What I learned from spending 31 days underwater | Fabien Cousteau
In 1963, Jacques Cousteau lived for 30 days in an underwater laboratory positioned on the floor of the Red Sea, and set a world record in th...
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Education
TED Talks Education
What should future schools look like? How do brains learn? Some of the world's greatest educators, researchers, and community leaders share their stories and visions onstage at the TED confe...
Episodes
20 of 49 episodes
The magic of the Amazon: A river that flows invisibly all around us | Antonio Donato Nobre
The Amazon River is like a heart, pumping water from the seas through it, and up into the atmosphere through 600 billion trees, which act li...
How not to be ignorant about the world | Hans and Ola Rosling
How much do you know about the world? Hans Rosling, with his famous charts of global population, health and income data (and an extra-extra-...
Why does the universe exist? | Jim Holt
Why is there something instead of nothing? In other words: Why does the universe exist (and why are we in it)? Philosopher and writer Jim Ho...
Please, please, people. Let's put the 'awe' back in 'awesome' | Jill Shargaa
Which of the following is awesome: your lunch or the Great Pyramid of Giza? Comedian Jill Shargaa sounds a hilarious call for us to save the...
The danger of silence | Clint Smith
"We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't," says poet and teach...
Why I live in mortal dread of public speaking | Megan Washington
Megan Washington is one of Australia's premier singer/songwriters. And, since childhood, she has had a stutter. In this bold and personal ta...
An ultra-low-cost college degree | Shai Reshef
At the online University of the People, anyone with a high school diploma can take classes toward a degree in business administration or com...
What makes a word "real"? | Anne Curzan
One could argue that slang words like ‘hangry,’ ‘defriend’ and ‘adorkable’ fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language, even if they d...
What ants teach us about the brain, cancer and the Internet | Deborah Gordon
Ecologist Deborah Gordon studies ants wherever she can find them -- in the desert, in the tropics, in her kitchen ... In this fascinating ta...
Comics that ask "what if?" | Randall Munroe
Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions ("what if you hit a baseball moving at the speed of light?") using math, phys...
Teach teachers how to create magic | Christopher Emdin
What do rap shows, barbershop banter and Sunday services have in common? As Christopher Emdin says, they all hold the secret magic to enthra...
A new equation for intelligence | Alex Wissner-Gross
Is there an equation for intelligence? Yes. It's F = T ∇ Sτ. In a fascinating and informative talk, physicist and computer scientist Alex Wi...
Why massive open online courses (still) matter | Anant Agarwal
2013 was a year of hype for MOOCs (massive open online courses). Great big numbers and great big hopes were followed by some disappointing f...
The magic of Fibonacci numbers | Arthur Benjamin
Math is logical, functional and just ... awesome. Mathemagician Arthur Benjamin explores hidden properties of that weird and wonderful set o...
The pursuit of ignorance | Stuart Firestein
What does real scientific work look like? As neuroscientist Stuart Firestein jokes: It looks a lot less like the scientific method and a lot...
Why I fell in love with monster prime numbers | Adam Spencer
They're millions of digits long, and it takes an army of mathematicians and machines to hunt them down -- what's not to love about monster p...
How to escape education's death valley | Sir Ken Robinson
Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. In a...
Grit: The power of passion and perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth
Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She q...
Our failing schools. Enough is enough! | Geoffrey Canada
Why, why, why does our education system look so similar to the way it did 50 years ago? Millions of students were failing then, as they are...