"Everybody pees and poops — and we know that urine and stool contain a rich source of information on our health," says data detective Newsha Ghaeli. Exploring the growing field of wastewater epidemiology, she shows how studying sewage can (anonymously) reveal a lot about the collective well-being of our cities — leading to real-time quality-of-l...

Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms can save our lives, restore our ecosystems and transform other worlds.

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove is the COVID-19 Technical Lead of the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as the Head of the Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Unit in the WHO's Health Emergencies Programme.

Jennifer B. Nuzzo helps governments, businesses, communities and individuals prepare for pandemics.

Richard Wilkinson was one of the first people to train in epidemiology from a background in the social sciences rather than medicine.

Olivia Affuso's mission is to inspire women and girls to live active, balanced lives.

Jerome Kim, MD, is the Director General of the International Vaccine Institute and an international expert on the evaluation and development of vaccines.

Cat Laine has made it her mission to find solutions to the problems that face the world’s poor, by merging innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit.

Newsha Ghaeli uses unique data sources to design more responsive and resilient cities.

Armed with blood samples, high-tech tools and a small army of fieldworkers, Nathan Wolfe hopes to re-invent pandemic control -- and reveal hidden secrets of the planet's dominant lifeform: the virus.

A theoretical physicist by training, IBM's Simone Bianco believes that the 21st century will be the century when the synergy between AI and biology will be fully realized.

Ben Goldacre unpicks dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dubious government reports, pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.

Shanghai. New York. Tehran. Tokyo. Today, dozens of cities worldwide are each home to many millions of people. But those masses of humanity might not exist in such tight quarters if not for John Snow. (No, not that Jon Snow. This John Snow.) Snow was a 19th-century English doctor who's credited with proving that cholera, a sometimes deadly in...

As director of The Vaccine Confidence Project, Heidi J. Larson works to evaluate and address vaccine hesitancy.

David Heymann is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He led the World Health Organization's global response to the SARS epidemic in 2003.

As cofounder of 1Day Sooner, Sophie Rose advocates for COVID-19 challenge trial volunteers.

Could our culture have misdiagnosed violence? As the director of the initiative Cure Violence, Gary Slutkin approaches gunfire on neighborhood streets as a contagious disease, looking to science and public health for strategies to stop it.

Jessica Ladd is using technology to combat sexual assault, empower survivors and advance justice.

Kathryn Bouskill's work explores how our health is shaped as much by our biology as it is by our behaviors and cultural contexts.

TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant has spent his career solving the world's biggest problems, from overseeing the last smallpox cases to saving millions from blindness.

Hundreds of talks from independently organized TEDx events around the world are published on the TEDxTalks website daily. Each Tuesday and Thursday, we'll choose four of our favorites, highlighting just a few of the enlightening talks from TEDx community, and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Browse all TEDxTalks here » B...

Often, discussions about equality center around leaning in, or whether or not the glass ceiling has got cracks in it. But for many women, the focus is on surviving everyday violence, assault and rape -- a daily struggle that plays a part in keeping a billion people locked into poverty. Gary Haugen (TED Talk: The hidden reason for poverty the wor...

On the stage at TEDGlobal 2011, Ben Goldacre delivered an incredibly fast-paced and informative talk on the subtle ways nutritionists, pharmaceutical companies, and others distort scientific evidence. TED's Ben Lillie caught up with him to talk about how to read newspapers, the power of the placebo effect, and how people really want to learn...

Julian Treasure cares very deeply for your ears. That’s why he’s given TED talks like “The 4 ways sound affects us” and “Why architects need to use their ears.” Treasure is on a mission to make policymakers, engineers, architects and, well, everyone think more about what they hear around them -- because the way things sound have a tangible, me...

"If there is this big difference, with some people worth everything and other people worth nothing, where do you come?" So asks Richard Wilkinson in the trailer for the forthcoming documentary based on his influential book The Spirit Level. Wilkinson, an epidemiologist, spent his career examining health issues caused or worsened by poverty and i...

Overwhelmed by your news feed? Use tools from science to evaluate what’s true and what’s fake, suggests researcher Emma Frans. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here. In our daily reading, we encounter all ...

After watching the collection of talks on Rethinking Cancer, read a thoughtful recap of the major points in this TED Study, and learn where experts believe things are headed. Putting it together Cancer is a disease full of paradoxes. It seems strange that our bodies appear to be so perfectly evolved for our environment and yet this disease has ...

Every day, emergency room workers use triage to prioritize patient care -- but exhausted personnel in under-resourced hospitals can easily make deadly errors in diagnostic tests and symptom scoring. South African emergency room doctor Mohammed Dalwai witnessed such avoidable tragedy firsthand while working with Médicins sans Frontières in Pa...

An epidemic hidden in plain view Margaret Heffernan begins her TEDGlobal talk by telling us a story: In Oxford in the 1950s, there was physician named Alice Stewart who was fascinated with the new science of epidemiology. She realized, as a scientist does, that the way to prove herself was to find a hard problem and solve it. The problem ...

Surgeon Peter Attia sees a disconcerting paradox at work when it comes to our health: while people are talking about eating healthily and exercising perhaps more than ever, we’re seeing no reduction in the rates of obesity and diabetes. As it stands, more than 8% of Americans are diabetic and an additional 26% are pre-diabetic -- which represe...