing has...

Who hasn’t sent a text message saying “I’m on my way” when it wasn’t true or fudged the truth a touch in their online dating profile? But Jeff Hancock doesn’t believe that the anonymity of the internet encourages dishonesty. In fact, he...

When TED Senior Fellow Cesar Harada heard about the devastating effects of the BP Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, he quit his dream job and moved to New Orleans to develop a more efficient way to soak up the oil. He designed a...

When we witness something amazing, many of us instinctively pull out our phones and snap pictures. Is this obsession with photographing everything impacting our experiences? In a meditative talk, Erin Sullivan reflects on how being more...

Kevin Surace suggests we rethink basic construction materials -- such as the familiar wallboard -- to reduce the huge carbon footprint generated by the manufacturing and construction of our buildings. He introduces EcoRock, a clean,...

Our first of two episodes about Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, 100 Years of Solitude. This week, we're looking at the Buendia family, and their many generations of people with the same names. We'll also look at the fascinating way the...

This video is about weird condensed matter systems, aka materials that have bizarre emergent particles in them that are unlike most other particles in the universe.

Machines that can think, learn and adapt are coming -- and that could mean that we humans will end up with significant unemployment. What should we do about it? In a straightforward talk about a controversial idea, futurist Martin Ford...

Bill Stone, a maverick cave explorer who has plumbed Earth's deepest abysses, discusses his efforts to mine lunar ice for space fuel and to build an autonomous robot for studying Jupiter's moon Europa.

You and nine other individuals have been captured by super-intelligent alien overlords. The aliens think humans look quite tasty, but their civilization forbids eating highly logical and cooperative beings. Unfortunately, they're not...

How do you think about a non-square matrix as a transformation?

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does so much interesting stuff exist in the universe? Particle physicist Harry Cliff works on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and he has some potentially bad news for people who seek...